Kabaya Chocolat Galette

There are so many refugees from my New Year's fukubukuro to review that I'm not likely to need to buy much of anything to review for at least a month. And there are so many of them that I'm going to be eating them for at least 3 months. These "chocolat galette" cookies were one of the first things that I tore open and partook of because they are chocolate, and, they are cookies. I'm only human, after all.

Despite carrying two of the key elements of a good product, I have to say that I would not have bought these of my own initiative had I seen them in the store. The primary reason is that these sorts of individually wrapped cookies are a real crap shoot in terms of flavor. Many of them taste like crispy bits of nothingness. They don't deliver on flavor so much as on appearance and texture. This is especially true of crispy cookies that come in the "Chips Ahoy" mold. That is, the types that are crisp and have some sort of melted chocolate poured on them or chocolate chips.

I expected a waxy, nearly tasteless chocolate coating and a bland cookie interior, but was pleasantly surprised to find that these have a very nice, pleasantly deep without being too bitter chocolate flavor and they are not too sweet. The cookies also taste fresh and have excellent snap without being too brittle. Each cookie is rather small though, at only 4.5 cm (1.8 in.), but only 49 calories. I'm torn between the guilt I feel at creating so much trash for a tiny morsel of pleasure and how effectively these preserve the cookie goodness and encourage portion control.

Though very tasty, these do contain two types of "bad fats" (margarine and shortening). Looking at the ingredients, I believe the flavor is enhanced by the inclusion of almond powder and at least a bit more cocoa than usual. I'm sure that you can find these in many supermarkets, but I'm afraid that I didn't make an effort to price this bag of just 8 cookies (yes, and small). I'd be surprised though if they cost less than 160 yen ($1.94) or more than 220 yen ($2.67).

On the flavor alone, I'd recommend these. On the other aspects, I'm a little torn. I enjoyed them thoroughly, so I'm giving them a happy rating, but I'd say that considering the packaging, likely price, and small quantity, I wouldn't recommend them to anyone unless they were jonesing pretty hard for a crispy chocolate cookie.

Meiji Tasty Cinnamon Chocolate

I've been away from the U.S. for so long that I can't remember if products are named with adjectives like "tasty", "delicious", or "arousal-inducing." I may be amused that this has the word "tasty" in the product name when it's not really funny at all. When someone has to tell me it tastes good rather than allowing me to assume it is so, it makes me think they doth protest too much... but I can't remember if it's just a Japanese marketing thing or if all manufacturers name their products in this manner. Perhaps my readers who haven't lived abroad for a little over two decades can enlighten me.

I found this box of cinnamon chocolate for 138 yen ($1.67) at a Lawson convenience store while out for an early morning walk with my husband. We were resisting the bakeries full of fresh pastries, Mr. Donut with its, well, donuts, and all of the other morning enticements. The only thing we gave in and bought was this pack of 6 sticks (36 grams total, 35 calories per stick) of cinnamon chocolate.

My husband sampled this first and remarked that he wasn't quite sure what to make of it because cinnamon and chocolate weren't a natural pairing in his experience, but Mexican hot chocolate preparations often put these two flavors together. Additionally, I've got a recipe for Amish brownies which combines cocoa, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon. It's not an alien combination, but these two-tone bars offer a far more potent aspect of cinnamon than either of the aforementioned concoctions.

The chocolate is a dark chocolate with a heavy "bottom" flavor that hits you at the back of the tongue. The cinnamon, though infused into white chocolate, isn't incredibly sweet, but is quite potent. In fact, it remands me a lot of Dentyne chewing gum. Together, these do indeed make for a strange pairing. Imagine eating a dark chocolate Hershey's kiss while chewing cinnamon gum (or while brushing your teeth) and you'll have an approximation of what this is like.

I think Meiji dropped the ball on this by making the cinnamon too overbearing. I love cinnamon, and I even prefer super strong cinnamon but it's important that it have a chance to shine through with the proper background flavor, and this Meiji chocolate is all wrong for this purpose. I'm not sure if I'll bother to finish this box, small as it is, and I definitely wouldn't buy it again. However, this isn't bad enough to qualify for an "unhappy" rating, and my husband said he'll eat the rest even if I don't.

Maxim Cafe Menu (Oreo, Mont Blanc)

When I lived back home, I used to buy General Foods International Coffees. I didn't have any moments to 'celebrate', but they made adequate sugar-free instant coffee. At that point in time, I was a coffee wuss and couldn't stomach the real stuff. Those flavored coffees are like training wheels...okay, perhaps more like tricycles that your parents are holding onto the back of while you ride around tentatively. They give you a thimble of coffee, a ton of fake flavor, a lot of powdered milk and gobs of artificial sweetener. I'm guessing one has no more than a smattering of coffee beans worth of actual coffee...okay, perhaps no more than a smattering of coffee-flavored chemicals.

Since "graduating" to "the hard stuff" (aka real coffee), I haven't bought many flavored instant coffees. Part of the reason for that is that I live in Japan, where sugar-free versions of such things don't exist so a small serving of instant coffee brings with it gobs of actual sugar instead of chemicals that are meant to fool you into thinking you're having sugar. Another reason is that such things are expensive for piddly amounts of warm, brown liquid.

I was strolling around Peacock supermarket when the Maxim Oreo cafe latte mix and I couldn't resist. The Mont Blanc was hanging out next to it so I decided to toss it in as well. Each box cost 158 yen ($1.94) for 5 servings of the Oreo flavor and 4 of the Mont Blanc. I don't know why one has more than the other, but I think it's because one is more elegant fake coffee and the other low-brow junk food fake coffee.

I didn't take a picture of the coffee after I made it because it looks like coffee. There was really nothing to see so I justified being slack about the pictures. Imagine any of the billions of images of coffee out there and visualize one. There, you got it.

Both make a small amount of coffee. You add 130 ml. of hot water to the powder in each tube. I tried the Mont Blanc first and it didn't taste like much of anything. If you added a teaspoon of regular brewed coffee to reconstituted powdered milk with just the barest whisper of chestnut, that's what it is. It isn't particularly sweet, which is either a plus or a minus depending on how you like such things. I tried it with a little sweetener to see if making it sweeter would bring out more of the chestnut, but it just made it sweeter which totally drowned out the minimal coffee and whispery chestnut flavor.

The Oreo flavored coffee was a different kettle of fish, which is not to say that it tasted like fish. It did, however, make a strange crackling noise when I added in the powder. I think that if you were trying to create some sort of faux witches brew situation for Halloween with accompanying sound effects, this would do it for you. Though both of these are labeled "latte", the Oreo version was a lot darker and had a stronger coffee flavor as well as what tasted like essence of cookie crumbs mixed into it. That may not sound too bad, but the problem is that bitter chocolate Oreo cookie crumbs without the sweet creamy filling doesn't work so well. If you add bitter (coffee) to bitter (chocolate cookie), you get a strange combination. It's not bad, but it's not good. At least this tastes like something though, which is more than I can say for the Mont Blanc version.

Neither of these coffees lit my fire, and I definitely wouldn't buy them again. At about 65 calories per 3/4 cup serving, I'm not inclined to waste my precious snacking allotment on these. I'm not even sure that I'll finish these two boxes. They don't have to be bad to get stuck at the back of my snack basket and collect dust. They just don't have to be good and these are incredibly so-so.

Random Picture 50

A local shop places various and sundry foods on a rack for sale to passersby. One day, they had this fine display of fish heads for a mere 525 yen ($6.38). It was all I could do to stop myself from thinking (quite ethnocentrically) that someone was trying to sell me their garbage.

Of course, I also thought about the "Fish Heads" song. It would have been utterly awesome if it had been playing at the shop when I walked by, but I'm thinking that the seller didn't have much of a sense of humor about this type of thing.

Cratz Chicken Arrabiata

I love Cratz, as my past reviews of their products demonstrate. The Chicken Arrabiata variety has been around for ages and I have only neglected to review it because I think that they make for boring review fodder. How much can I milk out of "mmmm, Cratz!" I love these little hard pretzels bits with almonds. To be honest, I didn't even know what chicken arrabiata was when I bought this. I looked it up after the fact and its chicken with various Italian seasonings. The biggest component seems to be tomato, but also garlic, onion, and sometimes mushrooms.

The smell of these is slightly spicy. The flavor is a melange of chicken, tomato, garlic, and black pepper. While these are all good flavors, it's very hard to pin down what is going on with these. They generally taste spicy and savory and minimally salty. These are good enough, but a little too heavy on the chicken and tomato. I think they're a bit short on the salt and heavy on the peppery aspect.

The Cratz line competes against itself rather than other snacks. If I had to choose between this and a bag of nearly any type of potato chip, I'd take these. However, if I had to choose between any other variety of Cratz and this type, I'd take another flavor. A 44-gram bag of these has 228 calories and some of those come from a nice number of almonds. I found these for 100 yen ($1.20) at Lawson 100, but you can get them anywhere. If you can get the cheese variety or bacon pepper Cratz, I'd say get one of those, but that doesn't mean these aren't good as much as the fact that the others are better in my opinion.

Fujiya Heart Peanuts

Back when I was working in an office, my boss used to buy packets of 100 yen ($1.20) "peanuts choco". For foreign folks who want to indulge in something which is "safe", chocolate-covered nuts of any sort are the bee's knees. In fact, there are some incredibly good chocolate covered almonds that I was addicted to when I was working. Unsurprisingly, I was fatter when I worked in an office.

I haven't reviewed any chocolate covered nuts because they're hard to mess up. This bag of heart-shaped peanut chocolates from Fujiya is being reviewed because it came with one of my three fukubukuro. I'm betting my readers are getting tired of hearing that. Yeah, well get used to it. I'm not even halfway done with what I got.

There are 15 little medallions in the bag, each individually wrapped and with the words "have a heart" imprinted on them and providing you with 45 calories. Though these look like they're a Valentine's release, they're always available.  For reasons I'm not sure of, Fujiya felt it was important to say that these were manufactured at their Hiratsuka plant. That means nothing to my readers who don't live in Japan, and problem means little to those who do. I only know it as this place which is really far from my apartment that my husband and I once ventured to to look at a second-hand record shop. We were looking for rare records. I don't remember smelling peanuts or chocolate when I was there, but maybe they hermetically sealed the emissions in efficient Japanese fashion.

There really isn't much to say a about these. They smell like peanuts and chocolate. The nuts are very lightly roasted and plentiful, and the milk chocolate is fairly smooth and lacks the bad aftertaste that some Japanese chocolate has. They're good, but they're pricier (more or less 200 yen/$2.40 per bag) than the bags of peanuts choco my boss used to buy. The main difference is that the chocolate on these is smoother and has a finer texture and have bigger peanuts. Also, the packages of peanuts choco are not wrapped individually, but just tossed into a plastic tray so they buffet one another and lack the pristine appearance and gloss of this Fujiya offering. The Fujiya ones also are fortified with Vitamin E so that you can feel good about eating them. At least that's the only reason I can think of to include it.

These are good, but they're not outstanding compared to other similar offerings. If I were in the mood for chocolate-covered peanuts, I'd buy the cheaper hundred-yen shop versions of "peanuts choco". They have less packaging, are cheaper and taste pretty much the same. I'm giving them a happy rating because they taste good, but I wouldn't buy them again for the aforementioned reasons.

Nighttime Sweets Strawberry Parfait

Packaging is a way of manipulating people into buying stuff they might not otherwise buy. Without the allure of packaging, people are pretty much going to be basing their purchases on three factors - appearance (if the food is actually visible), type of food, and price. I have to wonder what shopping was like back in the "Little House On the Prairie" days when "inventive packaging" was showing an illustration of a guy with a huge handlebar mustache on a jar of "Uncle Earwax's Super Hardening Mustache Paraffin". I'm guessing people pretty much just bought what they needed back in those days.

The producers of boring food like yogurt rely on us being dumb enough to be fooled by misleading images of the flavor of the slightly sour, thin goo contained therein. Even someone who is fairly "savvy" (which is what we all think we are, which is part of our overall "stupid") can be suckered into seeing a lovely bit of strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, berries, and wafers and think that's what we're going to be tasting. Of course, they can't be really accused of misleading us because it says, "this is an image" under the parfait picture.

I didn't have high expectations of this when I saw it at Seiyu for 100 yen ($1.20), but I had a good experience with the previous entry in the "Nighttime Sweets" line, the apple pie yogurt. I figured that the line deserved my attention even if I'm not a fan of strawberry-flavored foods in general. To be clear, I love the fresh berries, but just dislike how they are incorporated into processed food.

Peeling back the foil, I was greeted with the scent of real pureed strawberries. Color me surprised. I was also shocked at the taste of this because it reminded me of strawberry shortcake. In fact, if you pureed a shortcake that is what it'd taste like. Seriously. Okay, if you took one of those small round yellow sponge cakes that are sold cheaply in local markets, piled on some berries, whipped cream, a little sugar, and then doused it in whole milk and then pureed it, that is what this tastes like.

I was truly blown away by this. The fine folks at Luna made yogurt that tastes very little like yogurt (again, their vanilla yogurt tastes like a tiny pot of heaven). There is definitely some cream flavoring in there and what looks, smells and tastes like real berries. There may also be essence of cake, for all I know. What is for certain is that this is only 69 calories and tastes great. I'll be sorry when this inevitably leaves the market, but I have some hopes now that this line is going to deliver again and again with each new offer.

Pasco Stick Melon Choco

I read the results of a study recently which said that putting calorie information on menus didn't have any impact on purchasing decisions. I think that's a big, fat lie. Personally, seeing calorie information actually encourages me to buy certain things. I've taken to inspecting the calorie counts on interesting looking breakfast foods, and anything which is a reasonable portion size and under 100 calories is likely to go into my basket.

These "stick melon choco" (chocolate chip "melon" bread) are 99 calories each, and the perfect size to have two for breakfast or one at tea time. There are 5 in the bag and it only cost 99 yen ($1.22) at Seiyu supermarket. I like melon pan when it's good, because the contrast between the crispy cookie exterior shell and soft, fluffy white-bread-like exterior can be sublime. The main problem is that store-bought melon pan usually is soft, but I was lured into buying this because there was something on the front that said I could make them crispy again by putting them in the toaster oven. I'm dumb like that.

It squishes easily when you cut it.

The flavor is heavily influenced by margarine and white flour. Despite the fact that there are a few chocolate chips and what looks like layers of chocolate, that component is very subdued. The sweetness is also on the light side except when you catch some of the granulated sugar sprinkled on the top on your tongue.

Even wrapped in foil for toaster oven heating, the bottom burned slightly around the edges. Without foil, it turned to a black crispy horror. The packaging should have warned me that I shouldn't put it directly in the oven, but instead just said, "use the toaster oven and it'll be crispy"! Thanks for nothing, Pasco! I charbroiled one in the oven to learn this lesson.

The texture varies widely depending on how it is prepared. Straight out of the bag, it's slightly doughy and a lot like standard white bread. Heated in the toaster oven in foil, the bottom gets a little crispy. Warmed in the microwave, it becomes doughier and quite soft. The flavor of the chocolate came out the best when heated in the microwave, but the texture was best when done in foil in the toaster oven.

There were fine, but I was disappointed that the chocolate aspect wasn't stronger. I liked them well enough, but perhaps not enough to have them again. Chances are that I will opt to sample something else rather than re-visit these. It's not that they're bad in any way, but rather that they're not special enough to become anything resembling a "favorite".

Random Picture 49

Click this picture to load a bigger one which can be read more easily.

Before I started paying attention to food labels, and indeed before most foods in Japan had full nutritional data, I used to think that the relative sweetness or composition of a food related to caloric values. That is, if it wasn't very sweet, didn't have frosting or a fatty filling, I figured that it couldn't carry much of a punch on the calorie front. Back in those naive days, the cake you see pictured above was one of my favorite treats. It's a mildly sweet, moist, vanilla cake which is about the size of your palm.

Fast forward to the present and my rather greatly enhanced knowledge of all things food and more comprehensive food labeling. I discovered that my favorite unassuming steam cake is about 470 calories. That's as much as I consume for entire meals. People think Japanese folks don't get fat because their sweets aren't as sweet, but that really does not relate to how fattening the snacks are. Take that from someone who has been paying close attention for the last several years - your hips are not safe merely because the food isn't as sweet.

Pino Sweet Potato Ice Cream

Pino is a bit of an institution in Japan and yet I think this is only the second time that I have purchased it in my 22 years in Japan. The basic version is vanilla ice cream with a chocolate shell, but like a standard ice cream bar back home. Because this is Japan, and the people stay tiny by making it easy to eat tiny portions, the folks behind Pino (that would be confectionery mega-maker, Morinaga) took the basic bar idea and created tiny little bon-bons that you can spear on a plastic toothpick.

While this idea may sound quite simple, Morinaga appears to have applied some careful considerations to the product design. They're the sort of formula touches that you wouldn't consider unless you bought the product, tried to eat it, and had some messy problems. For instance, a chocolate coating which is too hard will shatter when you spear the bon-bon with the plastic spear, so the coating can't get too brittle when frozen. The ice cream also cannot become so hard that you have a lot of problems penetrating it with the pick. Both of these were surprisingly not an issue when I sampled this sweet potato Pino. Though the ice cream gets pretty firm, the shell only fractures around the insertion point and you don't have to fight too hard to stab the heart of it so you can deliver it to your waiting mouth.

The odd thing about this particular Pino is that it is labeled "Dessert". It makes me wonder how the other varieties are conceptualized. Aren't they all "dessert" or do the fine folks at Morinaga think the other versions are meal varieties? At any rate, the coating on this is labeled as "chocolate" but it is actually also sweet-potato-flavored and slightly purple in color. The interior is slightly yellow to help emulate the coloring of a typical Japanese sweet potato.

The flavor is quite sweet and there is a strong element of sweet potato that borders on, but doesn't go over the edge of overbearing. I detected a "baked" flavor which I strongly associate with sweet potato cakes (one of which is pictured on the box cover) and found that to be quite surprising. That must be a tricky element to include. I also thought there might be a hint of cinnamon, but my taste buds may have been deceiving me. The ice cream is fairly average. In fact, I've had creamier ice milk, but that doesn't make this in any way unacceptable as mass-produced ice cream. Since you get 6 (10 ml.) bon-bons per box for a mere 100 yen ($1.20), you can't really expect the ice cream to blow off your socks. It is good, just not fantastic.

I don't buy much ice cream because I am afraid I'll either gobble it all down or leave it to develop a thick layer of freezer burn in an effort to save myself from its caloric load, but I really should sample more Pino as each bon-bon is only 32 calories and portion control is so easy. This was good, but a bit too sweet in general for me. That being said, I'd probably buy it again if it is seasonally re-released in autumn/winter of next year. I just can't see buying it too terribly often.

Lotte Toppo Marron Cake Sticks

 Toppo is Lotte's answer to Glico's Pocky. To avoid looking like a complete copycat, they turned them inside out and created a pretzel straw filled with a sweet cream of one flavor or another instead of dipping the pretzel in chocolate. I've been meaning to review something from the Toppo line for awhile, but hadn't gotten around to it. This chestnut cream cake variety which was placed in my fukubukuro from Okashi no Machioka and pushed up the time-line on my getting to these inverted Pocky sticks.

The Toppo boxes are pretty heavy (42 grams/1.5 oz.) and full of substantial sticks so they usually cost between 150-180 yen each ($1.83-$2.19) depending on where you're getting them. This variety has two foil packs with 7 sticks in each. Each stick is 33 calories so eating one pack will set you back 231 calories. If you don't pay attention to the nutrition information (or can't understand it) and eat the whole thing, you can consume a whopping 462 calories.

The heft comes mainly from the not insubstantial amount of flavored cream in the center of the pretzel tube. I think it'd be interesting to try and drink a hot drink through these, but I imagine that the pretzel exterior would degrade before the filling would warm and melt enough to suck it out. If I were a more adventurous sort, I might try microwaving them to make the filling molten then give my mouth third degree burns by sucking it out. I'm not quite that stupid, but I probably will be after a few more years of snack reviewing.

The sticks smell a bit like malt and caramel. Since one of the ingredients is malt powder, this is not surprise. I have considerable experience with various chestnut cream sweets including the real deal (Mont Blanc) and these are nothing like them. They mainly taste a bit like coffee and caramel. I think that the coffee aspect is an attempt to emulate the roasting of chestnuts as a means of copying the flavor. The caramel is probably some sort of alchemy between whey, cream powder, and chocolate. There's also added caramel flavoring.

It's not really important to me that these actually taste like chestnut cream cake, despite the fact that there are pictures of that type of cake on the front and back of the box. The important point is that it taste good. This is a more complicated question. I like the mix of pretzel with sweet fillings, as I've mentioned before when reviewing the awesome Pucca. These I didn't go for so much. Part of the problem is that the pretzel shell doesn't seem to have as much flavor as Pucca because it's not made with more flavorful rye flour (as Pucca is). Also, the flavor profile of the creamy filling is very shallow. It's sweet, but the coffe/caramel/chestnut notes are conveyed mostly through scent and not actual taste.

These are absolutely not bad at all, and I will finish the box. I just like to get more flavor and not simply have texture and sweetness. If I hadn't gotten this with my "lucky bag", I may well have purchased it for sampling anyway, but I would have been disappointed. I'm not through with Toppo as I want to try the original version (which has been favorably reviewed at Pocky Watch), but I wouldn't buy these again.

Luna Winter Apple with lemon and ginger yogurt

The Japanese are big into seasonal anything, so I'm guessing there is some special significance to these being "winter apples". I doubt, however, that my taste buds will know the difference. They're not exactly the most refined papillae out there, after all, but I also doubt that a 100 yen ($1.20) carton of yogurt requires a greatly refined palate.

I found this yogurt at Lawson 100 shop, but I'm sure it can be found in supermarkets and other convenience stores. I'm not a huge fan of apple treats, or even relatively healthy things like yogurt, but the inclusion of ginger and lemon made the idea of this more attractive to me. I also liked the fact that it's only 69 calories for 120 grams (4.2 oz.). It also helps that it is made by Luna, maker of many delicious yogurt offerings in Japan.

The yogurt smells like apples, which is no surprise. There is a generous amount of small, nicely firm apple chunks and they are liberally seasoned with lemon and carry a nice hint of ginger as well. I liked the fact that the fruit was substantial enough that you could actually chew the little apple pieces, but not so big that you felt they hadn't cut them up enough. The yogurt is a little runny and also a bit sweeter than I'd like. I think that is because this uses Sucralose artificial sweetener and it can pack a harder punch. However, I'm sure it is what keeps the calories down.

I'm rather torn about this one because I thought it was fine, but I'm not sure that I'd buy it again. The main issues I have with it is that the lemon and ginger is a little too intense in a way which  makes it seem almost "perfumey" and it is a bit too sweet. That being said, as a run-of-the-mill fruit yogurt option, this is certainly fine. However, given a choice between this and the "Apple Pie" Night-time Sweets yogurt, I'd take the latter any day. It has a better sweetness balance, the cinnamon works well in it and has the same number of calories as this ginger and lemon apple yogurt.

Calbee Sapporo Potato Pebbly Vegetable

Back when I was working in an office, I used to pick up these Calbee vegetable snacks on occasion when I wanted a salted snack treat. I didn't buy them because I thought they were so tasty, but rather because they seemed "healthier" than potato chips. If I had a sandwich and I wanted something extra with them, this was my "go to" crunchy snack.

I thought that the calorie count was lower because they didn't seem greasy. It turns out that they aren't seriously better for you in any way when measured by weight, but the volume is higher because they're relatively airy inside. This small bag is 117 calories. You get the illusion of fewer calories since you eat more of them, and that's snot exactly "nothing" when you're in it for the crispiness factor.

I found this small bag (24 grams/.85 oz.) at Seiyu supermarket for 38 yen (45 cents), and decided to revisit my old stand-by. Most of the time, I see much bigger 100 yen bags, but I knew I wasn't going to want to have that much of it around. While I couldn't remember these well enough to review them, I also recalled that they weren't so stellar that I found myself buying them over the years. Besides, now they are made with "pebbly" vegetables bits attached to them and I was "sure" that would represent a vast improvement.

The vegetable component of these is vastly exaggerated unless you only count potatoes. Their flavors are added mainly via a variety of powders including onion, green pepper, pumpkin, and tomato. I'm pretty sure that the little colorful lumps that are stuck on the side of the potato sticks are not real vegetables but some sort of colored potato wads.

These don't smell like much of anything, but that's not really a shock. The "straws" are crunchy and salty, and really don't have a very strong taste. They taste mainly liked processed potato with a slight vegetable aftertaste. If the potato flavor were stronger, these would be better. As it is, they're mainly about the texture and salt, and that's just not enough.

These aren't bad at all, but they fail entirely at being particularly good. Even for something that may be a bit lower in calories than a potato chip, they're too unimpressive to consider buying again.

Random Picture 48

Click on this image for a bigger version in gory detail. 

There are many foods in Japan which are better than what you can get in other countries, and there are some foods which are prepared uniquely to suit Japanese tastes which are different, but still good (not better, not worse, just different). Some things in Japan are pretty  much complete and utter failures, and that is sandwiches. The specimen pictured above is a soba sandwich. Soba is a Japanese noodle made from buckwheat. It is the equivalent of a spaghetti sandwich. There's nothing better than carbs heaped on carbs with, of course, some mustard (karashi) mayonnaise to boot!

While this is one of the nastier looking sandwiches (seriously, don't you think it looks like worms?), there are plenty of nice looking sandwiches with crusts removed that are full of paper thin ham slices, extremely mayo heavy potato, egg or tuna salad (more of a mayo paste with flavoring), and strawberries and cream.

Kirin Nuda Cooling Grapefruit

You have to admire Kirin's testicular fortitude and not because they named this drink "Nuda". Using anything that implies nudity actually takes no balls whatsoever because even a hint of sex sells more products. No, I think it's pretty gutsy of them to sell a "cooling" beverage in the winter time in a country where most of the people (especially the women) have the heat-retention capacity of those in the reptile family. The last thing people in Japan want when the temperature drops below 82 degrees F. (28 degrees C.) is anything which is "cooling".

The Nuda brand has been around for awhile, but this is my first sampling of it. I like grapefruit flavored food and drink, but not actual grapefruit. Oh, I have tried to get into eating the real deal but I just never saw the point in smothering something in sugar in order to make it palatable. I figure that, if I'm going to go for a large amount of sugar, I might as well eat a donut and stop fooling myself into thinking I'm eating something healthy because it was plucked from a vine before being saturation bombed with sucrose.

The  point of the "Nuda" line has nothing to do with supple naked bodies but rather with offering up light refreshment with bubbles. The basic "Nuda" is clear sparkling water and this is the same with a hint of grapefruit flavor. I found it for 87 yen ($1.06) at Seiyu supermarket. The question wasn't going to be about how well this bowled me over but rather about how they worked with the grapefruit flavor. Since this is just a flavored sparkling water, one can't expect too much.

When you unscrew the cap, you can smell a light grapefruit flavor. The water itself is carbonated adequately. You can really sense the bubbles if you hold it in your mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. I rather like this because I like the burn you can get from carbonated beverages. The grapefruit flavor is just enough to be detectable, but not enough to overwhelm. It is quite a good balance because the flavor is there, but there's absolutely no bitterness.

Kirin recommends their sparkling waters as office refreshment. Their ads hint that this will perk you up in meetings, brainstorming sessions, etc. I think that's expecting a bit too much from carbonated water. Nonetheless, this is good sparkling water and if you are inclined to go with bottled water, this is no more expensive than plain water and a nicer experience. I'd certainly buy it again if I were out and about and wanted some water and if it were available and it definitely beats club soda, which has always had a funky taste to me.

Nissin Spa King Carbonara Gratin

As part of my irregular reviews of "real" food, I decided to give this pasta-based entree from Nissin a go after one of my commenters said that the noodle-based packaged foods in Japan tend to be better than the rice-based ones. Though I'm not a fan of noodles, I don't "hate" them, and this carbonara beckoned to me with the promise of the bacon, egg and cheese... okay, it's more like the real deals are diamonds and this is offering a cubic zirconium, but even fake bacon is better than no bacon at all. Also, it's called "Spa King". Anything with "king" in it gains automatic awesomeness points. This is, after all, how "Burger King" stays in business. ;-)

All of the separate components await assembly. I guess they must be kept separate or they may combine into a mutant off-spring if prematurely mixed.

I found this 277 gram (9.7 oz.) meal packet at Seiyu supermarket for 198 yen ($2.36). That may sound like an impressive amount of grub, but it's actually only 6 oz. (170 grams) of food. The rest is plastic and foil, which rather makes me feel guilty for buying this given all of the associated material waste.

The various squiggly thing and goo packets squirted into the plastic tray.

Taking off the wrapping reveals quite a few separate packets including what look like somewhat scary cooked noodles pressed into an unappealing wad of carbohydrates. The blue packet is some sort of oily substance that you squeeze over the pasta first followed by the red and silver packet of sauce and finally the tiny bit of powdered cheese. After you squeeze all of the components into the tray in the proper order, you're supposed to put the cover back on before heating. Since it's just a sheet of plastic, you just sort of lay it back over the top of the mess. The instructions recommend various times depending on your microwave's power and I went for 3 minutes at 600W which seemed about right. 

It looks pretty good when it's cooked, though there isn't as much sauce as there appears to be here.

This smelled like canned white sauce. It's hard to describe it as anything more than that. The flavor was very heavy on the ham flavor, slightly peppery, rather salty, with hints of egg and cheese. It definitely could have used a stronger cheese element, but I really have no complaints. One of the biggest surprises is that the pasta is chewy and neither under nor overcooked. It's pretty much perfect, though it does come out in a mass that you have to fight to untangle after heating.

The Spa King's carbonara has a lot less bacon/ham product than one might hope for.

The "good" news about this is that it tastes pretty good for what it is and it has about 20% of the daily requirement of protein. I find that somewhat impressive for a dish that is pretty much a wad of pasta covered in various types of goo. I had this with some leftover chicken breast on the side to supplement the protein content of the meal (and a huge carrot for a vegetable). The bad news is that it has 1300 mg. of Sodium and ones daily recommendation is 1500 mg. So, 87% of the salt and 20% of the protein. It provides 370 calories, which isn't bad either.

Clearly, this isn't the best option for a meal, and it is designed to be something you have for lunch as a stand-alone entree. It tastes better than average though, is relatively cheap, and wouldn't be a bad occasional quick meal. I personally think it would serve one best as a quick side dish to some sort of lean protein, but then I'd recommend eating only half of it in such a case.

Tirol Premium Tiramisu

I grew up in a rural area where people ate a lot of potatoes, corn, chicken and beef. "Dessert" to us was usually ice cream or pie. Things like tiramisu were alien to us. In fact, I'm guessing anyone who even talked about such things with a sense of curiosity or longing would be viewed as trying too hard to be some snooty food connoisseur. Hence, my first exposure to tiramisu came during the period when it was a monumental food fad in Japan in the late 80's/early 90's. It hasn't exactly faded away since then, and the continuing release of chocolates like this is evidence of that.

For those who grew up like me and aren't familiar with tiramisu (all 2 or 3 of you), it's an Italian dessert made with ladyfingers (or cake), coffee, cocoa, liqueur, and Mascarpone cheese. Well made tiramisu is a textural and taste delight with depth and a certain delicacy. The last time I tasted something which was supposed to be the real deal was a sample at Costco, and it was heavy and nasty beyond belief. Most of what is on offer in Japan is a thin layer of yellow sponge cake with a mixture of whipped cream, cocoa, and coffee flavors. It's good, but also clearly no authentic.

Yeah, it broke into fragments when I tried to cut it in half.

The chocolate tries to emulate the layered sense and look of the real dessert including having a layer with cocoa powder in it. The look is rather easier to convey than the complex flavors of chocolate, coffee and mascarpone cheese. The main thing that this was going to lack was the textural elements of tiramisu. However, the flavor combination was actually pretty good. There was bittersweet chocolate, cocoa, coffee, and even the vaguest hint of mild cheese. The biggest surprise was that it wasn't too sweet as many Tirol chocolates with white chocolate as a main component are overbearingly sweet.

This was pretty good, not great, but a solid contribution to the Tirol Premium line-up. I wish there had been something else in the layering to add more variation in texture rather than just lots of solid chocolate. Also, while the flavor mixture was good and the sweetness level subdued, each flavor felt a bit flat. You can tell that these are low-quality chocolates, but one can't expect too much of a 1-inch/2.5 cm square for 20 yen (25 cents) that is picked up at a convenience store.

This is a little higher in calories than usual for a Tirol candy at 66. Since it's not incredibly sweet, I'm guessing it's just fattier than usual though the chocolate isn't any softer than usual (and mine was firm because I kept it in the refrigerator). I'm not sure if I would recommend this to others. On the one hand, it's pretty good for what it is and if you're in Japan and can just buy one cheaply and you like coffee chocolates, you might want to give it a try. If you have to pay a higher import price though, or dislike coffee chocolates, I'd say give it a miss. I don't think I'd buy another, but I don't regret having sampled this either.

Random Picture 47

 Click this to see a bigger one that you can read better.

This sign is from Becker's, a fast food place that is either owned or has an exclusive deal with Japan Railway (JR). In some stations, you can find these places though only in some of the bigger ones that aren't already surrounded by other fast food options. As fast food goes, they're at least a small cut above the rest. Like Subway, they bake their own bread (buns) on the premises and claim to make everything fresh. I used to work near Itabashi station and they had a Becker's, but my local station does not.

This poster is for breakfast options at a Becker's at a neighboring station and it caught my eye for several reasons. First of all, the presentation on the sign is very elegant for fast food. Since I didn't actually eat there, I can't say for sure, but I believe that the food is served on actual plates. The sets are:

"Morning Plate 1" - scrambled egg, toast with butter, and a scrap of bacon with coffee
"Morning Plate 2" - this is called the "balance plate" which includes everything in the first set (egg, bacon, toast, coffee) plus yogurt and juice
"Morning Plate 3" - a hot dog, yes, a hot dog and a few scraps of lettuce and tomato with coffee
"Morning Plate 4" -  coffee, toast with cheese or mayo with various goo (can't tell which and the poster doesn't say), coffee, and a thimble of cabbage
"Morning Plate 5" - English muffin halves with scrambled egg and ketchup and seaweed, cheese and bacon, and coffee


The configuration of these sets illustrates something about Japanese food culture which one can either find charming or irritating, and that's that the equivalent of gustatory lip service when it comes to the sides. The amount of vegetables is so minuscule as to be pretty much pointless. They function more as garnish than as meal components.