Ramune KitKat Mini

My husband and I were perusing a discount snack shop and they had a sign up that said that the next KitKat flavor to be released on June 16, 2009 will be "ramune" flavor. Ramune is a Japanese "soda" flavor which has a distinctive bottle that has a marble in it. It comes in different flavors but was originally a lemon-lime flavor mix, but there are actually a variety of flavors which are sold as ramune.

When I first came to Japan, I thought of ramune as "weird blue" flavor since it seemed a lot of the "soda" flavor candies and drinks were blue. It's not a bad flavor, but it's not really that great either. My guess is that most of the ramune that I've sampled is artificially flavored and therefore not the best quality.

The interesting thing is that, like many "Japanese" foods, ramune is actually something brought to Japan by a European person. In this case, a Scotsmen. One thing that sometimes irks me is that I'll see people talking about recipes for "Japanese bread" or "Japanese cheesecake" or whatnot. Prior to various Europeans introducing certain types of food culture, Japan didn't have a culture which included traditional baking with wheat (or almond) flour. There really is no such thing as "Japanese bread" or "Japanese cake" which is put in an oven and baked. There are only European recipes which are popular in Japan.

At any rate, ramune is actually a phonetic approximation of "lemonade". Le = Ra (ラ), Mo = Mu (ム), Nade = Ne (ネ). This may not make sense just looking at the spelling, but keep in mind that Japanese uses phonetic characters which, for the most part, are consonant vowel pairs and not single letters and "lemonade" doesn't use a "lee" sound, but a "lay". There are some sounds in English that the Japanese can't reproduce because they don't exist in their language.


At any rate, it is a logical choice for a summer KitKat release to choose a beverage that is so linked with the change of season in Japan. The choice Nestle Japan will make in terms of flavor is also an interesting one. Given that there is variation in ramune flavors in sweets and sodas, they had some flexibility.

When you open the package, the first thing you smell is bubble gum. The bars are pale bluish-green and about half the length of the usual KitKat finger. I paid 30 yen (about 30 cents) for one mini bar at 7-11. You can buy big bags of these for about 300-350 yen ($3-$3.45) and get 20 bars at once, but I preferred to pay more and get less for an unknown candy.

The first bite of this is of distinct and clear, but good, bubble gum flavor. Despite being a white chocolate-based KitKat, it's not overpoweringly sweet. The finishing flavor is like fizzy sour candy that you had as a kid. You know, the sort which you got for Halloween and put in a glass of water sometimes to see how it dissolved and then if you were really brave, you drank the water.

I thought this was pretty good and my husband loved it. In fact, he's considering buying a whole large bag of the mini bars to keep around as a sweet at work. I'd definitely buy these again, though I probably won't have the chance given how short-lived these specialty flavor KitKats seem to be these days. If you can sample this, I'd recommend you do unless you really dislike bubble gum flavor.

Crunky Almond Chocolate

Back when I was still working at a Japanese company, I used to fuel my late day energy lag with chocolate covered almonds. Most convenience stores carry at least one of several varieties of them. My favorite was Meiji's. The only problem was that the box was 105 grams (3.7 oz.) and resistance was futile. Buying a box was tantamount to admitting that I was going to overindulge in a big way. Chocolate-covered nuts are very dense in calories.

The Crunky Almond chocolates come in a box which is more manageable at 37 grams (1.3 oz.). The whole box is 212 calories or 22 calories per candy and cost 99 yen. Because the Meiji box is bigger, it costs about 180-200 yen. Note that Lotte, which makes Crunky products, has their own version of chocolate covered almonds both with and without crispy bits in the coating. These Crunky almonds seem to duplicate their existing product.


The candy looks and feels almost exactly like other types of chocolate-covered almonds. It's smooth and shiny and has almost no smell at all because of the shiny waxy coating. This gives them a very polished look, like part of a good bridge mix.

Despite my affinity for chocolate-covered almonds, I strung out eating this box for quite awhile, eating about one-third at a time. The first time I tried them, I couldn't sense much chocolate taste at all, but I think that was because my sense of smell and taste were suppressed for some reason. Initially, I thought that it was the waxy coating on the outside because sucking on them for awhile seemed to open up the flavor in a way that just crunching on them didn't. The second and third samplings were much richer and more appealing. The chocolate is deep, familiar Japanese bittersweet chocolate. It pairs well with a deeply roasted, crunchy almond.

The "Crunky" crunchy bits didn't do much for the overall experience except dilute the intensity of the chocolate a small amount. There's a hint of their malted puff flavor as a leftover taste, but it's not very strong. The almond and chocolate mostly overwhelm the puffs. The puffs do add a bit more crunch to the chocolates, but I'm not sure that it really needs it since the chocolate coating is solid and a little hard and the almond very crunchy.

These were quite good, but I can't say that they're necessarily better than a regular chocolate-covered almond. The main benefit of these over the other varieties is that the portion control is nicer for someone like me who finds it hard to resist the bigger boxes. I'd definitely buy these again, but if I saw them side by side with the Meiji almonds in the same portions, I'd still probably go for the pure chocolate coating of the regular chocolate-covered almonds.

Variety Friday: Domino's Hot Sub Procured

Image pinched from Domino's web site.

In last week's Variety Friday post, I mentioned that my husband and I were planning on giving Domino's new hot subs a try. I had actually planned on adding a bit to the end of that post talking about our experience, but something strange happened on the way to the pizza place.

There's a Domino's about a 3 or 4 minute walk from our apartment. It's a really tiny place with an entryway that is about as big as two phone booths stacked side by side, but there's enough of a kitchen behind it to do what they have to do to serve and deliver pizza to our neighborhood. When we walked down there around 1:00 pm, it was locked up tight. Since it is open 7 days a week, and at lunch time, this was a bit strange. In fact, there was a Japanese man who was clearly lurking outside waiting to see if they opened. After a short wait, he started trying to call the shop on his cell phone to no avail. We gave up pretty quickly and walked away. This is why this is a separate review rather than an addendum to last week's post.

Today, we had better luck around the same time of day and procured our sandwiches. My husband also ordered their rather pricey "juicy fried chicken" (at about $5 (510 yen) for only 4 small pieces) because he wasn't confident that the sandwiches were going to have enough meat to satisfy him. The people who took our order were very nice and energetic and fielded my husband's questions about whether or not mayonnaise (which he dislikes) was on the meat sub. I should note that you have to be very careful about asking such questions in Japan because even raising the point often makes them conclude that you want the food you're asking about. He had to make sure they knew he didn't want mayonnaise because the first thing they assumed was that he was asking to have mayo added to the sandwich. The exchange was something like this:

Husband: Does the meat sub have mayo?
Helpful clerk1: No, it doesn't.
Helpful clerk2: Yes, we have mayonnaise!
Husband: No, no, I don't want mayonnaise, I want to know if you put it on usually.
Helpful clerk2: No, not usually, but we can!
Husband: No, no, I don't want any.

I think this type of response comes from an overzealous desire to please the customer's every wish if it is at all possible.

There are sites which specialize in showing you how food looks on the packaging or in the advertising as compared to the real thing. The outside of our sandwiches really did resemble the ones in the advertisement (pictured at the top of this post), though they were toasted a bit more darkly and had cheese running down them in a few spots.


I ordered the roasted chicken hot sub with the full knowledge that it might not have all that much chicken. I would call the chicken quantity barely adequate. The bread was nice, fresh and crispy and the cheese good and gooey. The chicken was moist and nice white meat. The chicken was smothered in pesto mayonnaise and topped with melted cheese. I've mentioned before that mayonnaise is like the 4th food group in Japan. They love it to pieces, but I certainly could have done with a lot less of this. In fact, mostly, all I could taste was the pesto mayo with glimpses of the chicken.


My husband's meat sub was closer to a pizza sandwich and had more meat although the slices of the three types of meat were pretty thin. On the bottom is pizza sauce then what the Japanese call "pepperoni salami" (which is not the same as pepperoni in the U.S.), then "fresh ham" (not heavily cured), and finally the weird ass Japanese "wieners" that have a funky taste all their own. I didn't sample it, but my husband liked this and said he'd buy it again, even given the somewhat heavy price tag for a 15 cm (6 inch) sandwich.

Strangely, the meat sub was the cheapest of the sandwiches at 550 yen (about $5.50) despite clearly having more meat than the roast chicken which was 680 yen (about $6.75). Usually, meat is the priciest element of any food order here. I guess that they were charging me more for the heaping helping of pesto mayonnaise. At any rate, while I would be willing to try one of these subs again, I won't be giving the roast pesto mayonnaise with a side of chicken a shot again. I'd probably try the jalapeno next time, provided they don't discontinue these before I get around to having another.

"Snow Inn" Soft Sembei (Salad flavor)

Back when I reviewed black soy bean sembei, one of the commenters (Sophia) advised me not to be wary of the frosted sembei because they have a sweet and salty thing going on. Since I'm a fan of chocolate paired with salt, I figured I'd take her advice and give them a try.

There are many varieties of frosted rice crackers and I decided to just go for what was on sale This large bag with 24 crackers (12 packs of 2) was 168 yen (about $1.60). Each cracker is about 7.5 cm (about 3 in.) in size. "Soft" sembei appears to mean that the crackers are puffier and have more air in them than the flatter, cracker-like crackers I've tried before. They're not actually soft though. They are quite crispy. They simply aren't as brittle as some other sembei. From a salted snack point of view, "soft" sembei are like cheese puffs and "hard" ones are like potato chips.

The company that makes these is Sanko Seika. They make a great many varieties of rice-based snacks. The company was established in 1962 and is headquartered in Niigata. I've noticed a lot of the food manufacturers in Japan are not based in Tokyo. I guess that they grew up around the agricultural concerns that their products are made from and had no reason to move to one of the more expensive metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka. Sanko Seika apparently is known among Japanese for their old television ads which featured a slogan which amounted to "oh, the Sanko wafer is smiling at you." I wish I could find an ad on YouTube, but all I could find was a pretty pointless video of someone inspecting the back of a packet of sembei slowly and opening it up.


The front of the bag says "salad" on it. The combination of frosted sugary "salad" is one that doesn't necessarily sit well with me, but I figure it's a food-based adventure. This is far easier than a real adventure like, say climbing Mt. Everest. Because I'm 44 years old and have a bad back, funky sembei is about all I can manage on the adventure front.


The ingredients for these sembei include rice, sugar, vegetable oil, salt, skim milk, gelatin, fruit milk oligosaccharides, lactose, light hydrolyzate, whipped cream, soy sauce powder, and seasoning. I'm not sure where any of that amounts to "salad" and I'm a bit surprised to see "sugar" as the second biggest ingredient after rice. Despite the high amount of sugar, there are only 70 calories for 2 crackers. Considering the size of them, 35 calories apiece isn't bad.

These sembei smell mainly like average rice crackers with just a hint of soy sauce. If you eat them with the sugary side down so that it hits your tongue more strongly, you get a good sense of the mix of flavors. It's a very difficult thing to describe because I guess the closest I can come to describing it is what it'd be like if you ate frosted flakes with diluted soy sauce and salt. It's very weird. That's not to say that it is bad, but it's definitely an acquired taste and unique.

I liked these, and I will definitely eat the remainder of the bag through time, but I don't think I'd buy this particular flavor again. It's not that I don't enjoy them necessarily, but I can't see craving them. The hard part for me is the soy sauce taste with the sugary frosting. I'm not a great fan of soy sauce to begin with, though I generally don't mind it.

The texture of these crackers is excellent and eating them from that viewpoint is very satisfying. I'm just not getting over the mix of flavors. I'd recommend trying them if you have a chance though. There's every chance someone with tastes that run differently than mine might enjoy them. Certainly many Japanese folks do.

This sembei was also reviewed at Snack Love.

Tirol Purple Potato Chocolate

When I was a kid, purple was my favorite flavor for pretty much anything. My mother bought plastic tubes of syrup which you stuck in the freezer and then squeezed out and sucked on until your tongue turned purple. Purple was also my favorite lollipop, Kool-Aid, and sno-cone. Of course, "purple" was supposed to mean "grape", but none of that kid's stuff tasted like real grape. I don't know what flavor it was, but it was probably sugar, purple food coloring, and a little citric acid for bite.


As one becomes an adult, purple food starts to take on a different feel. Except for grapes, it seems like a "wrong" color for food as it carries with it the memory of those artificial treats from when I was too young to know or care what I was eating. For this reason, purple potato Tirol chocolate looks funky. It smells great though, like a yummy roasted sweet potato that you buy from a cart on the street in Tokyo in winter.


My candy melted a little across the top even though we haven't seen a day higher than 83 degrees and I have been keeping this in the refrigerator full-time. My guess is that it happened in transit and is a result of the fact that the chocolate coating is relatively soft. This makes it easy to bite into. The coating is fairly sweet and carries a strong, but not overpowering sweet potato flavor. The cookie adds texture and has no flavor of its own. When I cut this in half and saw that the center was a cookie, I was disappointed and thought that some sort of bean jam or mochi filling might have been better. After eating it though, I think that the cookie was probably the best choice to cut the sweetness a bit.

This was 40 yen (about 37 cents) at a local Family Mart and has 52 calories for its 1 inch square (2.54 cm) size. It's a nice little morsel if you love sweet potatoes (and I do). I'd definitely consider buying it again, though I'm not sure that I could eat more than one at a time. It's unique and enjoyable, but not the sort of thing you're going to put away in large amounts. I'd count that as a benefit.