Asian Grab Bag 8

Item 8
Package Information: Kabaya Jersey Milk soft candy (Japan).
Impression: Resembled a sickly obese lemon drop.  A lemon drop drained of flavor by a vampire who sucks lemon flavors out of things?  Tasted like coconut.  Soft, but not too soft.  Sort of like those coconut macadamia balls Angela sent me.


[What's the Asian Grab Bag?] 

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Direct from Korea.

Though these Green Tea Kit Kats are made in Japan, Paul brought them back from Korea.

As you can read here, I quite like this flavor.  I was happy to receive more.  Thanks, Paul!

It seems that Nestlé will incorporate almost anything edible into a Kit Kat, but they seldom sell in the U.S.  The Japanese may have the most exciting choices.  Have you tried or seen any unusual ones?

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Asian Grab Bag 6

Item 6
Package Information: Meisan (Japan)
Impression: Everything's red.  I dared hope for cherry.  It was kind of fruity and something...more.  Slightly tart.  A devious friend.

[What's the Asian Grab Bag?] 

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Asian Grab Bag 5

Item 5
Package Information: Kanro (Japan).
Impression: The packaging and the candy are both yellow.  I'm expecting lemon flavor.  It's lemony, sure, but with a sort of "nursing home perfume" note underneath.  This fades and becomes mostly vegetal/floral.  Lemon and flowering weeds?

[What's the Asian Grab Bag?] 

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Asian Grab Bag 4

Item 4
Package Information: N/A [i.e. none I can read]
Impression: Buttery, sweet, crumbly, sandy.  Yum!  Surprising white chocolate layer in the middle.

[What's the Asian Grab Bag?]

Asian Grab Bag 3

Item 3
Package Information: Furuta Chocolate (Japan)
Impression: An almost minty soapiness

[What's the Asian Grab Bag?]

Asian Grab Bag 2

Item 2
Package Information: Lotte Original (Japan)
Impression: Milky chocolate mixed with white chocolate in a lattice texture.  Interesting on the tongue.

[What's the Asian Grab Bag?]

Asian Grab Bag 1

Remember this bag of Asian candies and chocolates?

I can not, for the life of me, remember who gave it to me.  Dad? Paul? Martha and Jim?  A thousand apologies, friends and family.

Whatever country these items were purchased in, most of them are Japanese.  Let's peruse, shall we?
 


Item 1
Package Information: Kabaya Matcha Chocolate (Japan)
Impression: Strong green tea flavor and sharp soapiness

I Break for Tea

Saturday morning, I finally got around to trying the green tea Kit Kat Nick brought back from Japan.

I would only complain that the packaging is a tad excessive. Inside each cardboard box, the four Kit Kat sticks are separated into two small plastic-wrapped packs of two sticks each.

A small plus? The slogan seemed less strident in this version than in the American campaign. For this Japanese permutation, they've replaced "Gimme a break...Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar" with "Have a break, have a KitKat."

Enough about the package, though. The snack's the thing. Kit Kat has well-captured the lighter-than-pea-green color of the tea. The candy smells sweet, milky, and almost of almond. The flavor is very similar -- sweet, with subtle green tea and milk notes, but without the bitterness that green tea can sometimes have. The wafer layers add a nice crunch.

I quite liked this -- more than original chocolate Kit Kat, I'd say. In fact, I'd be happy eating some more. Who's going to Japan next?

Shrouded in Mystery

Questions :
What is this?
How old is it?

Clues:
There is only one in Snack Jail.
The wrapper is printed in a foreign alphabet (is this Japanese?)
It is very hard.
It tastes like spicy soda.
It gets chewier and juicier in the mouth, but remains pretty hard (I think this may be a clue to how old it is).
It is a light tan or beige that fades to white as it is chewed.

Chips and Sticks:

In which I dither around for a paragraph or so before finally getting to the point.

Nick's trip to Japan sounds like it was a nice time. Better than nice. My favorite part is when, after it was over, he came back to NYC with a little Japan in his luggage. Some of Japan is edible, you know, and of this category Nick selected some comestibles as souvenirs. And of these edible souvenirs selected, a good number of bites were shared with me. And this was nice of him. Really, really nice!




Corn Soup Pringles (that may not be the correct translation, as I've forgotten exactly what Jeremy said the Japanese reads) taste like Pringles coated with chicken Ramen Noodle Soup flavor powder. This pleases me. They're getting a little stale because I waited just too long to finish eating the small cannister's portion, but don't hold that against them. I didn't.




Pretz Asparagus don't visually resemble asparagus in many ways. They are long and thin, and have little brown hatch marks painted or burnt on one side (which are probably supposed to resemble the tips that grow on the asparagus stalk), but that's about it. Their flavor, however, and especially their scent are reminiscent of that vegetable. There's a certain bright greenness about them in the mouth. They're actually more asparagus-ish, as it were, than they are pretzel-y. I like them best eaten two at a time.

In conclusion: I am eating Japanese snacks and everything is nice.

From Japan, via Jersey, via Jeremy

These Meiji Horn Chocolates were each other's opposites. In the gold wrapper, there was a snack made of chocolate biscuit on the outside and a sort of white chocolate inside. The red wrapper contained a blond biscuit with milk chocolate filling. Both had their two ends dipped in chocolate. I found the crunch-to-filling ratio quite satisfactory and the biscuit had a shortbread flavor. I think the red-wrappered version was my favorite, but they were both good.

My Milky candies were cute but didn't smell like much of anything. Again, I had a red wrapper and a yellowish wrapper (how thematic of you, Jeremy!). The candies were a litte hard, but chewy, with no discernable flavor. At the center of the red-packaged one was a harder button of candy that looked like it was made of the same ingredients but was much more difficult to chew. It might be my imagination, but the yellow-wrapper Milky seemed a little milkier. It was definitely easier to chew through once it softened up on the tongue.

What's up with these? I guess they're supposed to be caramels. Or toffees?

Poetry Tuesday: Flavor Confusion

Twinkle, twinkle, little chocolates
(seriously, you're so shiny. "Foil" is the brand name here, right?),
How can I tell if you are mocklates
(I mean, come on! Your ingredients are in Japanese.)?
On my counter in a row
(well, more accurately it's a small wooden island on wheels),
Baby-sized, who cannot grow
(if one more person makes that Why Do They Call It Fun-Size; It's Not A Fun Size joke I will lose it),
Crinkle-crinkled in my pockets
(all last week I carried you around wanting to do justice to Jeremy's thoughtfulness),
Poetry Tuesday's hard with chocolates
(pretty hard, even if one is willing to invoke trite nursery rhymes for one's purposes).



Non-Poetic but Stream-Of-Consciousness Flavor Breakdown!
Tirol - chewy caramel and mocha. Top got smushed but design looked like a pinwheel of two crossing, wavy lines.
Chocolate Almond - one big nut = one big nutty crunch, chocolate nice and milky. nut etched on top.
White & Cookie - pinwheel lines in a cross on the top. All black-speckled. Big pieces of cookie throughout. Strong milk vanilla flavor.
Bis Milk Choco - smells darker. biscuity crunch inside. pinwheel on top. Mostly chocolate.
Strawberry Milk? - two-tone: pink top, white bottom layer. Pinwheel. Strange markings on cow. Smells like Strawberry Milkshake Whoppers. Pinky clear gummy hard and chewy center was an unpleasant surprise.

Yes, Ma'am.

Jeremy knows Japanese snacks. He's been to Japan and everything, y'all. Multiple times! For months at a time! I listen when Jeremy says, "try this" about a Japanese treat.

Country Ma'am (divine name, btw) is an individually packaged "chocochip" cookie. The flavor is vanilla.



(That's a standard Post-It Note pad for size comparison). The cookie was pretty sweet and a little soft. I found a layer of chocolate in the middle. It wasn't so much a chocochip as a chocodisc cookie. The flavor was a bit "off," but not at all off-putting. It seemed to taste a smidge processed or preserved, but vanilla came through and the soft cookie conquered any artificiality here.

Here's the scoop on sourcing your authentic Japanese snacks: try Family Market in Astoria. J said he spotted things there he hasn't seen elsewhere since returning to the states. I can't wait to try a Coolish!

The Silent Snackstress

While browsing vintage cookbooks on Ebay (trying to look-but-not-buy), I ran across one from the early 1930s titled, The Silent Hostess. Produced by General Electric, I expect that the "silent" to this book is the silence of G.E. appliances, and that it's not a treatise on why the woman throwing the party should keep quiet, but the title made me wonder what I might serve at a "silence" themed dinner party. I mean that the food would need to be silent, not the guests (or the host/ess). Nothing crunchy or crispy or that needs to be sawed into with knives and forks. Still, you'd want enough variation in flavor and texture that dinner guests don't feel like they're eating an institutional dinner for the infirm. And I'd hope everyone would wear muted colors and soft-soled shoes.

As a silent snack, the marshmallow is a revelation, if not particularly healthy. I like a jumbo Jet-Puffed with a smear of peanut butter on top. But if you're more of a jelly lover than a p.b. fan, why not go with these?



There's jelly in them thar marshmallows. Grape jelly.



I like that they're individually wrapped because it increases portability (and because of this they don't stick together in lumps or go stale like other bags of marshmallows can). They have a pleasant, powdery sweetness that soothes the palate and neither too much nor too little of the jelly filling. The marshmallows used in these treats might even taste better (leaving aside the probably artificial grapeness inside) than the plain, bagged variety available everywhere. I'd buy these unfilled, too, if that were an option, and put them in dark chocolate cocoa.

Want to go wild? PBJ marshmallow (one of these with a little peanut butter on top). Or two held together with peanut butter spread in between. Why not?!

O Taste and See

I'm no Denise Levertov, but I've decided to institute Poetry Tuesdays on Snackreligious. From now on, Tuesdays' posting will be ever-so-poetical. Let's get classy around here!




The Smiling Mouth

[A tribute to Kikori No Kirikabu ("chocolate and cookie snack"), which are Japanese chocolate-covered tree stump cookies featuring a happy lumberjack on the box. In the style of (and with apologies to) Charles d'Orléans.]


The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain
The handes smooth, the axe you hold plain,
Your bootes lit* - what should I further say?
It is my craft, for I am not blasé,
To muse theron in stinting of my pain --
The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain,
So would I eat your, if I could or may,
Crunchy stumps with chocolate I've seen,
Forwhy that snack me is most fain,
And will be to the hour in which I day** --
The smiling mouth and laughing pipe smoke gray,
The chestes strong and long small armes twain.


* lit = little
** day = die


p.s. What is he saying to me here on the inside flap?

Japanese Picnic foods

In Seattle, Eva took us to Uwajimaya (an impressive Asian-and-more grocery/home goods market) in the International District for a pre-camping shopping trip. We also picked up some ready-to-eat items for snacking in the car on the way to (and on board) the ferry.



Inarizushi are fried tofu pouches filled with sushi rice. They are good cold -- moist and sugary, but tangy from the (rice wine?) vinegar -- but I wondered if they might be even better just fried and crispy. Then I discovered that the pouches come pre-made in cans. One merely stuffs and (some recipes say) steams them. So I guess they wouldn't be crispy that way, either.

We also tried onigiri (not pictured), triangles of rice and filling (salmon, eel, etc) with crisp seaweed around the outside. The packaging of the brand we found in the market ingeniously keeps the seaweed dry - even if one of your onigiri gets lost in the cooler and doesn't get eaten until the next day.

Ooh, and there were some kind of delicious shrimp rolls (I've forgotten the name). They were excellent - fresh and crunchy and light.



But...



Less satisfying were the Cheese Rings, which also tasted quite sugary. Though the flavor was "off," the shape was novel and they were eaten anyway. I mean, as long as one is trying new things...

Green Tea Bark

Green Tea Bark, originally uploaded by jennybunny.

In Seattle, Eva offered me a Sequoia Chocolate, which does have cocoa butter in it but not much chocolate flavor. The dominant flavor is green tea, which comes on strong (and I like it!), and there's a background note of fruitiness. My best guess about the name, as most of the information on the package is in Japanese, is that the lines etched into the green tea chcolate (surrounding wafers and more green tea chocolate layers inside) are meant to resemble tree bark.

Hey, whose toes are those?

Feeling fruity

Impressions of the Gummy Choco Apple (by Meiji)
(purchased in Chinatown, NYC, but not from Aji Ichiban)



1. Thanks, Dan. Wait. What are these? Weird. Wait. I want one.
2. Smells kind of like a malted milk ball. Or one of those speckled chocolate easter egg candies. About the size of a raisinette.
3. Yeah. It's gummy all right. But not chew-resistant. But not dissolving right away, either. While the chocolate melts in my mouth I'm chewing some gummy thing.
4. Pretty apple-y inside. Not bad. I'd eat another. The sweet apple flavor lingers.
3. Hey! If I just bite off the top, the "apple" inside this chocolate thing is white, not red as the packaging suggests.
4. Apple juice is on the ingredients list, so I guess it's not all artificial flavoring.
5. Well, now. A serving is 27 pieces. How refreshing. I can afford to share a few. Or eat a few more.
6. I could put pencils in this tube.
7. Are those chickens wearing chocolate hats?
8. Wait. That chicken's blue.
9. Those chickens (?) look pretty happy.
10. I'm pretty happy. Way to go, candy.



p.s. The odd appearance of these gummy choco apples are due to them slightly melting and sticking together in the tube, which rubs some of the surface chocolate's gloss off in round patches.

n.b. Informative and interesting note from Eva on Flickr: "I like the muscat flavor. However, the odd thing is if you look at the ingredients they just list "lacquer" straight up. As in, from the lacquer beetle."