Ginbis Tabekko Animal Biscuits Coconut

When I was growing up and it came time to wrap a gift, I got out the paper, scissors, and wrapping paper and did a very basic wrapping job. One of the cool things about living in another culture is that the possibilities of carrying out even a small activity like wrapping a gift are expanded. Not only did I learn that there were all sorts of paper-saving nifty ways in which to wrap gifts that the Japanese employed and Americans hadn't thought of, but I learned that you didn't even have to use paper. 

Traditional Japanese wrapping cloths, furoshiki, can be used to wrap a gift in such a way as to make the wrapping itself a part of the gift. What is more, it can be reused by the receiver to wrap a future gift if he or she so desires. While it is possible to reuse wrapping paper if you're careful about how you unwrap, it's got nothing on a piece of nicely designed material.

Behold, my bunny folded-furoshiki. 

The awesome thing about furoshiki isn't necessarily the fact that it is ecologically sound and unique, but that you can wrap things in a wide variety of ways. This makes wrapping oddly shaped things easier and more interesting. Recently, I decided to use a furoshiki to wrap a gift. This was mainly because I didn't have a proper box, but also because it seemed like a more stylish option to boot. Among the choices was one in which you could tie it up like a rabbit. Though I'm not particularly good with tying knots, I did manage to pull off a rabbit-like wrapping. Trust me when I say that it's not as easy as it looks, but it's also not as difficult as doing origami.

Why am I talking about furoshiki in a review of Ginbis biscuits? Well, I was thinking about how I could have chosen a wide variety of folding techniques, but the one that appealed to me most was one that resembled an animal. I was also thinking about an episode of Archer in which he's carrying around leftovers in a foil-shaped swan. And just yesterday, I read a review of taiyaki on Serious Eats in which they were saying it was better than imagawayaki because it was shaped liked fish. Things are better when we shape them like animals. 

Perhaps it is a form of playing god (behold, I have forged an animal with cookie dough and my mighty, mighty hands) or simply the sense that we've created a low form of art, but humans have been trying to make animals out of food-stuffs and material-stuffs for many moons. In the middle ages, they used to grind up the meat of one animal and shape it into another animal ("farcing"). 

Ginbis biscuits are the equivalent of animal crackers in the U.S. and, frankly, part of the appeal of such things is that they are shaped like animals. If the makers of Cheez-its had been clever enough to shape their crackers like elephants or bats, they could have taken over the world (since Cheez-its are superior to Goldfish crackers). Their shortsightedness cost them the opportunity to experience world domination. 

Getting back to the matter at hand, I've reviewed the butter version of these cookies before and found them quite enjoyable. Like their butter counterparts, they are thin and a cross between a cracker and a cookie. There is a light sprinkling of sugar on the top and the flavor is very well-balanced with a strong but not overbearing coconut flavor and a light sweetness which is present enough to say "cookie" but not cloying. Because they are so thin, they are pleasantly crispy and make a great companion for tea. The entire 1.8 oz/50 gram box has 260 calories, so don't let the light nature of them fool you into thinking they're low calorie. Portion control is definitely recommended and will take a bit of willpower considering that the impulse to just toss them into your mouth one after another will be high.

The cool thing about these cookies beyond their pleasant taste and texture is the cultural aspects of them. The names of various animals are written on them in English and the back of the box has the English with Japanese translations. I find it fascinating that someone decided that it was useful to teach Japanese kids what a "macaw" is (confession, I'm not sure of what a macaw is). Each animal listed on the box is represented inside as a blobby cracker shape, and some of them are abbreviated in utterly unhelpful ways. For example, there is a listing for "M-Duck" (which is, I'm sure what is written on the cracker). If you read the Japanese, you see that this stands for "Mandarin Duck". Okay, do kids need to know what a mandarin duck is in two languages?

The funny thing is that I actually learned something by reading the back of the box. One of the animals listed is "peafowl", which apparently is the proper way to refer to peacocks and peahens as a type of bird. So, beyond enjoying these light, crispy cookies, you can educate yourself about names of animals that you may not have known about. I bought these at Daiso Japan for $1 (about 100 yen), but they can be picked up at many Asian markets for a similar price or purchased online at places like the Asian grocer. 

Pon Mania (product information)

Image from the Mister Donut Japan site. The commercials feature a chubby man in drag. He might be a sumo wrestler, but I'm too far removed from the sport after so many years to be sure. 

There were many food-related words that I heard in Japan, but I never gave a second thought to what they meant in English. It's like "sushi". We can see what it is, and don't have to necessarily translate it. It merely is a Japaense word for a food that requires no English. Another one of those words was "pon". Until I started to write this post, I never gave a second thought to what "pon" meant. I just knew that certain foods of certain shapes either were called "pon" or contained the word "pon". Unfortunately, because I decided to write about this topic, I had to go off and look into this pressing issue.

What is more unfortunate is the fact that there are several possible translations of "pon". It can be the sound that is made when something is hit, such as a ball hitting a tennis racket. It can refer to a mahjongg term or the old video game "pong" by Atari. It can also refer to Pom juice, since "m" and "n" can sound the same in Japanese (hey, don't take me to task for this if you don't like it - I got this from the Japanese Wikipedia page - go bitch at them). It can refer to a type of punch or cereal. It also, apparently, means "small" in the language of the Ainu, the aboriginal people of Japan.

From top left (clockwise): "Nama" (fresh) ring, golden chocolate, nama chocolate, chocolate crunch

So, after all of this research, what did I learn about the meaning of "pon"? Well, I didn't learn anything conclusive, but logic tells me it refers to small round shaped food or food made up of small round shapes. For 10 years, Mister Donut has been making a "pon de ring", which is a rather chewy ring made up of little round blobs (due to being made with rice flour or mochiko). As part of their anniversary celebration, they're releasing a "nama" (fresh) line and a line of mini "pon". The minis look like regular donuts, but are made with the same chewy batter.

Image from Pizza Hut Japan's web site.

 

I did experience "pon" in other food avenues as well. MOS Burger at one point offered a "cheese pon", which was a super chewy ball of dough with, unsurprisingly, cheese inside. In that vein, Pizza Hut Japan is offering two types of "pon" with rather different flavor profiles. You can see by the little dough blobs flying around the happy fellow's head that they are either stuffed with orange and white stuff or brown stuff. That's cheese filled or chocolate filled. And the common denominator continues to be the chewy texture of these dough blobs. 

So, though the Japanese Wikipedia never told me so, experience and current offerings would seem to indicate that "pon" is chewy baked blobs made with rice flour. That means that the "winning" definition on Wikipedia is the one that refers to the Portuguese "pont de queijo", or cheese bread. This is a riff on another European bread product, much as many Japanese baked goods are.

If you're interested in celebrating the anniversary of the pon donuts at Mister Donut with a background screen, there are some pretty funky ones currently on offer. I can't directly link, but if you go here, and then click on the button that I've circled in red above, you'll be given two choices of picture designs. I recommend you click the golden lion designs on the right, but if you get off on transvestite sumo wrestlers, feel free to click the image on the left. Once you click the general style, some other options will pop up that you can choose from, but you should be able to work it out based on graphics and screen resolution size choices. 

Random Picture #152

Some people look at a hot dog bun and think about what types of meat it might accommodate. Those people lack the expansive imagination of Japanese culinary types. No, they look at such buns and do not limit the scope of their thoughts to such things as meat. They can heap spaghetti or ramen in there for a multi-carb fest, or, they can pipe it full of whipped cream and jam and turn it into a dessert dog. 

One of the things which struck a uniquely Japanese discord with me was the tendency to take regular bread products and put dessert fillings into them. You could find white bread sandwiches in convenience stores, for instance, that came filled with strawberries and whipped cream. These buns are filled with yuzu jam and whipped cream. For those who don't know the delights of yuzu, it's Japanese citron which tastes like a cross between an orange and a grapefruit with perhaps a bit of lemon. Yuzu remains one of the flavors of Japan that I miss, but even a yuzu lover like me would not be compelled to buy a hot dog bun full of this jam with cream. 

H & H Trading Milk Stick Wafers

I saw these "milk stick wafers" on offer many times at local 100 yen shops like Lawson 100 as well as the hybrid market/100 yen shop "My Basket". I generally had bigger fish to fry and turned up my nose like some snack food snob at this pedestrian offering. Actually, the truth wasn't that I was too good for cheap wafers, but rather that I'd been burned far too often when it came to wafers in Japan. Sure, they could deliver a nice crunch, and often they were calcium fortified, but generally there wasn't much going on in the flavor department.

Image from Amazon Japan.

While I hate to be one of "those" Americans who whines about Japanese sweets in comparison to what I could get back home, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to turn to that sort of loathsome behavior in the case of what we commonly call "sugar wafers" here. In Japan, they rarely put enough cream or sugar between them, or the wafers were too thick and tough. There was one type which was bland, but I liked it anyway and that is the vanilla whole grain ones pictured above. Before I realized that Japanese sweets that were "healthy" and not especially sweet were still packing enough carbohydrate calories to increase my pants size, I used to buy these all of the time and polish off a package in no more than four sittings (sometimes in as few as two). These had a nice earthy whole grain taste that I enjoyed, but they were not what one would call a "sugar wafer", despite appearances to the contrary.

The cookies that I picked up an Hankook Korean market may not look like a traditional sugar wafer, but that is what they taste like. They are just a little unusual in their construction. The outside is standard crispy wafer material and the inside is sweet filling. There are two differences, however, between this and other types of wafers. One is that the thicker construction of this tube style wafer makes it less crispy and ever so marginally tougher. I'm guessing this is intentional to stop them from being brittle enough to shatter at the drop of a case of them being loaded onto a truck. They are surprisingly resilient to clumsy treatment.

OK, there are actually 3 differences... they also have a goofy slogan written on them in English. The Japanese above it just says "milk stick wafers" so this is not a translation.

The other difference is that they have "milk" flavor filling. As I've said before, "milk" is actually a flavor in Japan. It either tastes like powdered milk that has been sweetened (that's when it's really bad) or like condensed milk (that's when it's not so bad). These resemble the latter. Every time I buy one of these, I yearn for some flavor depth of some sort. Would it kill them to add some vanilla? Seriously.

All that being said, these are perfectly serviceable sugar wafers. The main good point is the excellent portion control. When I have a proper bag of sugar wafers, I want to eat a lot of them, but two fingers (53 calories) are in one foil packet so you are discouraged from eating more than one serving. They are sweet enough without being too sweet, and the wafer design makes them far less crumbly than the plank-style ones (which tend to flake off everywhere).

All of that being said, and even given that they only cost $1.29 (119 yen), I wouldn't buy these again. For 99 cents, I can pick up a package of European sugar wafers at a discount store that will have more volume, less wasteful packaging and a better flavor (like hazelnut). It's not that these are bad. It's more that they aren't especially good.

Sina Orange Ginger Chews

Despite their attempts to undo my dental work, I was very pleased with the Sina Ginger Chews that I reviewed last December. They were cheap, had a good strong ginger flavor, and were easy to find at several Asian markets. When I saw this orange variety at a tiny little Asian market on Castro Street in Mountain View, I jumped at the chance. Well, I didn't literally "jump" because the shopkeeper was already eyeballing me as I went around looking for Japanese stuff, but I did give her my dollar and happily exit the store with the 2-oz (56 g.) box in hand. 

Saying "damn the fillings" and risking death by choking by sampling one of these in the car without water to wash it down, I disengaged one from its foil prison and put it in my mouth. These things are so sticky that I think even Teflon packaging wouldn't stop the chews from adhering to them. The orange ones were not different than the ginger ones in terms of their potential to lodge in a cranny of your teeth and suck out the amalgam or stick to the back of your esophagus, and they also look like a severed cats tongue on a plate when removed from their attractive individual wrappers.

The orange hits at the beginning in a flavor that, sadly, reminds me of stale juice. The ginger comes up the rear and overtakes the citrus fruit until it totally overwhelms and produces a pleasant gingery heat throughout your mouth. Ahhhh, that's better. I still love that ginger kick, but I'm not sure that the orange is bringing much of value to the mix. It may add a little sweetness, or a little citrus balance, but it just didn't add to the overall appeal of the candy for me. 

One of my favorite indulgent drinks is to take orange juice and mix it with ginger ale. I was hoping for the favorable aspects of that combination to come through in this, but it just didn't do much for me. This is absolutely not bad and I'd surely buy another box if it was this or nothing. However, I'd prefer the unadulterated original ginger chew to the orange one. If the orange isn't doing much, then I see no point in bothering to have it there.