Pure Grapefruit Honey and Peach Mango Gummy (product announcement)

Image from Kanro.

One of my friends recently remarked on Facebook that part of the process of making gummi candy involves boiling animal bones. She's a vegetarian, so this was something of concern to her and she wanted to let other friends who may subscribe to her moral code know to avoid such candies. I'm rather torn at this point about whether or not to warn her about marshmallows as well, as they also often contain gelatin derived from animal products.

The rational side of me, which I try to keep firmly in check at all times, would also like to point out that this is actually not food that contributes to the death of animals. No one is killing animals to boil their bones for gelatin products. It's actually finding a use for the parts that are leftover after all of us savage omnivores have consumed the flesh. My guess is that, if we all stopped eating meat, then all gelatin-related products in America would cease to be made from bones and would be made the way they are in Japan, from seaweed. I don't think people would be raising cows to toss their meat in the trash and boil the bones.

The good news is that I can recommend Japanese marshmallows and gummy/gummi candies to her and she can enjoy them without violating her personal ethical code. Since Pure keeps offering up new and interesting flavors, there's no end to the fun you can have sampling their candies. And, they are good gummies. I've tried a lot of them and rarely disliked one. Okay, I really didn't care for the apple and ginger ale one, but the rest were quite nice.

There are actually three new flavors on offer, but I couldn't put them all in the headline. There are the grapefruit and honey and peach mango flavors pictured at the top of the post as well as a yogurt mango flavor shown above this paragraph. It's clear that mango blends are one of the more popular food fads right now. Mango has been in the spotlight for a few years now, and clearly it's popularity has not waned. The yogurt and mango flavor features a split color scheme, supposedly featuring one flavor on each side. It was released in June. The other flavors will be available at the end of the first week of July at convenience stores. 

Mintia Rich Grapefruit

Prolific movie reviewer Roger Ebert once said something to the effect that what he wanted out of a movie was for it to be something that he had not seen before. Given how many movies he digested as a movie reviewer, this would become an increasingly difficult bill to fill. The more active experience you have with something, the harder it becomes for the next experience to impress you.

Note that I say "active" experience and not "experience". Most of us sleepwalk through our sensory lives. We wake up and barely taste the expensive coffee we pick up at the local coffee chain shop. Well, when I say, "we", I mean other people. I make an active effort to attend to the taste, smell, and texture of every food I consume. This is the gift and curse of being a food blogger, as I'm sure Roger Ebert can't watch a movie without attending to various details that most of us pedestrian viewers fail to notice (and therefore can just enjoy our movie without any extraneous nonsense).

In no way am I suggesting that my sense of taste is refined from attending to all that I eat, but rather that it becomes pretty jaded. Things that people who are not food reviewers enjoy will be those which I find lacking because I'm paying perhaps too much attention. One of the reasons that foodies, and I'm not a "foodie", but more of a "junk foodie", seek food further and further afield of their usual scope is that they're bored. They start to think that "different" is "better" because this is valuable to them personally, just as Roger Ebert embraced and endorsed movies which I found unappealing because, for him, "different" was "better".

That's a big intro for a review of the Japanese equivalent of Tic-Tacs, but I'm making a point about all Japanese food and snacks. These are awesome in part because they aren't the little smooth pellets that shook in ones pocket throughout childhood, though they do essentially fill the same niche. The main difference is that Mintia plays into the higher Japanese tolerance for sour things and a mixture of savory and sweet together. Tic-Tacs play closer to sweetness, which suits American palates better.  Mintia tends to reflect basic Japanese cuisine's flavors. Japanese people like things less sweet, more sour, and more bitter because they're used to it. Jaded palates like mine like these things a lot because they're bored.

That being said, I like Mintia because the flavors are usually pretty intense. Every tiny little sugar-free pellet of this "rich grapefruit" flavor is sour without making your mouth pucker and sweet enough for balance. It evens tastes like "real" grapefruit to a fair extent, though without any of the intense bitterness of the real deal. The first ingredient is "grapefruit sugar" followed by a scary cocktail of sweeteners that the likes of me does not mind but those that are sensitive to them may want to avoid. The packaging tells us that there are some sort of grapefruit chips in them as well as some sort of "grapefruit aroma" addition. They do smell good, though I doubt many people other than myself will be sniffing at them. You are, after all, normal rather than a bizarre junk foodie.

My only "problem" with Mintia, and I've never had a bad experience with them, is that I tend to want to eat a whole package at once. At 24 calories per 50 teeny tiny pellets, this isn't much of an expense calorically, and at around 100-120 yen ($1.23-$1.47) per pack, it's not hard on the wallet. It is, however, hard on the tongue as these are closer to the rough texture of a pressed powdered candy than the slick smoothness of a Tic-Tac and tend to be abrasive on your sensitive body parts. I'd definitely buy these again, but I'd have to wait until after my tongue has healed. 

Dydo Peter Rabbit Fruit Tea (Season Blend)

Dydo is one of the first Japanese drink companies that I heard the name of, though I didn't come across it firsthand. My husband, before he was Mr. Orchid64, spent a year in Japan alone as a teacher and sent me a picture of a Dydo vending machine and with our inexperience with Japanese culture at that time, we thought it was a funny-sounding name. Little did we know that there were far more amusing words to be discovered.

I don't see many of their machines in my particular neighborhood, and honestly don't recall seeing many of their drinks on store shelves. This was a little surprise to me when I discovered it in the cold drink case at a 100 yen ($1.20) shop in a neighboring area. The inclusion of grapefruit as a flavor is what drew me in, though I haven't had the best experience with grapefruit drinks in the past.

Peter Rabbit is pretty popular in Japan among the young women set. Kids don't seem so much into that character, but university students and young OLs are known to pick up Peter Rabbit goods at expensive import shops like Sony Plaza. Unsurprisingly, this is promoted as "woman friendly" due to its zero calorie status. They catch your eye with Peter Rabbit, and get you to buy it because it won't make you fat. The character is so popular that about 25% of visitors to the cottage where the character was created are Japanese. I find myself wondering just how much Dydo had to pay the estate of Beatrix Potter to use this character.

A whiff after opening the bottle reveals both tea and citrus fruit, unsurprisingly. The ingredients include grapefruit and the scent really confirms this. The taste is a balanced blend of grapefruit and plain tea. The grapefruit flavor hits the tongue first and the tea after, but both are there clearly and cleanly. The bottle mentions that ginger and honey are also flavor components, and one can detect the faintest hint of honey and ginger. Since this is a zero calorie drink, I don't understand how both "grapefruit sugar" and honey can be ingredients and keep the calories at nothing, but there is a note that says that this is not absolutely zero but less than 5 calories per 100 ml.

This is a pretty nice tea. I can detect complex flavors and everything that is promised on the bottle's label is present. If you are sensitive to artificial sweeteners, you may not want to try this. If not, it's certainly worth a taste. I'd buy it again if I found it and was in the right mood. It's refreshing and has the right amount of pretty much everything to make a tasty fruit tea.

Irubii Grapefruit Vinegar Drink

As I mentioned in the apple vinegar KitKat, many Japanese people believe that drinking vinegar has health benefits. I had never taken the plunge and purchased such a drink before, but I was trolling for a new sugar-free drink at a convenience store (in this case, Family Mart, where this cost 105 yen or about a buck) and came across this carton of grapefruit-vinegar drink.

I'm not actually a fan of real grapefruits, but I do like grapefruit-flavored things. In fact, it's one of two exceptions to my liking the fruit (strawberries, bananas), but disliking the foods flavored with it. For the record, I also like orange-flavored things but dislike oranges. It's a pulpy citrus fruit thing, I'm sure.

Anyway, I usually take a picture of the drink I'm reviewing poured into a glass, and I did take a picture of this. That is because it looks exactly like water. There's really nothing to see. It smells faintly of both grapefruit and vinegar. The vinegar element is very subdued both in scent and taste, but tends to show through when you drink by burning the back of your throat.

The taste is a combination of bitter grapefruit and artificial sweeteners with a whisper of vinegar. It's not awful, but it's not great. I probably would have finished it if it weren't for the fear of third degree vinegar burns from drinking 500 ml. of this. It would be very hard to recommend this both because of that and the heavy taste of chemical sweeteners.

Natsu Mikan

One of my students gave me three of these ugly customers from a tree in her yard. She told me that she had copious amounts of them and that I could have more if I liked them. They were called "summer oranges" or "natsu mikan". Apparently, this type of fruit is very popular for people to plant in the gardens they plant at their residences.

I must say that these smell really great. Like the golden oranges that I reviewed previously, they don't have a distinctive smell, but rather a mixed citrus smell. I could pick out an orange, lemon or grapefruit by their distinctive scents, but I couldn't easily identify one of these. Each orange is about the size of a small grapefruit or a large orange. The color is that of a dirty lemon with a few orange areas.


When I asked my student to describe the taste, she said they were very sour and advised me to cut it in half and either pack the top with sugar or honey and leave it on a counter or in the refrigerator overnight to allow it to absorb the sugar. I mentioned that this sounded a lot like a grapefruit and she said that these were more bitter and sour than grapefruit. While I do like the flavor of grapefruit in jelly sweets or citrus blends, I don't like to eat real grapefruit.

This did not bode well for the likes of me because I don't take well to bitter flavors. Some people can develop a taste for them, and heaven knows I've tried, but my sense of taste in regard to bitter things is extremely acute. In general, most people can't tolerate bitter flavors because a lot of bitter plants are poisonous. Hating them is something which has helped our species survive just as loving sweet things has done so (and made us all a bit curvier).

I did as my student recommended and packed the top of one half with sugar and left it in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, I dug into a section with a spoon. Suffice it to say, I didn't take to it at all. It was okay where the sugar was absolutely packed on, but even the areas which were moderately saturated with sweetness weren't enough to make this palatable. One bite and I had to toss it away.

I think people who eat a morning bit of grapefruit might enjoy this, though even they might be hard-pressed to eat it regularly. My student told me a lot of people like to use these to make things like marmalade, but I'm not a fan of that either. At best, I'm thinking these could be made into some sort of potpourri or scented oil, but I can't recommend buying them or even much more than sampling them if you get one for free.