Sogo Bakery and Red Bean Bread review

The red bean bread on display. (Click any picture in this post to load a larger version.)

One of my late pleasures during my time in Japan was "koshian" or red bean bread. I especially enjoyed a version sold at the "Good Morning Bakery" that was about a 10-minute walk from our apartment in Asagaya. I was hoping to have a somewhat similar experience with this bread after discovering it on sale at what had to be one of the cruddiest little Chinese malls in San Jose (in an area closer to Cupertino).

The counter that comprises pretty much the entire "store front".

Sogo Bakery is a chain that has its own branches as well as sells products trough the chain of 99 Ranch Asian markets. All of the branches listed on their web site are in California. I don't know if their products can be had elsewhere, but they appear to specialize in a variety of Chinese and other sweets and breads targeted at the Asian market.

Apparently, UFOs are cheaper than Europeanism (whatever that is).

The one I went to in San Jose was at the front of a small mall that included a deli, a Chinese yogurt shop, a medicinal herbs shop, and some miscellaneous jewelry and other sundry items shops. The place was quite old and a bit dingy, though I have to say that it was worn, but not really dirty. When I used their restrooms, I noted that they were clean. If you want to know just how well-kept a space is, don't look at the middle of the floor space. Look at the corners. Most American bathrooms and older stores will have a built-up pile of crud in the corners where someone has mopped the floor hastily and a lot of it has been shoved into the corners. This place had clear corners, so someone is looking after it very well. Don't let old exteriors lead you to believe it's "dirty".

Mung bean, wife, and sun pastry buns.

The entire little mall was very interesting because the menus for the deli were only in Chinese. You had to speak Mandarin to be employed there and my husband and I were the only white people in the mall. This is the sort of situation in which most people here who are not of the dominant ethnicity of the client base feel uncomfortable in, but so many years of being a part of an extreme minority makes us just fine with walking around what other Caucasians feel is an "alien" environment. Besides, that's where all of the good finds can be found!

This option gives a whole new meaning to, "look out, he's got a grenade!"

The bakery was pretty much the usual affair for Asian places in that it had a pastry case full of elaborate decorated cakes, tarts, pies, and cupcakes in the front and less expensive bread options away from the cashier. A lot of the bread and buns were either European (including some pretty nice-looking garlic bread) or Chinese. There wasn't much in the way of green tea (so not particularly Japanese), but there were a fair number of bean items and a smattering of muffins. The prices were not especially expensive or cheap for this area. The best bargain, in my opinion, was the red bean bread at $3.75 per loaf. It's a lot for that price, and competitive with packaged, mass-produced bread that is not a store brand and is of higher quality.

A view of the red bean bread (koshian), that I had in Tokyo from the "Good Morning Bakery". One fat slice of this cost about 300 yen or about $3. This was the standard to live up to.

Regarding the concept of bread with red beans, I know it sounds horrible, but it's actually a moist, lightly sweet, and utterly delicious concept. It's more akin to cinnamon-swirled bread or jam-swirls inside of a loaf of white bread than what you might imagine. It's moister and heavier, and I'd say it makes a "light" snack except that the bread is incredibly heavy and not particularly low in calories.

A slice of the Sogo Bakery red bean bread.

In fact, I weighed the loaf of bread that I bought before tucking in and it was 1 lb. and 11 oz./765 grams! It's got some heft from the weight of the bean paste. Each slice is a whopping 240 calories, though it does make a breakfast or hardy snack all by itself.

As you can see by comparing the pictures, the Japanese koshian is much more marbled with bean paste. It is in generous swirls that integrates almost completely with the bread. The Sogo Bakery bread has had rolled out dough spread with red bean paste and it was rolled up and baked. I get the feeling the Good Morning stuff took a lot more effort to get that much distributed through it. Clearly, I got more bean for my money from the Good Morning type and it showed in the taste.

The red oval shows the misaligned slices that were changed to hide the plain end piece.

The bread is lightly sweet on its own and the areas with bean paste is a bit sweeter and carries the flavor of the paste. It's not intense, and that isn't a bad thing, but I would have liked more. The bread is fresh and soft and very good as a bread even without the beans. It makes me believe that their regular bread is probably pretty good stuff.

The hidden piece with very little in the way of red bean in it!

I also have to say that they pulled a little trick on their customers with how they package the bread. They take the outer two slices and turn them around so you can't see the end. I noticed that the two front slices seemed mismatched in terms of how the sizes lined up. It looked like they were cut off a different, smaller loaf, but then I realized they were just turned around to hide the largely plain on one side slice that was on the end. This is a bit of a cheap trick in my opinion. I realize customers won't be as attracted to the bread if one end looks plain and the other is a crust (and it is), but they should simply not include that slice rather than hide it in this manner.

Even with this little cheap trick and the fact that it wasn't as good as what I had in Japan, I'd still buy this bread again without hesitation. It's fresh, tasty, sweet, and a unique treat. I froze the loaf I bought after having a slice and I plan to have it as toast from here on (or rewarmed in the toaster oven while wrapped in foil). My experience in Japan with koshian was that it lost a lot the next day and freezing bread tends to slow down the quality loss. The only thing about this which I wish was different was the amount you buy. I would have preferred to buy no more than four slices at once since I'll be the only one eating it. It will take me a long time to consume an entire loaf. If you're near one of these bakeries (or see this bread in a market), I'd recommend picking one up and trying it. It'd be an especially good choice as a unique option at a potluck or as a baked treat for a party with open-minded friends.

Random Picture #202

Assuming you cannot read Japanese or haven't taken a moment to scrutize the picture from a vending machine shown above, I'd like you to take a moment to guess at what is being sold in these cans. All of these feature Mt. Fuji at different points in time - in winter, in spring with cherry blossoms, and the last one says, "diamond Fuji" which I imagine is the sun over Fuji in summer? What cannot item do you think fits the motif?

The truth is that I'm not sure what sort of canned food fits these scenes, but I wouldn't have guessed that it would be what it turned out to be. These cans are full of bread. From left to right is adzuki (red bean) bread, plain bread, and then coffee bread. I guess that, if you climb Mt. Fuji, you might benefit from a canned carb boost. That would make more sense if this picture was taken on the ascent up that mountain, but this machine was nowhere near it. It was in Tokyo in Kichijoji's Inokashira park. Perhaps the bread was made from something on Mt. Fuji, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's just a tourist thing. Any thoughts?

Lawson Uchi Cafe Bread campaign (product information)

I subscribe to a web site which shows retro ads for various products as well as one that takes old recipes and tries them out to see if they're decent. In both of these cases, you see a fair number of ads for things which are incorporated into recipes that don't really belong. Old 7-Up ads, for instance, encourage you to pour it in your meatloaf mix or to mix it with milk and give it to your kids.

It makes perfect sense for manufacturers to try and shoehorn their product into your recipes so that you'll use it more often. Lawson has taken a very different approach to trying to sell its bread. Rather than encourage you to buy bread and then incorporate it into your French toast, tsukune mix, or soak it in sake for a Japanized bread pudding, they just give you recipes for food that goes well with bread.

The idea of pairing your food in ads in order to put the idea in people's heads that, hey, 'food A goes well with food B', but I don't think I've ever seen recipes given which don't include the product being promoted. It's an interesting concept and the reason this caught my eye was a recipe for chestnut soup. In fact, at first I thought they were selling the soup in their convenience stores, but, no, it's about the side dish.

If you'd like to make the soup, the recipe is here. It's actually not too dissimilar from a recipe I created while living in Japan though I didn't use cream in mine and I included carrots, sage, and thyme. There are 7 recipes and only two of them show bread as a side. The others are actually for spreads to put on bread, sandwich filling, and, in one case, making a French-toast-style recipe with berries. The basic concept is to pair bread with a variety of other flavors (lemon, egg, chestnut, potato, apple, salmon, and berry) so you can enjoy Lawson's brick of white bread every single day of the week with a far more interesting flavor.

Random Picture #181

One of the things which I liked about Japanese bakeries was the tendency to fashion their bread products in the shapes of animals or characters. Where I was born and raised, I don't think we ever had what would be considered a "real" bakery and my first experience with this sort of bread artistry came in Japan.

Upon returning to the U.S. and learning that they actually do such things here as well, I was a little less impressed, especially with some of the more mass-produced-looking results such as the bears shown above. The one in the front looks like he has been punched in the snout. The one behind him looks rather deformed.

I never really thought much about it, but I wonder if Japanese customers would avoid malformed character bread. Since Japanese consumers are renowned for their fussiness, it would make sense that they would prefer not to get a mutant bear bread. After all, if it's not pretty, what's the point of getting a shaped bread at all? Considering that these are small (about the size of your palm) and cost 200 yen (about $2) each, I'm not sure it's worth paying the somewhat premium price for substandard work.

D-Plus Hokkaido Cream Pastry Roll

Recently, I tried protein powder as a standalone product for the first time. I'm sure that I've consumed food which has had the equivalent of such supplements before, but this was my first experience with scooping it out and stirring it into a beverage in such a way that I could really taste it. Incidentally, I didn't buy it, but was given it free for review. I don't normally eat protein powder, but that's not the point I'm getting to anyway.

The protein powder had a particular familiar taste which I could not put my finger on for quite some time. I looked at the ingredients, the first of which related to peas, which I rarely eat and have an irrational dislike of because my mother tried to force-feed them to me when I was a kid, and there was nothing there to clue me in on why it should taste like some sense memory lodged deep in the memory banks of my aging brain. After giving up on pinpointing it, the answer came unbidden into my mind. It tasted like a much more intense version of the aftertaste from cheap vitamin fortified cereal, likely a Cheerios knock-off that I had in my impoverished upbringing. 

In a strange way, this made sense since I imagine one way in which cereal, which is really pretty bad for you, is "fortified" with nutrients is with vitamin powders. This protein powder had a similar taste profile. The weird thing was that the familiarity of it actually made it seem "better". It wasn't that it tasted good, nor that I had any sort of fond memory of that cereal, but just the fact that it was familiar made me like it more. Nostalgia is a potent modifier of experience.

That is a phrase that comes to mind because this Hokkaido Cream pastry roll, purchased at Daiso Japan for a modest $1.50, is all about nostalgia for me. No one, save my husband, whined more about the "bready" relatively shelf stable pastries in Japan more than me. They were not sweet enough, had too little flavor and were always composed of relatively bland white bread. However, that presentation is something which I'll always associate with living there. This roll tasted like life in Tokyo.

That is not to say that it tasted "great", but it was actually better than expected. I sampled a D-Plus Anpan previously, and found it disappointing. This was somewhat better for two reasons. First of all, the bread was fluffier and softer than the anpan version. It was suprisingly fresh in terms of the texture. That could be the nature of this sweet or I could have gotten the anpan at the end of its shelf life and the cream bread at the beginning. It's hard to say for sure, but it was actually pretty decent as far as being soft.

The "cream" part was where it really hit home as a carby slice of Japan. I thought that I'd cut it open and find a small anemic pocket of cream in the middle surrounded by a huge amount of bread. That wasn't the way it worked. If you look at the picture above, you can see dots of yellow that look like tiny bits of butter. You can also see that the cream bread is layered is sections. The cream is distributed in marginal amounts between each segment. This may account for how moist and soft the bread is since even a smattering of fatty cream filling may keep the bread from drying out.

In terms of the taste, I honestly liked it. It is ever so slightly sweet and had the barest hint of custard taste. Coupled with the fairly good texture, this was a serviceable breakfast bread or snack (and at 270 calories, it was a reasonable portion). The truth is that I'd buy this again. However, I think that this is not something I'd recommend for my readers unless they have the same nostalgia for Japan that I do. Objectively speaking, this is no great shakes and you'd be better off buying a nice bun or roll from a supermarket bakery. This was good, but only for what it is and for those who have a sense memory they'd like to relive. I'm sure that's how these D-Plus pastries remain in stock at Japanese markets. They cater to the desire of people who want the "Japanese taste" while they're not in Japan. 

D-Plus Koshi Anpan

"D-Plus" is not a grade, though by the end of this review, we'll see if there is a double-meaning to this product's maker's name. It stands for "day plus" which could mean a great many things or nothing at all. I'm told that using English names for products is just to make them seem cooler somehow. I think that it refers to the fact that these are "long life bread" products that last more than a day. I'm not sure, but I think this one was issued on May 25, and I bought it on June 11, so, that's quite a "plus" if my assumptions are correct. The company's web site says that these are designed to last up to 60 days, so this is about the middle-aged period of this bun's life.

This is my first experience with this particular manufacturer of Japanese snacks and that is due to the fact that, as I mentioned in my post on Japanese bakeries, I rarely ate anpan (sweet bean jam buns) because I was never a fan of the hamburger-bun-like casings. The thing that changed all of that was having been away from Japan for 3 months and finding myself a bit on the "starved" side when it comes to anything with anko (sweet bean jam). I found this at "Daiso Japan" in Mountain View, California and snapped it up in a fit of snack purchasing. For those who don't know, "Daiso" is a chain of 100-yen shops in Japan that has a few branches elsewhere. That place is essentially a transplant of the Japanese shops and even carried the same types of visors that I bought in Japan for pretty much the same price.

Since everything in the Daiso Japan store is a $1.50 (120 yen), that's what I paid for this and it was pretty gratifying to be paying almost the same amount for this here as I would if I had picked it up in Tokyo. My experiences so far have shown that that is rare. Usually, things are at least 50% more expensive, if not double the price of those in Tokyo.

The company that makes these is located in Gunma prefecture and has only been doing business since 2003. They take pride in using natural yeast germinated in brown rice and talk about how it produces lactobacillus cultures, though they also mention that the cultures are killed when the bread is baked so I'm not sure why they bother to mention it. It's like they're trying to add an aura of healthfulness to their products.

I've had many experiences with packaged bread products and knew this wasn't going to be the greatest thing on earth. That's okay. Not everything I eat has to be the best of the best. In this case, I was really just looking at the experience of having anpan without tracking down a specialty bakery in the Bay Area. Also, for the price, one has to set ones expectations at the right place.

One interesting thing about buying things in America is that I don't have to translate the ingredients or nutrition information. I've read kanji for years that say "fruit sugar" on them and have wondered if that was the way the Japanese say "high fructose corn syrup", but I know it could also be "grape sugar", which is a less nutritionally suspect substance. In the case of this cake, it is the dreaded HFCS. However, I'm not really the sort who gets worked up about that because I don't eat much processed food and don't drink sodas with sugar. I figure that I'm not in much danger with what little I do eat, but those who feel it is the devil's liquid refreshment may want to steer clear of anything in Japan saying "fruit sugar". One other odd thing about the translation is that it says the bun has 260 calories in the English information, but 288 in the Japanese information. It seems that 28 calories were lost in translation.

I tried half of the bun at room temperature straight out of the package. The bean jam is smooth, sweet, and very tasty, though it does tend to settle into a cake in the middle rather than distribute nicely throughout the bun. The bun, well, it wasn't terrible, but did taste like a day-old hamburger bun. It wasn't exactly stale, but it also wasn't exactly fresh tasting either. I ate the other half after putting it in the microwave for about 10 seconds. Sometimes, a little zap will freshen up dubious bread and I believe it did improve the overall texture a bit by softening it up. It was about 15% better with a bit of a warming.

It's hard to render a verdict on this given my spotty access to such Japanese snacks. If I was deprived of anko snacks for a long time again, I'd certainly buy this again. In Tokyo, I loved manju that offered me a soft mochi wrapper around the bean jam and had all I could want from traditional sweets shops. Here, I'm in the "beggars can't be choosers" position. The bottom line is that I might buy this again, but only out of nostalgia for the taste of bean jam, but if I can find ready access to a better source, I wouldn't buy this again. It's not that it's so bad, but simply that the bread is not very good.

Random Picture #106

It may surprise no one that I have been taking pictures of food all over Japan like a mad woman since I know that I'll not have the chance to do so in the future. That being said, I still hold out hope for interesting shots to share even after I go home. Who knows what sort of shopping experiences I'll have in California (where I'll eventually end up, but am not starting from). It's not exactly a wasteland when it comes to Japanese food. Even when I lived there 23 years ago, I was able to buy packets of instant miso soup at a local Safeway. 

Some experiences will never quite be the same no matter what, and one of them will be the Japanese bakery experience. For one thing, I expect everything to be much bigger back home. I also expect that presentation will be less impressive. Finally, I expect far less decadent textures and richness. All Japanese bread products are on the fat-heavy side in my experience. Of course, this picture is meant to illustrate the "cute" side. 

One of my Japanese friends started a Facebook group for animal breads and I joined rather belatedly and found this picture of bear bread. Actually, I found that the vast majority of animal bread in Japan is "bear bread" as it's probably easiest to make, but am still hoping to participate in the group with some more imaginative offerings after I get back to the U.S.

Marumiya Pandaful Italian Pizza Topping

Many moons ago when I was in my early years in Japan and working at Nova, I used to go out for yakitori a lot with coworkers. We bonded over our collective ignorance and struggled together with the language. Somehow, everyone managed to cobble together an order. I learned that "dai jockey" was what people said when they wanted a big glass of beer. I also learned that bars never sold diet sodas and often only reluctantly gave you a glass of water with your sticks of grilled chicken.

After a particularly enjoyable meal at our favorite yakitori restaurant, one of my coworkers expressed gratitude at having been invited. He said that he had planned to go home and just have cheese toast and what we'd experienced was an order of magnitude better. Cheese toast is what tired people resort to when they don't have the energy to manage the sophistication of a grilled cheese sandwich. It's also rather popular with foreigners who have been in Japan for a short time because it can be made in a toaster oven and often that is the only equipment we are given besides a single gas burner and contains two ingredients which are "safe" to eat and easy to identify when you can't read Japanese.

Since I like to cook, I've never been much for cheese toast. That being said, I'm not a immune to its simple allure. It is two great tastes that taste great together, but it is quite simple. This topping is designed to dress up your cheese toast with the taste of pizza seasonings. It adds a few grams of protein and 220 mg. of sodium as well. The main ingredient is a soy derivative followed by dried corn, onion, and pepper. It also includes chicken extract, bacon, tomato, cheese, and most oddly, apple. There are also a fair number of additives, but let's not even pretend this is something one eats for health. You don't have cheese toast if you're eating right.

Incidentally, the name of this product is a cute play on words. The funny thing is that none of those words are Japanese. In Japan, they adopted the Portuguese word for bread, "pan". They also adopted bread from Portugal as well as castella cake and kompeito hard candies. Most of Japan's baking culture was borrowed from Europe. At any rate, this is a bread topping so "pan" is half of the word play. The rest is "wonderful" from English. They then use a panda as their mascot as a further way of playing with the words. It's all quite cute, but makes for verbose explaining. 

I found this at Lawson 100 for 100 yen ($1.25). There were some other flavors on offer, but the entire display sold out pretty quickly and I forgot what the others were. The company that makes this, Marumiya, offers up a great many "sprinkle toppings" for traditional food such as rice. They also sell prepared food in foil packets and dehydrated food products. This seems like a little foray into a side product that fits in with their overall product line. I guess making stuff to sprinkle on bread is the next logical step to making stuff to scatter on your rice. 

One packet is 30 grams and that offers up three servings at 43 calories per serving. I used a half slice of Roman Meal bread. This is fairly enormous bread, as much bread in Japan is the size of Texas Toast, so half is a decent serving size. I spread it with a little margarine before sprinkling the topping onto it to help it stick a bit better. I was afraid the little crumbly bits would just fall off, especially where cheese did not melt over the topping. 

The packet mentions that the cheese does not come with the topping. I had just picked up a block of mozzarella cheese that could probably feed a family of four for a month at Costco so this was a good time to try out some pizza-flavored cheese toast. After browning it a bit, I bit into it. The flavor of the sprinkles is slightly zesty and pizza-like. It contains rosemary, among other spices. The flavor is okay, not great, but not bad. The thing that doesn't work is the texture mix of the crumbly bits, which are slightly soft, yet firm, with the bread. I kept feeling like that flavor should go along with an actual pizza crust rather than a slice of bread. I also felt that it'd be better to simply spread some pizza sauce on bread and put the cheese on it rather than use the sprinkles.

This isn't bad at all. It isn't great, but you're not going to be spitting it out or anything. The main benefit of this over making pizza toast the old-fashioned way with sauce is that the packet of sprinkles will last without refrigeration for ages. As long as you close the zipper top of the packet, you can just use it when you're bored with your cheese toast. If you buy pizza sauce and you live alone or infrequently have pizza toast, it'll almost certainly go bad in your fridge. I can't really recommend this unless you're lazy, single, and want some easy and effortless variation on your cheese toast. Personally, I can't see buying it again because it's inoffensive, but not impressive.

Muji Amashoku

When you think movie snacks, you're probably thinking popcorn, M & M's, chocolate-covered raisins, or some sort of candy that can be shoveled into your mouth in small bits such as to mislead you about the true amount you are consuming. You probably aren't thinking "Japanese baked goods", but this amashoku (sweet bun) was purchased for me to consume during a viewing of Mission Impossible IV: Ghost Protocol. 

I didn't plan to be so unconventional, but the theater we went to was fused with Muji (in what I'm sure was a painful transporter accident). If you don't want to look that up and don't know what it is, I'll tell you it is a worldwide seller of household goods, clothing, and other assorted crap that emphasizes minimalism. It's the "no brand" brand. The fact that it is considered "cool" always makes me smirk since I grew up poor and buying "generics" which were what no one wanted because of their plain black on white labels. If only they'd chosen a different color scheme (Muji's is black text on tan with deep red lines), they might have been painfully hip instead of fodder for people who knew the humiliation of shopping with food stamps.

Since Muji had a shop in the basement and first floor of the theater, we killed time before the main feature by perusing one of the shops. There is a minimum of 20 minutes of advertising and coming attractions and we were lied to about the starting time and subjected to 13 minutes of ads even though we waited until near the starting time. At any rate, since Japanese theaters allow you to bring in your own snacks (hurrah!), I was drawn to the compact packet of amashoku for a mere 126 yen. Each small bun is a little bigger in diameter than a 500 yen coin/American half dollar and a mere 27 calories. 

All amashoku is a little on the dry side, but not in a way which is especially unpleasant. It has a textural quality which crosses between bread, a cookie, and cake. It has the texture of the top of a muffin, the dryness of bread, and a bit of the delicate inner texture of cake. Really fresh amashoku that you buy in bakeries has a slightly crispy top. Pre-packaged types like this are pretty much soft all the way through, but that doesn't make them bad.

The flavor is of margarine, sugar and something that reminds me of anise at the end. It's a very distinctive flavor which I encounter with all sorts of amashoku, but I can't find anything in on-line recipes which would account for this taste. The basics are flour, butter, sugar, and egg. These were sweeter than some amashoku, but not too sweet and quite tasty. For a texture junky like me, they really hit the spot. 

Since Muji is worldwide, there's a chance that these can be bought in other countries at their shops. I was already a fan of amashoku, but they are on the "plain" side. If you're someone who likes carbs that aren't too oily or painfully sweet, I'd recommend giving them a try. I'll certainly have them again.

Random Picture #82

I've written before about portion sizes in Japan, and how they often package things to make it easier for people to eat less. This does not hold true in all cases. In fact, one of the few food areas in which large sizes is not uncommon is baked goods which are sold in convenience stores or markets. Those packaged bread-based products are often huge. One of these enormous specimens was available at the awesome discount shop Tsurukame and I paused and had my husband get a picture of it using my arm as a point of comparison. This is about 16.5 in./42 cm. of refined carbohydrates mixed with sugar and damaged fats. If you were to gobble it all down at once, you'd be ingesting 1233 calories. Of course, I'm under no illusion that this is meant to be eaten by one person. Chances are, it's a family pack type of thing and this is meant to be divided into as many as 10 servings. Either way, this is one monster "cream bread" pastry for the bargain price of $2.

Yamazaki-pan Hitokuchi mochi bread

Sorry that there is no cutaway shot. I took one, but lost it in the huge number of photos I've taken lately. If I find it, I'll add it in later.

When we first moved into our neighborhood, there was a Mos Burger fast food joint not 3 minutes from our apartment. Mos Burger, for those who don't know, is the best Japanese rip-off of Western chains like McDonald's. Not only did they pilfer the big "M" logo, but they initially started out with a yellow letter on a red background. As time has gone by, Mos Burger has differentiated itself favorably (for the most part) from Mickey D's. They tailor their menu to suit the Japanese market and offer fresher food. This has the up-side of tasting better, but the down-side of taking a lot longer to serve your order.

When that Mos Burger was still in place, my husband and I used to occasionally go there for food when we were too tired to cook. My favorite was their spicy chili dog. Though I'm not much of a hot dog eater, it was the closest thing to a chili dog I could find in Japan and I grew up with access to very good knock-offs of the famous Skyline chili. As long as a dog had that sort of chili sauce on it, I was in love. I can't say Mos Burger's chili dogs come close at all, but there aren't many other options in Japan.

Before that branch of Mos Burger faded away due to a lack of business, they once offered something called a "cheese pon". This was one of those temporary deals that is on hand for several months then goes the way of the dodo bird. I mention this because those cheese pon were almost the same as this bread which I purchased at Lawson 100 (for 100 yen/$1.24). Eating these brought back memories of spicy chili dogs and greasy bits of chewy bread.

There are 8 little doughy balls in the package and each is a stretchy little dough ball. They are greasy feeling on the tongue, but not so oily on the fingers. The inside looks a lot like mochi (pounded rice cake) and is chewy like mochi, but less refined. The cheese flavor is so subdued as to be nearly absent. In fact, I wonder if the "cheese" aspect is mainly to get them to look orange. The ingredients list does include "cheese cream" and "natural cheese", but they are a bit far down on the list after the basic bread-making ingredients.

I ate these over a three-day period and I really liked them as a sort of wicked little bread snack. I don't know how bad they really are for you because Yamazaki-pan rarely gives nutrition information on its packaged bread products. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've had an interest in something they offer but passed on it because I had no idea what I was eating. This time, I just took the plunge anyway.

I wish these were cheesier, but they really hooked me with their texture and overall taste which I wish I could describe more effectively. The flavor is very subtle and probably would have been more pronounced with a bit more salt in the mix. At any rate, these pair well with soup or simply as a snack with some weight. If you come across them, they're well worth a sampling and are a unique experience.

Pasco Sweet Potato "Stick"

When I was a kid, I remember visiting my maternal grandmother and having sandwiches with her "weird bread". That is, bread that was made with whole wheat, grains, or whatever that made it brown and "gross". I couldn't understand how anyone would choose such oddness over white bread. Now that I'm "old" (46), I can't see the appeal of the gluey cushions of nothingness that I perceive white bread to be. To me, it's just a step removed from cake, particularly in its Japanese incarnation.

Because I eat whole wheat bread and baked goods nearly everyday, turning to the Japanese bread section for anything is rare for me. I realize that most of the bread is relatively finely made with gobs of fat and sugar to make it soft as a cloud and to lend some very fine textural elements, but it just doesn't float my aging boat. However, I pondered these Pasco sweet potato sticks mainly because I'm sucker for all things sweet potato. Also, at only 65 calories per stick, they looked like very fine fodder for tea time.

I tried eating this three different ways. First, I had a bite as it came out of the package. The sense was decidedly "meh". It mainly tasted like fairly decent white bread with a hint of sweetness and a detectable margarine flavor. The sweet potato didn't come through much at all. Second, I wrapped it in foil and heated it a bit in the toaster oven such that it was warmed, but not too hot to handle. This made it slightly better as the texture of the bread was softer and seemed fresher and it seemed a tad sweeter. Finally, I heated it to a point where it was quite hot to handle using the same method and this is where it seemed to "wake up".

By getting it really hot (about as hot as you can manage without seriously burning your fingers), the sweet potato turned creamy and soft and the flavor seemed to open up. I could really taste the sweet potato as an element only when the bread was in this state. The only problem is that "near nuclear" hotness doesn't last long so they have to be savored rather rapidly if you want the maximum enjoyment.

I liked this, but I'm not a fan of super sweet pastries. This was quite subtle in its flavors and not very sweet. You really have to be as much a fan of plain, relatively decent quality white bread and sweet potato to want to eat something like this. In many ways, this type of "pastry" typifies a strong difference between Japanese and American tastes. There are plenty of these sorts of sticks or twists in Japan with mixtures of chocolate, "cream" (like custard), red beans, and sweet potato. They are all quite similar to this one in that they aren't incredibly sweet and have subtle flavors.

The big question which I find hard to answer is whether I'd buy this again. I probably would, but not soon and not often. I tend to favor whole grains and stronger flavors for breakfast, and I try to avoid products made with white flour because of the potential for a blood sugar spike and crash (which will make one very hungry after a short period of time). I could see buying this again when I was in the mood for a change of pace, but only perhaps once or twice a year.

Copan Italian Pizza French Bread Crisps

"Copan" brand toasted bread snacks have been around for ages, but they haven't really lured me in. Part of the reason for this may be that I'm not sure where they fall on the snack continuum. They seem more like a form of a bread stick than a snack. It was just hard to get excited about something that looked like a flat crouton.

Today, I saw the 42 gram bag of Italian pizza flavor Copan and decided to finally dive in. It was only 98 yen (about a dollar), and the flavor sounded appealing enough. Maybe I was misplacing a craving for pizza.


The bag contains a lot of little 5 cm (2 in.) pieces of what look like slivers of French bread sliced from a tiny loaf. They smell like those jars of "pizza seasoning" you sometimes find in greasy pizza joints. The scent includes tomato, Parmesan cheese, oregano, and a hint of the distinctive yeastiness of bread.

These don't taste like pizza, but that's no surprise. It's unrealistic to expect a little dry bit of bread to be like pizza. What they do taste like is really nicely toasted French bread with a lot of good seasoning. The tomato and cheese flavor are especially present and fairly "real" tasting. There's a nice tanginess to them and a deep savory flavor that comes from adding in some chicken and shrimp flavors. The texture is perfectly crunchy and they are neither too dry nor too oily. Someone definitely did a good job with the toasting process.

Much to my surprise, I loved these. I ate the whole bag (all 230 calories of them) at once. Once you get started, it's really hard to stop eating them. I'd definitely buy these again, provided that I didn't mind consuming all those calories at once.

Lawson Value Line Tuna Mayo Pizza

There's an excellent blog called "Heat Eat Review" which features frozen and ready to eat food reviews. I've often thought that such an idea would be interesting for Japanese frozen or prepared meals, but the truth is that there isn't much of such types of food around relative to the U.S. The fact that women tend to cook most of the time and housewives are still pretty common means people tend to get full and balanced meals rather than grab something quick. Also, the types of food that are available in this area tend to be expensive and of very poor quality. It'd require one to eat an entire meal of junk instead of just the snack size things that I review.

As I mentioned in a former review of a prepared ham and cheese bagel, I rarely buy prepared food, frozen or otherwise. The only time I tend to buy it is when I'm not feeling well and feel too tired or sick to cook. The night before I bought the Lawson's Value Line frozen pizza that I only slept about 4 hours, so I was ripe for an easy meal when I hit the local convenience store for milk. I found this pizza, along with a similar one called a "mix pizza" and decided to give it a go.


The pizza cost 100 yen (about a dollar) and is 14 cm (5.5 in.) in size. The entire pizza has 249 calories, which is what puts it into the "snack" range and not a meal. It comes in a plastic shrink-wrapped package inside of it's main plastic package. I guess they feel it needs the extra wrapping for freezer burn protection. The instructions on the package recommend that you cook this in the toaster oven for 5-6 minutes at 1000 watts, but I found that was not long enough for the cheese to melt or the crust to get a bit brown.


After cooking, the pizza smells odd. It has a bit of a tomato smell, but also a strange nondescript fishy smell which I associate with Japanese food. I'm guessing that smell would be the tuna. While the crust is your standard preformed crust, it actually has a little better texture than average. The outsides is slightly crispy and the inside is nicely chewy. The sauce is inoffensive, but not very flavorful. In fact, the main problem is that aside from the crust and the tomato sauce, there's very little flavor at all. The tuna is more of an aftertaste than an actual topping. The cheese is so sparse as to be undetectable as is the corn.


I should note that I had very low expectations of this given that it's very small and cheap, and frozen pizza in Japan is abysmal on the whole. The crust exceeded my expectations, but the toppings were about usual for a Japanese frozen pizza. This makes for a pretty nice "bread" if you manage to cook it just right in the oven. It really isn't much as pizza though. If you'd like a soft, warm pizza-flavored bread to go along with a salad or as a snack at tea time, this wouldn't be a bad choice. I'd say this is fine as long as you're in the mood for that and nothing more.

Maple Fried Bread Snack

Sometimes I try something which is abysmally bad and I figure that someone somewhere has a very different sense of taste than I. I figure that any sort of passionate response to the taste of something probably means the product was test marketed to people who are unlike myself.

This is not one of those times when I have sampled something I hate. This is a time when I wonder if someone bothered to test market something because taste testing would certainly have revealed that no one could possibly care to eat this product as anything than a desperate last choice for sustenance. The indifference I feel to this snack is immeasurable.

This was made by Yamazaki Baking Company which I know well for it's packaged baked goods, its own chain of convenience stores, and for having a partnership with Nabisco in Japan. In the early 90's, they were also involved in a flap about potassium bromide use in their products and the detrimental effects on the health of anyone who consumed them. Despite their spotty history, I'm a great fan of their cake products, especially their mont blanc which is commonly sold in 2-packs in supermarkets here. In fact, any Yamazaki cake product which incorporates whipped cream tests my self control. Given the companies history of pleasing me as a customer, I wasn't expecting this item to underwhelm so awesomely.


I have to ask myself who thought this type of product was a good idea. Didn't they actually eat it? When I consider the possibilities, I'm left with only one conclusion: this product was created to use up bread scraps created by the company's bread production. It's the only excuse I can come up with. These things are little more than bits of lightly fried, dried out bread. I wonder if someone at the company got a big promotion, or at least a pat on the back for coming up with a way to recycle leftovers by making these edible packing peanuts.

They taste like stale bread with a few molecules of flavoring added. Despite what appears to be a liberal dusting of spices of some sort, these have very little flavor. They have the barest, and I'm not exaggerating, hint of something sweet, but no maple flavor that can be detected on the human tongue. They smell like a mixture of maple and nondescript fried food oil. I'm guessing this comes from the fact that they're fried in pork fat. "Maple sugar" is an ingredient, but it's very far down the list as one might expect from something which is barely detectable. About the only good thing I can say is that they're very crunchy as promised on the front of the bag, but I'm guessing any sliver of stale bread you've left lying around would be too if you tossed it in a pan of butter and fried it and rolled it in maple sugar. In fact, I recommend that over eating these. It may be worse than these. It may be better, but it can't possibly be as lame.

On the bright side, each 55 gram bag has 266 calories. Since no one is ever going to eat these, even if they make the mistake of forking over 99 yen (about a dollar) to buy the bag, that's 266 calories that you won't have to worry about burning off on the treadmill.

Smile Oven Big Melon Pan

Melon pan is one of the most superficially misunderstood pastries in Japan. For starters, people assume it's melon flavored. While it may seem illogical to name an item after a component which is often absent, let's consider some other concoctions in English. Are buffalo wings made from the wings of a buffalo? Are nutty bars made by crazy people? They're not even made with real nuts. Are whoopie pies made from or while making whoopie? No, Japan isn't alone in its inconsistency with naming conventions, though at least occasionally melon pan is flavored with melon.


Most of the time, melon pan is what I can only describe as "nothing" flavored. It's really just a big dollop of bread dough covered with crispy cookie dough then baked. At its best, the inside is fluffy bread and the outside is a lightly sweet crispy cookie shell sprinkled lightly with large crystals of sugar. In short, it is pretty much at its best as this Smile Oven melon pan.


All is not beer and skittles on the Smile Oven melon pan front, however. It smells like margarine and the only real flavor it has aside from margarine (not butter, no, no) is sweetness and flour. This is a pure textural sensation. It's a good one though be careful to get a fresh one if you're diving into melon pan territory. Melon pan that's sat around for awhile softens up and a melon pan without a crispy exterior is essentially sweetened white bread.

The biggest problem with the Smile Oven Big Melon Pan is that big doesn't mean better. You're essentially eating margarine-flavored cookie dough wrapped around the equivalent of 4 slices of good quality fresh and fluffy white bread. While you may consume it thinking that it's not that sugary so it can't be that bad for you, consider that it has a whopping 558 calories. Since this isn't the sort of thing that you can save and eat the next day, it's either a case of having to consume a huge processed carb bomb or throw part of it away.

This is a very nice treat, but I ended up eating the shell and tossing most of the bread away. It is good, but not good enough to be a meal substitute and 558 calories is as much as I eat for dinner. If you're walking around Tokyo and want to fuel up for a lot of footwork, then this might not be a bad thing to eat, but if you're snacking at the computer at work, forget it.

Maple Melon Pan

One of the first things you notice when you enter a convenience store in Japan is that there are many different and highly interesting looking baked goods on display. It's a bit like the Hostess displays that you might see in American 7-11's or Sheetz. The main difference is that the Japanese ones are not nearly as sweet and have a much heavier overtone of bread rather than cake. Also, there is rarely a pie of any sort in sight.

After you sample a few of these things, you find that a lot of them are pretty vile and bland white bread-based items. Many of the savory options are little more than hot dog buns with corn, mayonnaise, and small quantities of tuna, eggs, ham, or sausage.

The sweet options sometimes provide a little more promise, but they also tend to be your basic white bread buns or rolls filled with various flavors of whipped cream, jellies or beans. I've got nothing against the fillings, but putting them on a hamburger or hotdog bun is just gross.

Fujipan (the "pan" means bread) makes a variety of bread products in Japan with a heavy emphasis on sandwich bread, "stick" bread, and various snacks. They also market bread snacks based on the Japanese animation character "Anpanman". In various convenience stores, it's not uncommon to run across one or two of their current line of snacks in the baked goods area. At my local shop, two types of Fujipan melon pan were in stock. One was chocolate chip and looked suspiciously like it may actually have been melon- flavored. For the record, a lot of melon pan doesn't taste like melon. It only looks like it.

Since I am not keen on the idea of chocolate flavor mixed with melon, I decided to give the maple flavor a go. A bag with 4 pieces cost 100 yen (about 95 cents USD) so they're fairly cheap. Each piece is more like a soft cookie than a bit of bread. Melon pan is actually made of both bread and a cookie topping. The inside of these cookies is like regular bread dough that has been spread with a maple-flavored fat spread (this is literally what it's called in the ingredients list) and then a cookie dough topping is poured on top of it. It is baked and the bread rises a bit, the filling is largely absorbed into the interior, and the cookie shell is supposed to get a bit hard. The inside is actually hollow and is coated with the residue of the maple fat spread.


The main problem with buying melon pan in these sorts of plastic packages for mass distribution is that the cookie shell gets soft. Half of the pleasure of a melon pan is the crispy shell on top of the bread. You only get that half if you buy your melon pan at an actual bakery. That doesn't mean that the texture of these is not interesting or enjoyable. It just means that it is not an optimal melon pan experience.

When you open the package, the melon pan smells of maple. They are soft, but not spongy. The texture is tender and they get a bit doughy as you chew them. The maple flavor is not overwhelming or overly artificial. I'm pretty satisfied with the flavor balance, but I think many Western folks might like them to be sweeter.

Whether or not you like this is going to hinge heavily on how you feel about the texture. The doughy quality and varied texture of the bread and cookie shell may or may not suit some people. I found these pleasant and think they'd make a nice occasional snack with tea or even a light breakfast with coffee. The only thing to keep in mind is that you don't want to eat too many at once as they are 110 calories apiece and almost certainly contain "bad fats". I'm guessing that the "maple fat spread" is probably made with margarine or some other fat mixture that includes trans fats, though it is impossible to know for sure since there's no explanation on the package.

I might pick these up again some day, but I can't see putting them into any sort of regular rotation. Since they seem to be a seasonal item for autumn, there may not even be a choice in the matter. I think sampling these once or twice a year would be just about right.