Furuta Torukeru White Chocolate Bar

"Torukeru" means "melty" or "melting" and is often used by Japanese candy makers to say that there is soft, ganache-like chocolate involved in their candy-making alchemy. Often, that means it's either oozing all over your fingers or soft, but solid. You can see by the illustration on the package above that they're trying to convey the idea that there is soft, creamy filling trying to escape the evil clutches of the brittle wafers in which they are trapped between. 

The problem with this concept is that you're putting something which is essentially absorbent between something absorb-able. Over time, the wafers are going to suck some of the moisture out of the cream and disable all of its capacity to be anything resembling "melty". That is what happened to my bar, if indeed it ever was full of soft, melting cream in the first place. Fortunately, this in now way detracted from the textural elements which included the easily cleaved exterior chocolate coating and several crispy wafers with a very thin layer of chocolate cream between them.

This was surprisingly good considering its white chocolate exterior and my general aversion to said substance. The not so sweet and slightly bitter interior wafers and chocolate filling balance out the fairly sweet white chocolate exterior. Surprisingly, at room temperature, the outside is quite firm. I've had problems with Sequoia chocolate bars being too soft, but this was good and reminded me of one of the better KitKat variations that I've experienced in the past.

One can pick up Sequoia bars for near a dollar at Japanese markets in California and they're quite cheap in Japan as well. The "specialty" bars like this one tend to be about 50 yen or about 50 cents at convenience stores. They are a cheap way to try something a little off the beaten path and I was not disappointed in this. At 141 calories for a single large finger-sized bar, it also offers good portion control.

Though I liked this quite fine, it wasn't exotic enough or "good" enough to make me want to have it again. As a one-off sampling, I have no regrets, but I wouldn't recommend you go out of your way to try it. Though it's a nice enough wafer-chocolate combo, it's probably not worth choosing over more interesting options. Still, if you're in Japan and crave a KitKat, but don't want to have a whole bar around to tempt you, this is a really good alternative and better than the regular chocolate Sequoia bars (which are actually pretty good, too) by a small margin.