Japanese "Golden Oranges"

Fruit in Tokyo is fairly expensive save for a few items like bananas. Even they are only "cheap" by comparison to things like apples which range from about a dollar to up to $3.00 each. Therefore, I am not an adventurous purchaser of fruit. I tend to buy only what I'm sure I like because the risk of investing in bad fruit is simply not worth it. I also grew up in a household where one did not waste the smallest amount of food so the idea of tossing out perfectly good food, which I merely find unpalatable, rubs me the wrong way.

For this reason, Japanese fresh fruit, which is a favored snack of mine, doesn't show up very often for review. Mainly, I'm reviewing it only when it is given to me by Japanese friends, acquaintances or students. Also, a lot of the sorts of things that are not common abroad aren't available in shops anyway. Most of them are regional and you only get them when a distant friend of a friend in Tokyo tries to unload a large portion of their overflowing harvest.


One of my students was given a large portion of Japanese golden oranges by a coworker and she fobbed some off on me. She didn't tell me the Japanese name and my research didn't turn it up. Searches turned up the Japanese equivalent of loquats, kumquats, and fortunella, but none of those was correct. Trying to find the Japanese name of something when you only have a vague description in English, particularly when the fruit is uncommon or unavailable in other countries is a tough feat to pull off.

Each of these oranges is quite small, about the size of a tangerine (or mikan in Japan). The color of the skin is orange-yellow rather than the sunny yellow of a lemon. They smell incredible, like a citrus blend. I didn't use the peel for anything, but I imagine the potential is there for tea, potpourri or even baking using the rind.


The fruit inside is lighter than an orange and it separates easily from the relatively thick skin. The pith sticks like a second flesh where it sticks rather than as stringy bits like in a conventional orange. The taste is like a cross between an orange and a grapefruit without any of the grapefruit bitterness. It was really quite refreshing and tasty. It's not too sweet, but not sour or bitter.

Though I love citrus flavors in cooking or juice, I don't tend to eat the fruit itself very often because I don't like the texture or the acid. These would win out easily over a navel orange (that is, a "regular" orange), but I'd still be more likely to buy Japanese tangerines (mikan) rather than these golden oranges. If they were cheap or if I got them as a gift again, I'd certainly welcome having them again and would definitely recommend sampling them.

Morinaga Milk Chocolate Bar

Three of the biggest snack food producers in Japan each have their own plain milk chocolate bar. These types of bars would be the equivalent of a plain Hershey bar back in the U.S. I've sampled Lotte's Ghana and Meiji's milk chocolate bar so I decided I'd go for the trifecta and sample Morinaga's as well.

The Morinaga bar resembles the Meiji one rather closely both in terms of the outer wrapper design and the foil inner wrapper that is consumed by the oversized paper outer wrapper that fits it like pants that haven't been hemmed properly. Both bars look and feel cheap when you compare their packaging to the solid red box a Ghana bar comes in. The only difference is that Morinaga's currently sports a poster illustration by Raymond Savignac. There are 20 different poster designs meant to add novelty to the wrapper's design, but I only saw one design available at my local market. There's also a blurb on the bar about the "Angel Smile Project" which is designed to help out children through sales of chocolate around the world.


The bar looks and feels almost exactly like Meiji's bar with it being separated into 12 squares (at 28 calories a square for a total of 340 calories for the bar) and having the company's name pressed into each one. If they weren't two fairly great rivals, I'd wonder if the bars weren't made by the same company and distributed with slightly different wrappers. The taste is a little different though, so I'm sure they're not the same. The Morinaga bar tastes a lot like hot cocoa and seems to have less cocoa butter than its competitors, particularly Ghana which is a richly fatty bar.

The Morinaga chocolate is solid, but has a soft snap (hence the reason the squares tend not to break along the lines cleanly). There is an element of bittersweet chocolate in almost all Japanese chocolate (except plain KitKats) and often an aftertaste associated with it. This bar was no exception, but it wasn't as unpleasant as the aftertaste from the Meiji bar.

I will note that Morinaga is the only bar that overtly states that the cocoa beans they use are from Japan. Lotte's beans are from, rather unsurprisingly, Ghana, and Meiji doesn't say where its are from and just talks about the roasting process.

Now that I've had all three bars, I'd rank them as follows:

1. Ghana
2. Morinaga
3. Meiji

If you're in the mood for a plain chocolate bar, probably any of them would do if you had a glass of milk or coffee around as a palate cleanser, but if you have a choice, I'd suggest going with Ghana because it has less of a bitter aftertaste and is so rich. They all cost about the same, though I can get Ghana for about 10 yen (10 cents) less than the other two bars most of the time.

White Gratin Curl

Sometimes you see a product and never give its name a second thought. Take the "Curl" line of processed corn snacks as an example. I've seen a variety of these little cups of salted snack food badness around for well over a decade, but I never noticed that they are straight sticks. There's absolutely nothing curly about these curls except the flourishes on the katakana writing of the name.

Most of the time, Curl products (made by Meiji) are flavored with curry or cheese, so this white gratin variation caught my eye. One of my favorite foods from Japanese restaurants early on during my stay was a mushroom rice gratin that was sold at an ostensibly "Mexican" restaurant near my home. With fond memories of that dish (before the restaurant swapped to Korean barbecue joint), I picked this up.


After peeling off the foil top, I gave it a sniff and was greeted with the scent of cheese powder, much like that in thousands of other cheesy corn snacks, though this was a bit less pungent than something like Cheetos. The first taste was of cheese, followed by onion, corn and a hint of parsley. These are rather salted, but not overdone. The texture is light and crispy. They remind me of a super puffy Cheeto.

The flavorings in these include pork oil, chicken extract powder, cheese powder, onion powder, whey powder, and parsley. It's nicely savory and has slightly interesting flavors, but is dominated by a rather artificial cheese and onion taste. The entire 41 gram (1.4 oz.) container has 228 calories. It felt like a whole lot of calories for very little substance and that is one reason that I wouldn't buy these again. It just felt like too little pleasure for the caloric investment. If I'm going to go for something salty as food amusement, I think I can do better elsewhere.

Note: This product is named after a corn puff type snack which actually is curl-shaped. I realize it is a brand name rather than a description of the snacks in this cup.

Chocolate Banana Tart Petit Bit

I always find Japanese companies with Western-sounding names a bit strange. It's like they are trying too hard to be sophisticated or are somehow denying their heritage. To be fair, I find Western companies with Japanese names pretentious and irritating. They're trying too hard to sound hip, cool, or quirky. This company could be about an area of France or a Kentucky whiskey (Bourbon). My research indicates that this is about the French version, not the boozy one.


Bourbon has been around since 1924 and the name has changed a few times since it was first established. It's major products are Al Forte cookies which feature embossed chocolate on one side and a cookie on the other and "Bit" chocolates. "Bit" is sold either as larger individual squares or in packets as "Petit Bit". The Petit Bit package has 10 pieces of about 2.5 cm x 1.5 cm (1 in. x .6 in.) and comes in a wide variety of flavors including blueberry mousse, strawberry, almond, and bitter chocolate. The variety I'm reviewing today is 29 calories per candy. My husband picked up this banana tart variety at "New Days" convenience store where he says they're having a bit of a banana-flavored treats explosion.


Since I generally have a bad reaction to banana treats, I didn't expect to like this. As soon as I unwrapped the package, a strong banana scent wafted out at me and I was further discouraged. The candy is half chocolate and half banana with little pellets of cookie in the center. The flavor is surprisingly realistic. The banana tastes a lot like a real banana, albeit a very ripe one. The cookie pellets mainly lend texture and the chocolate tastes a lot like chocolate syrup. In fact, this very much reminds me of a banana split's banana and chocolate combination.

This was surprisingly good. The flavors are strong, but well-matched. The combination of the slightly soft chocolate with the crispy cookie bits is quite nice and the portions easy to control. If you're a fan of banana splits or chocolate banana tarts, I'd recommending giving this a try.

Variety Friday: McHotdog Mega Sausage

Image pilfered from McDonald's Japan.

The food that people choose to eat for breakfast has always been more interesting to me than any other meal of the day. We're all willing to be a little adventurous at lunch or supper time, but the type of food that one is willing to shovel into one's face after stumbling out of bed is generally more limited. If people are going to be conservative about their eating habits or eat whatever is considered "traditional" for that meal in their culture, you're going to see that reflected more often in breakfast.

What does all of this talk of breakfast have to do with the McHotdog Mega Sausage? Well, believe it or not, this item is only available for breakfast. If you want to get your over-sized wiener on, you'll have to get to a Mickey D's before 10:30. The ad on the site offers (in English, no less) the following words about this dog: Energy? Fun? Love? Beyond! I'm not sure what the obsession is with putting "love" into product ads where we wouldn't consider inserting such a word, but given the massive size of this sausage, the implications are interesting.

The advertising also says that this dog is 200% tastier for its huge size. I guess if it's bigger than the usual McHotdog, then there's probably more taste, but personally I find that Japanese wieners taste funny. They always have a bit of a strange funky taste. I'm guessing this is simply a reflection of different meat products being used in them, likely more pork. Japanese "hamburger" is laced with ground pork because they favor it over beef.

The interesting thing about this sandwich, and I'm sure that's the inescapable conclusion everyone who has glanced at the picture has reached, is that the bun seems Lilliputian compared to the sausage trying to make a home in it. It looks funky, but it's probably not a bad idea. The bread looks sized mainly to provide a tidy way to hold the hot dog rather than as something to be evenly portioned as you eat it. That means more protein and less carbohydrate which makes for a more energetic morning start. The nutrition information for this sausage fest states that it is 506 calories and 33.5 grams of fat (eep), so eating one may not be so bad on the carb front, but it's not really good for you either.

Personally, I can't see myself scarfing down a big wiener for breakfast so I'm not likely to rouse myself before 10:30 and traipse off to the local McDonald's. I'm generally pretty conservative about breakfast and favor a bit of toast or some other typical American carbohydrate-heavy food. If you're more adventurous, you'll want to get one of these sooner rather than later because the Mega Sausage is going to be around for a limited time.

Oh yes, all the possible double entendres in this piece should be interpreted in the worst possible way.