Yuzu Zarame Rice Cracker

One of my students used to come for her lessons after working and it was close to dinner time. This sometimes benefitted me because she would bring some treats with her and share them with me as we talked. I would ask her occasionally if she was hungry during the lesson due to the timing and she would say she was on rare occasions, but often said she sated her hunger with a rice cracker (sembei) and some tea before the lesson.

I've sometimes wondered what food holds the same place in American food culture as sembei does in Japan. Nothing really quite functions as the same placeholder, though I guess cookies come closest. The main difference between a cookie as a snack and a rice cracker is likely about 200-300 calories and the sweetness. In modern times, granola bars may come close to being a similar snack, though they are still sweeter, more caloric, and less satisfying in terms of texture.

The main benefit of sembei as a snack is that it carries a lot of satisfaction in a small, crunchy package. Most commercial crackers in Japan are sold in single, individually wrapped plastic packets if they are large like the one I'm reviewing today or in double packs if they are small like the ginger frosted sembei I bought a warehouse load full of (and still am working my way through). The main down side is that they are high glycemic snacks despite their low calorie profile so they will send your blood sugar on a roller coaster ride. I'm guessing having tea with them may help people in Japan feel full after a couple of sembei despite the glycemic index, or that they simply have less reaction to processed rice than Westerners who aren't eating a pound of rice a day as part of their regular diet.

This particular cracker is made by a company called Komenosato, which specializes in making a variety of old-fashioned rice crackers. They market through Rakuten who say they'll ship worldwide and these crackers are 100 yen each (about a dollar in the U.S. depending on the exchange rate. It's funny that they'll let you buy 12 for 1200 yen or 1 for 100 yen rather than offering a discount for buying a lot, but this is pretty common in Japan.

In terms of flavors, this has a bit of a vinegary flavor upfront and then you get a nice hit of yuzu following by some sweetness from the large grains of sugar on the surface. It definitely has a "fried" flavor and a bit of oil on the outside. This is what the Japanese call "hard" sembei which is not be to confused with "crispy". This is dense and brittle and crunchy. The flavor just adds up the more you eat it and the yuzu flavor becomes more intense, the vingery and baked rice flavors start to fade, and the sweetness starts to accumulate.

I loved this. If I could get a whole box for a decent price, I'd likely buy several. It's mainly the combination of how crunchy it is with the ever-increasing citrus notes of the yuzu and how the sweetness seems to allow it to bloom as you eat it. The only downside is that, by the end of eating such a big cracker, the sweetness gets to be a bit much.

If you're interested in these, you can try to buy them through Rakuten, though I believe you'll need to go through the Japanese interface as I couldn't find them listed on their English language site. You can also, at least for the time being, buy them for $2/cracker on Bokksu's market page, but I'm guessing that won't continue for too terribly long. They'll sell out and that will be that. Much to my surprise, you can buy these on Amazon for $26 for 12 crackers. That would seem the most expedient way to purchase them, though it is pretty expensive. Still, if they're around in the future, I could see myself splurging on a box. The seller, Rice Village Honpo, carries all of the Komenosato crackers so one can sample all of them.

Source: Part of the Bokksu premium summer citrus box

Sanko Seika Snow Inn Chestnut Cream Sembei

It's the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, it's when all of the chestnut sweets start showing up on shelves in Japan... or Japanese markets in my local area. I was thrilled when I saw these chestnut and milk sembei at Niyija market for $2.99. Though I sometimes have issues with the combination of the baked rice flavor of sembei coupled with sweet frosting-style flavorings, this was really too enticing to pass up, even at a somewhat premium price.

The picture on the ront of the bag shows a mont blanc confection as well as a few chestnuts. One has to consider that these are merely there to create visions of such things in your head rather than tell you what the sembei actually tastes like. The truth ended up being that this actually was much closer to mont blanc than chestnuts. No one was more surprised by this than me. As an enormous fan of mont blanc, you'd think it would trhill me. Not quite...

The issue with this was that there was the hint of chestnut, the sweetness, and a hint of what seemed like alcohol. Sometimes, there is brandy in the chestnut paste used in making mont blanc, and I think that flavor was conveyed in the frosting on these rice crackers. This is not a particularly bad thing, but that flavor was stronger than the others (aside from the basic rice cracker flavor itself).

I liked these, though not as much as I'd hoped. I think that they do convey the flavor of chestnut cream, but I'd like the flavor to be somewhat more potent. I'm more than happy to have this bag as a salty sweet, but, if it shows up again next year, I wouldn't buy another bag. It's good as a novelty, but not something that I'd seek again and again - at least not for the standard price.

It's interesting to note that the Sanko Seika "Snow Inn" line is turning into the rice cracker equivalent of weird KitKtas. Besides lemon and mango sembei, they've released this chestnut cream variety as well as a strawberry cream one. Though American fans of Japanese snacks are unlikely to get as excited by sembei as by chocolate-covered wafers, I am intrigued by their flavor diversity and will continue to sample new products as long as they keep making them.

Random Picture #166

The display above is from a sembei shop in Sugamo, aka, the old ladies Harajuku. That means that the former was the shopping mecca for the retired set just as the latter was that for the pink-mohawk and kilt-wearing crowd that was under 21. These rice crackers feature the likenesses of common cartoon characters in Japan. Two are easily recognizable, even by those who are not animation dorks (the pair in the middle, Hello Kitty and Pikachu). Flanking them are the lesser-known characters (in the West) of Anpanman and Doraemon.

It is my feeling that everything is what it is for a reason and that, if you take a moment and think, that you can learn something about people and culture. When I went to an exhibit of Incan art in Tokyo, I noticed the motifs on the artifacts and what they said about the ancient culture. The same can be seen in modern culture, but you have to stop and ponder. This is from Sugamo, and it tells you more than sembei makers with too much time on their hands indulge in copyright infringement. This is the place for grandmas to buy their red underpants, but they're selling rice crackers with designs for children on them at the premium price of 400 yen (about $4.00) a cracker. That means that they are marketing to grandmas so that they'll buy expensive stuff for the grandchildren as much as offering to gird her loins in scarlet for the right price.

Shirakiku Koban Sembei (Cheese)

I'd seen these rice crackers (sembei) hanging around the racks at Daiso Japan for awhile and ignored them because they had a fluorescent pink $1.00 sticker on them. I figured that, in a shop that usually sells things for $1.50, there had to be something wrong with them for the price to be marked down.

However, my desire for cheesy goodness coupled with what I saw as a funny name overrode any apprehension I had. And, yes, I realize how ridiculous it is to have any hesitation about spending a buck on a bag of snack crackers, but I've had far too many unfinished packages in my life from a lack of judiciousness in these situations. As someone who is borderline obsessed with not wasting things (I save broccoli stems and asparagus stalks to make soup because I can't stand to toss them out), I feel bad about just tossing things out. That's probably why there are so few of the "unhappy" and "very unhappy" ratings on this blog as they mean that I decided simply to throw something away. I always try to finish.

At any rate, the name of these reminds me of Japanese police boxes which are called koban. I imagined that these were the snack of choice for men who spent their days giving people directions and stopping people to ask if they'd stolen their bikes. In essence, I liked to imagine that these were to Japanese cops as donuts are to American ones.

However, my banal little fantasy is stopped in its tracks by the fact that the words are the same, but the kanji (Chinese characters) are different. This isn't this koban - 交番 it's that koban - 小判. If you can't read that and it shows up as gibberish for you, it doesn't matter because I'm just going to say that the latter refers to an oval coin used during the feudal Edo period in Japan. Bummer. It was funnier to imagine portly cops with salt-covered fingers talking about the latest results of the Yomiuri Giants while ordering a young compatriot to go chase down a foreigner and make him prove he's not a criminal.

My lazy cop fantasies dashed, I sat down and tried my super cheap sembei and was pleasantly surprised. These crackers are a flavor burst of pleasantly pungent cheesy goodness with a nice dose of what I can only call a meaty (umami) kick. The second bite starts in with some smoked cheese flavor. They are not too much of anything and that allows the flavor depth to come through.

The meaty flavor probably comes courtesy of MSG, but cheese is nowhere to be found in the ingredients list. It does include a handful of chemicals including "artificial flavor" and aspartame. Though they don't taste especially sweet, they do include sugar and glucose syrup in addition to the aforementioned artificial sweetener. All in all, these could put the "junk" in junk food.

Despite their nutritional shortcomings, I've already bought these twice and would buy them again. I love the cheesy flavor with savory undertones as well as the good portion control of the individual packages with two crackers each (25 calories). They're also very economical as a sembei option and the Daiso Japan is one of the easier haunts for me to reach if I'm in the mood for some rice cracker lovin'. While Amazon carries a lot of Shirakaku's Japanese food products, they, unfortunately, do not carry the cheese sembei.