Lay's India's Magic Masala Potato Crisps

My husband and I found these chips at an Indian market. I wasn't there for potato chips. In fact, I was there to buy loose leaf tea because it is one of the few places at which I can acquire Brooke Bond tea in the United States. In Japan, it was the only brand of tea bags that I liked and remains, in my less than sophisticated senses, the best mass market tea available. It's not Teavana level, mind you, but it also costs a lot less and has a nice robust flavor and floral aroma.

While perusing the shop and pondering whether I should pay $4 for the regular red box Brooke Bond or $4.49 for the "Taj Mahal" variety, we stumbled across these chips. I forked over the extra 49 cents, but I'm not sure the Taj Mahal is better than the red box. As for the chips, at a mere 99 cents per bag and with such an exotic-sounding flavor name, we could hardly pass it up.

The flavor of these is pretty amazing in its complexity. It hits you with cumin immediately followed by some chili flavors and onion, and then some sweetness. There are at least 3 layers of depth involved and the list of spices is long and explains how this is accomplished: spices (weird that this is listed then a long list of specific spices is given), chili powder, onion powder, dry mango powder, coriander, ginger, garlic, black pepper, turmeric, cumin, salt, black salt, sugar, tomato, citric acid, and tartaric acid.

This potent and complex mix also carries a strong bit of heat at the very end. If you're sensitive to hot things, this may be a little overwhelming, especially the cumulative heat that comes from it. My husband purchased these, but I'm wondering now if he will be able to bear the level of fire they offer. It's not that they're so hot. I can easily manage them, but I'm able to tolerate a lot more heat in my food than he is.

These are available on Amazon for a much higher price than I paid for them. Each bag is 2 servings at 2 oz./57 grams. For the 99 cents I paid (about 100 yen), they're well worth it for the novelty and complexity, but for $2.99 at Amazon, it's quite an indulgence, especially if you have to pay shipping.

To me, this is what flavored chips ought to bring to the table, though I do wonder if the flavor may be overbearing for some. One thing I used to think was that flavor-blasted snacks were mainly geared toward the American market, but I believe these are made for India or England. They are definitely made in India, and since I found them at an Indian market, I have to presume that they are something folks from that country might favor.

I don't buy or eat lots of potato chips, but I'd certainly entertain buying a bag of these again and if you like Indian spices and hot food, they're well worth a sampling.

Indofood CBP Chiki Snack Balls

Have you ever thought about the shapes of the food you eat? I thought of it while pondering these round salted snacks. I've noticed that there are fewer balls than sticks. This makes sense considering that "sticks" can be made merely by cutting up a larger mass. Balls have to be formed through some other process like using a mold. In fact, I have no idea how salted snack foods that are round are created, but my fevered imagination makes me think it must involve tiny little snack food fairies with sodium chloride dandruff who roll each morsel by hand and salt them with shakes of their disgusting heads. This is, I'm sure, part of what lead to the demise of the much loved Planter's Cheese balls.

The advantage of balls over puffs is not only that the sphere is a perfect shape in nature and organically appealing to us mammals whereas sticks and doodles remind us of tree branches, but also that they provide more light and airy inner snack for an appealing texture.

These are produced by an affiliated company of Frito Lay in Indonesia. Their web site says that they have chicken, cheese, and chocolate versions and they are produced under the strictest of quality control situations. If that is so, and I'm sure it is, I'm not sure why they smelled like diseased feet smothered in chemicals meant to cure them when I opened the bag. The smell didn't leap out and offend me, but I purposely try to get a sense of a food from the scent before I take a taste. Smelling these made me not want to taste them, but, this is my slave-wage-pay job, after all.

I asked my husband to take a whiff of them as well and he found the smell as vile as I did. As I prepared to place a puff in my mouth, he said that I was very brave. With all of that build-up, one might expect that I just ate something incredibly vile, but the truth is that these were okay. They weren't great, but they were not the least bit offensive.

The balls themselves are exceptionally light and airy. The corn and rice base makes them taste a little like Cap'n Crunch without the sugar or hardness. They are also akin to "Kix" cereal without the crispy texture. The flavor other than the basic cereal one is very, very subdued. I expected to be blasted with some intense chemical powder, but the flavor is incredibly mild. It's has a whisper of salt and chicken boullion flavor.

Clearly, these are designed for kids and I think that has a lot to do with how mild they are. Children have much more sensitive palates than adults and can't tolerate super strong flavors, at least not on the savory end of the scale. I think they can eat sugar straight out of the bag with little difficulty, but they hate vegetables (like onions) for a reason - at least sometimes.

These are okay, but far too bland for me. I got them courtesy of KS Snacks so I can hardly complain about what I paid for them. They are interesting as a one-off experience, but I wouldn't try them again and, if I saw their other snacks at a store, I'd be inclined to give them a miss because they're not that impressive.

I will give my benefactor a bit of a plug here though because they've changed their web site and are offering more snacks, a discount code for 10% off your order (KS 1), and are now listing prices in U.S. currency rather than Indonesia. There are more Japanese items on the front page (being sold in volume) as well as some interesting items like "red tea" and peach Pocky.

Cheetos Cream Stew (product information)

One thing I have learned is that it takes a special set of taste buds to appreciate certain flavor combinations. While people in general have embraced sweet and salty mixes, including things like salty caramel and chocolate, it's a lot harder to take sugar with flavors like onion, garlic, and meat flavorings. Frito-lay Japan obviously thinks that the Japanese have a genetic advantage in this regard as this release talks about the "sweetness of corn and cream" mixed with the flavor of stew. Of course, the last time they mixed sweet and salty in Cheetos was when they created the abysmal Pepsi Cheetos.

These were released on Dec. 2 and will be available for six months. If I run across a bag, I'm unlikely to try them because I am not an enormous fan of more conventional Cheetos and I'm not sure I could give these a fair shake. That being said, if upon closer inspection this appears to be a powder-seasoned salted snack and not the vile chocolate-coating-style seasoning that I experienced in the "cheese fondue" version, I may be tempted to try for the novelty of the experience.

Frito Lay Shuwa Shuwa Cola Corn Snacks (product information)

Picture courtesy of Frito-Lay Japan.

This product was actually brought to my attention by way of The Impulsive Buy, which I'm sure will actually review it. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, even if I was still in Japan and could saunter down to the local 7-11 and pick one up for a reasonable price.

This is supposed to provide a sense of "swooshing" in the mouth - like cola swishing in a glass, I imagine - when you eat it. I'm not sure how a flavor delivered in a sweet and sour Cheeto is supposed to provide a tactile sensation, but that's what it's supposed to accomplish. Frankly, if this has chemicals that can do that, I wouldn't want anything to do with them. It sounds frightening.

There's a Japanese fellow on YouTube who videos himself sampling this snack. You don't have to understand any Japanese to know what he thinks of it. His facial expressions and wracking sobs tell the tale without words as he forces himself to eat them and gives them a final score of "minus 20".

Heinz Tomato Ketchup Corn Snack

 The name of this snack sounds like someone is spelling out the product a little too clearly. Back home, I think these might be called "ketchup puffs", or maybe even "Heinz balls." Okay, maybe the latter wouldn't be acceptable in polite company. In Japan there are often these overly explanatory names of certain things that have a foreign origin. We wouldn't say "tomato ketchup" because we assume all ketchup is made with tomatoes. Similarly, the Japanese call coffee cups "mug cups". A mug is a cup, but they have a different word to differentiate a coffee cup from other types of cups.

Getting to the product at hand, I found this 60 gram (approximately 2 ounces) bag at Okashi no Marche discount snack shop in Koenji. I need to do a bit on that particular shop some time because it is like the deep discount version of a discount snack shop. They have cardboard boxes full of very cut price items and these were a mere 50 yen (60 cents). That makes them about half price. In Tokyo, it's not uncommon for stores to offer discounts as paltry as 3% and exceptionally rare to find a discount this high on anything. I've never seen a place that dealt in soon to expire food with steep price cuts because I think such items would not appeal to Japanese folks who have a scrutinizing eye when it comes to freshness.

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of ketchup. I'm more of a mayo and mustard girl, but I don't detest it. I wouldn't have purchased this if it weren't so cheap. That being said, ketchup has grown on me to a small extent as the years have gone by. There used to be a time when I couldn't abide even a dollop of it in a larger preparation, but I've used it in homemade vegetarian burgers and even in omurice.

It's a good thing that I've found that I can enjoy ketchup to some extent because these are intensely flavored with it. If you like upending the bottle into your waiting mouth or licking it off a spoon, this is the snack for you. It is nicely salted (not too much, not too little) and crispy and just puffy enough without being too airy. The tomato flavor is also very prominent.

I liked these, but I think I wouldn't buy them again as I'm simply not that big a fan of ketchup. I believe they are well-made, but too one-note. The Frito-Lay Japanese condiment-based snacks are so over the top flavor-wise that they are hard to resist even when they're not up my flavor alley. I'll keep trying them, even if I expect to never want them again.

Frito Lay Takoyaki (Octopus Dumpling) Snack

I've mentioned before that I have never tried actual takoyaki (octopus dumpling), though I think this year will finally be the year that I lose my "octopus" virginity. I'm thinking I'll take the plunge and sample the real deal this New Year's if a takoyaki stand shows up at the local shrine on New Year's day. In the meantime, I purchased this bag of Frito Lay takoyaki corn snack as a way of going to 3rd base before I make a run for home plate. If these aren't bad, how terrible can the real deal be?

I have seen this snack in many shops and it can be had for about 100 yen ($1.20) at most supermarkets, snack shops, and drug stores. I haven't seen so many of them at convenience stores, but this isn't a new release so that is no surprise. Each bag is 70 grams (2.5 oz.) and has 351 calories. 

The picture on the front of the bag talks about how these have octopus powder, onion, aosa (which is "sea lettuce") and Otafuku sauce among other flavors. Otafuku sauce appears simply to be the brand name of a type of sauce commonly put on takoyaki and I think it is likely the main flavor component of this snack. When I opened the bag, I wasn't greeted with any particularly noxious odors. In fact, they smelled like any other bag of spicy corn snacks that one might buy without any funky seafood overtones.

Each little ball is a perfectly average and pleasantly crunchy corn puff coated with a variety of seasonings. There's definitely some onion powder and some sort of vinegary flavoring with a hint of soy sauce. The thing that I don't taste much of is any sort of strong seafood taste. This is mainly a savory blending of rich vegetable flavors with deep vinegar and a bit of soy. The salt level is about right to add bite but not to overwhelm.

This was a decent enough snack. It's not the sort of thing that I could see craving or wanting to buy again, but if I had a desire for something salty, I wouldn't turn my nose up at these if someone placed a bowl in front of me. Mainly, I think this is designed for active fans of Otafuku sauce and those who associate that particular flavor with takoyaki. I have to imagine real octopus dumplings taste more like, well, octopus. I'll probably finish the bag very, very slowly since I'm not over the moon about it. I wouldn't recommend it as a casual experimental sampling, but I think fans of takoyaki may find it rather pleasing.

"Extremely Spicy Mania" with Death Sauce

If someone did as that little guy did and really downed a bottle of sauce, I think he really would die.

Recently one of my students and I were discussing curry. In Japan, curry can be ordered with different grades of heat from 1 to 10. She said that she chooses a "3 and I told her that I go for an "8". I've actually had a "10" before, but the heat was so hot that I couldn't really taste the flavor of the curry after awhile. I offer this information to allow for the fact that I'm no chili wuss, though I'm also not the most advanced consumer of high powered chilis.

Nonetheless, when I saw this bag of Frito Lay "Extremely Spicy Mania with Death Sauce", I couldn't turn it down. I discovered it at Family Mart, and I have since lost the receipt, but I think it was about 160 yen ($1.82). I've never had death sauce, but anything that threatens my very existence with its heat draws me as a flame draws a moth. Also, this was a spin-off of the "Mayo Mania" snack I'd had before and there's something about the whole "mania" thing which is hard to pass up. Insanity and snacks just seem like a match made in heaven.

For those who don't know, "Death Sauce" is an American product which is made by a company called "Blair's" (which is ran by a man named Blair, imagine that). I've never had the actual sauce, but how deadly can it really be? Their marketing claims that they make the hottest sauces in the world and are in the Guinness Book of World Records. Ironically, their slogan for their "death sauces" is "feel alive". I was undaunted by their claims, and measured out half of the 60 gram (about 2 oz.) bag for consumption. I put them in a bowl and it left little bits of red oily residue on the dish where the rings touched the ceramic.

These are nice crispy, light corn-based snack rings. They smell a bit funky though. It's hard to pin down the scent, but the ingredients list includes "beef extract" and I believe that was what I was getting. You can also get a hint of the garlic and paprika used in them as well as, of course, the habanero.

The first bite was hot and savory. I could pick up some of the spices and they were pleasantly salty. The heat is quite strong and I drank some water. I ate about half of them, and the cumulative effect of the peppers on my tongue got to reach the point of "too much." It was painful, but generally in a good way. The whole point of super hot foods is to feel the burn and to release some endorphins. That being said, I stopped at about half the portion I had served myself because I knew it was going to get worse and also I couldn't really taste much past that point.

In the end, I didn't have to get something cold and creamy to sooth my tongue, but I wanted to and was glad that I had a frozen banana in the freezer to make into a smoothie. I was doubly glad because my stomach burned. In fact, it burned for about an hour after I ate a half ounce of these despite the fact that I had eaten grapes before these rings and a frozen banana smoothie with ice and low fat milk after them.

I don't know if these can actually burn your stomach with their ferocity, but I wasn't keen on the long-term nature of that warm feeling in my gut. Since people have been known to drink the sauce straight (for reasons I'm not sure of but it may go back to the whole "insanity" and snacks thing I mentioned earlier), I'm hoping that no real damage can be done. I'm also... concerned... about how this is all going to feel when it makes the journey through my digestive system. I've eaten Tyrant Habanero snacks before (in greater quantities) and experienced less stomach burn and residual warmth.

I liked these in terms of the texture, taste and the heat, and I have to credit them with giving me an incentive to exercise strict portion control. The whole bag is 310 calories and I think I could only manage a quarter at once, and even then that felt like more than necessary. These are tasty and should make fans of very hot foods quite happy. I think these types of things are the ultimate "otsumami" (food to be consumed with alcohol) in Japan because anyone who eats them will likely want to guzzle down beverages to deal with the fire in their mouth and stomach.

Though I'm not absolutely certain that I'd buy these again, I really did like them and I think I'll eat this bag very slowly - maybe two or three rings at a time and always with food. Mainly, my reservations only relate to the stomach burn. Note that there is a warning about the possible discomfort you can experience from eating too many at once and a recommendation not too many at the bottom of the bag so approach them with caution. This was made with Blair's "Sudden Death" sauce which seems to be the hottest in their index. After eating these, I concluded that I'm probably a chili wuss after all, but I'm still going to (at least) finish the bag, and I probably would buy more in the future if they remain on the market.

Yuzukoshō Gourmet Cheetos

Cross-cultural differences are usually recognized mainly when they are broad and obvious like the fact that Japanese people bow and Americans shake hands. One of the reasons I continue to be interested in Japan (or other cultures for that matter) is that I want to know and understand the subtle differences. I think that the aggregate of those types of differences paints a more detailed and vivid portrait of a different culture than the most obvious differences.

What does this have to do with something as pedestrian as Cheetos? Well, this bag of Yuzukoshō (a fermented spicy seasoning made with Japanese citrus fruit like a lemon and chili peppers) salted corn snack has as a selling point that it contains 100% dark meat pork extract. It fascinates me that this point is so appealing that it's put on the front of the bag in fairly prominent letters. The Japanese clearly value the origin of their pork extracts more than I do.


My husband quickly grabbed these Cheetos, a 70 gram (2.5 oz.) bag, at our local 99 yen store while snapping up other interesting-looking goodies. He didn't pay much attention to what it said. The skewers of grilled meat pictured on the package suckered him in. If he had known it was yuzu and chili, he wouldn't have bought it.

When you open the bag, the strongest scent is of the chili, but also black pepper. The Cheetos look to be liberally sprinkled with it. The flavor is very intense in four layers. There is the sourness of the yuzu, the heat of the pepper and chili, salt, and also sugar. The mix of sweet and salty with sour is actually quite nice, but the sweetness component (which is actually the sweetener Stevia) is amped up a bit too high for my tastes. In general, I like very strong flavors, but this tastes a bit too close to a spice bomb for me. My husband also felt the flavor was too "sharp". These would probably be better if the flavors were at about 70% of their current intensity.

In the end, we'll eat the whole bag (386 calories) because they're not bad at all. I'm guessing they'd be better with a drink of some sort close and hand or as an accompaniment to food so that you could give your taste buds a rest.

German Potato Gourmet Doritos

I can't speak for everywhere else in the world, but German potatoes are not a standard dish in any eating establishment I ever visited in America. They are, however, a standard offering in bars and restaurants where there is an emphasis on alcohol. Early in my stay in Japan, when I was working at Nova conversation school and socializing once a week or more with coworkers, we used to go to bars or restaurants which offered such fare.

During one of these social gatherings, German potatoes were the center of one of my more awkward and memorable social situations in Japan. My husband had ordered a small plate of "German potato", not knowing at the time what it was, but deciding to brave it even with a pretty steep price tag (about $3 for a very small side dish). He was given a very small, sizzling plate of nicely browned, greasy potatoes with bits of onion and bacon. He loved it and a female coworker of mine wanted a bite to see if she'd like it enough to get it, too. As it turned out, she liked it so much that she kept eating his ever diminishing portion. After she'd taken three bites (closing in on eating half), he commented that he wasn't going to have enough if she kept it up. She said that she felt as if her hand had just been slapped away and she was quite flummoxed because of it.

At the time, I wanted to crawl under the table because I wished my husband had just ordered another plate of potatoes rather than say something to her. In retrospect though, I think my friend should have just ordered her own potatoes. I also think that it was inappropriate of her to make it seem as though my husband were responsible for the tension that resulted from her eating his food rather than her taking responsibility for her bad manners.


I think German potatoes are offered in places with a lot of beer drinking because they are greasy and fatty and help people not get as drunk (or hungover). With the memory of that tasty bar food in mind, my husband picked up a bag of these gourmet Doritos at a local 99 yen shop and I was along for the ride. Of course, he only associates German potatoes with fatty goodness, not social embarrassment since he long ago forgot about the aforementioned incident.

These Doritos come in an 80 gram (2.8 oz.) bag and, if you can eat nearly 3 oz. of chips at one go, you'll consume nearly 400 calories. Though they don't contain any actual potato, as they are still corn chips, they are flavored with potato, bacon, and onion. The smell is distinctly ham-like. The amazing thing about these is that they really do taste very much like the German potatoes you get in bars in Japan. They even have that buttery, nicely browned potato flavor along with pork and onion. The only difference is the crispy texture and the corn chip flavor which hits you as you finish the chip.

This is a very good Dorito, but it is still a Dorito. If you like German potatoes, this should hit the spot nicely. My husband really liked these and I thought they were good as well, though I probably won't buy them again because of the unpleasant memories they dredge up of social awkwardness. ;-)

(Seriously, I'd buy them again if I were in the mood.)

Yahoo! Majimori Corn Snack Tonkotsu Rich Miso

This is the second of two Majimori corn snacks based on ramen flavors. The first variety was "brown oil, garlic, and pork bone" flavor and I was rather fond of it. As I mentioned in the previous review, this product is a collaboration between several companies - Maruchan, Yahoo Japan, Frito-Lay and Tokyo Web Week 1.

Tonkotsu is the Japanese word for pork bone so both of the Majimori flavors are made with pork flavor. Since ramen is often flavored with pork, this is no surprise. By the way, ramen in Japan is sometimes the same sort of dried out noodles with salty flavor packets that is so common in Western countries, but the really good stuff is sold at food stands or restaurants and it's rather far removed from the cheap stuff college students use to fortify them when they've spent too much on beer and are looking at providing themselves with sustenance on a few dollars they found crammed under their roommates dirty socks.


The bar that is set for matching good ramen is significantly higher than the bar with living up to really cheap, dehydrated ramen. Since the first variety that I tried lived up to the complexity of the flavor, I fully expected this one to as well and I wasn't disappointed. Once again, all of the elements of well made ramen were there.

If you open the bag and give it a good sniff, you can smell cabbage, corn and a bit of a spicy, oil smell which is reminiscent of sesame oil. The interesting thing about the corn aroma and taste is that it is not the processed corn snack variety. It's the actual taste and smell of corn kernels. The cabbage flavor is also very present as is the taste of oily pork. The finish on them is one of spicy heat.

Unlike the brown oil pork and garlic flavor, the first bite has complex and rich flavors. You don't need to keep eating for the flavor to build its way up. I liked this, but the thing about both of the Majimori flavors is that they so successfully carry the oily flavor of ramen broth and this makes it less appealing for me personally. I imagine this is great for lovers of oil infused with rich, dense flavors, but it's just not my thing. I'd certainly give these another try if I was in the mood. Given my particular tastes though, that mood is unlikely to come around very often.

Mayo Mania Corn Snacks

When you think of big mayonnaise eaters, my guess is that the majority of people are not thinking of all the trim Japanese people walking around in their smart business clothes or even the tiny geisha in their kimono. I'm guessing the only Japanese people most Western folks envision scarfing down the mayonnaise are sumo wrestlers. The truth is so much more disturbing than most people realize.

The Japanese love mayonnaise. There is even a fan club called "We Love Mayo!" If you look at the bag pictured above, you see a graphic of someone pouring a tube of mayo right into his mouth. On the back of the bag (not pictured), there's another graphic of a man squirting two tubes of mayo into his mouth. This actually is an attractive notion to some Japanese people. Personally, I would find having to eat mayo straight from the bottle/tube a form of torture. That's not to say that I don't like mayo. I do like to put a bit of light mayonnaise on some types of sandwiches, but my appreciation ends there. It's a condiment, not a meal and I'd no sooner pour it straight into my mouth than I'd drink from a ketchup bottle.

In the interest of snack food testing, and because I can't resist some weird ass foods, I bought this Mayo Mania corn snack at a Family Mart convenience store. It cost about 120 yen ($1.22) for 60 grams (2.1 oz.). The whole bag is 319 calories. This is the regular mayo flavor, but there is also a version with a blue bag which is "tuna mayo" that was not in stock.


The rings look a lot like Funyuns. They also have a similar light crispy texture to those same processed onion rings. Since both Mayo Mania and Funyuns are made by Frito Lay, this is no surprise. Opening the bag is a bit like huffing a jar or mayonnaise, the smell hits you pretty clearly though the smell isn't nearly as potent as the taste. These taste like eating a spoon full of mayonnaise with a spicy chaser at the end. The front of the bag proudly boasts that the flavor has been doubled in intensity, and boy howdy, do I believe it.

I ate these along with a chicken sandwich (which I intentionally left the mayonnaise off of) in order to dilute the experience and it was still pretty overwhelming. These are good. The saltiness, crunch, and added spicy heat are nice, but the mayo flavor is so strong that I couldn't see trying them again nor wold I recommend them to any but the most ardent lovers of mayonnaise.

Yahoo! Japan Majimori Corn Snack Brown Oil Pork & Garlic

Yahoo is regarded as second to Google when it comes to home pages and search engines among most folks in the West. In Japan, Yahoo is the bee's knees to Google's bee's, uh, little toes. This is why Yahoo gets its own brand of corn snack. Well, not exactly its own. This is a collaborative effort between Maruchan, maker of cup-a-ramen type products, Yahoo Japan, Frito-Lay, and Tokyo Web 1 Week (a magazine). They all came together to create some sort of promotion which would draw attention to all of them.


These were released on February 16 and I picked mine up at a convenience store for 99 yen ($1.06). The bag contains 55 grams (about 2 oz.) of corn snacks which will set you back 295 calories if you snarf it all down. The web site talks about how these are meant to resemble ramen flavored with "thick brown oil", pork bone, ginger, and garlic. There is another ramen flavored corn snack which has been released at the same time as this one, but it wasn't on sale locally. The other one is spicy miso and tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet).

When I opened the bag and gave it a sniff, I really couldn't identify the scent. It's such a melange of flavors that it defies easy identification. It doesn't smell particularly bad, nor particularly good. When I first started eating them, I had a strong sense of a lot of foreplay with no finish. There seemed to be an immense and complex hit of flavor with only a bit of an oily follow-up. As I ate more and more of them, the savory flavors separated out into pork, green onion, ginger, and garlic. Cumulatively, the garlic seems to become more and more present as the flavor builds up, but that pork bone flavor is strongly there as well.

When I first started eating these, I wasn't very impressed, by about the 10th puff, I was hooked. They are so savory and complex in flavor and get better and better as time goes by. From a flavor viewpoint, this is good. From the viewpoint of eating more of something which really isn't good for you, it's rather bad. Still, this is a limited edition product which I'm sure won't be around forever and worth a one time indulgence. I'd definitely recommend trying them.

Cheetos Cheese Fondue

When I saw the illustration on the front of this package, I thought there was no way the corn puffs inside were going to actually be coated in cheese. I was wrong. Each puff is coated in something, though I don't think it is any substance akin to cheese fondue.


If you imagine the texture of chocolate coating, you come closer to what the cheese gunk on these Cheetos resembles. It's slightly tacky when held in the fingers. You don't have to worry about getting any flavor powder on your hands, but you may end up with weird light yellow goop smeared on your fingers if you hold one of these long enough.

These smell rather funky, like some sort of odd type of cheese that you figure rich people eat because it's expensive, but regular people avoid because it doesn't taste very good. The feel of the coating on your tongue is bizarrely cool. They taste strange though there is certainly a cheesy flavor in there somewhere. I'm not sure if the whey flavor is too strong or if there is just way too much sugar (and not nearly enough salt) in them, but something is definitely wrong with the taste balance.

A 35 gram (1.2 oz.) bag of these costs about 140 yen (about $1.35) so they're pretty expensive. There is also 183 calories in the package which makes them fattening even for a salted snack food. Everything about these is just wrong and I wouldn't buy them again.

Garlic Doritos

One thing you notice if you live in Japan long enough is that food manufacturers are big fans of short-term variations on their core products. In the U.S., you find markets stocking a huge variety all the time, though they also introduce limited edition flavors regularly. In Tokyo, with such limited shelf space in most stores, you get more of what I'd call "serial variety". That means that you should stock up on some obscure flavor if you like it because it probably won't come around again for another year once it's off the shelves.

I've also been told by Japanese people that they like sampling a wide variety of flavors and, in fact, I've been told that the U.S. has little variety compared to Japan. Given that my CH's trip home last year included pictures of shelves chock-a-block with 12 different flavors of coffee creamer, the observation that the U.S. has little variety comes as a surprise to me. I think that what the Japanese people mean is that the U.S. doesn't have the flavor "revolving door" that Japan appears to have. The thing about these variations, and I have to give the marketing folks credit for this, is that they encourage you to sample. It's not only the novelty, but also the limited availability.

I'm not a big chip eater, but I decided to pick up these garlic Doritos at the 99 yen shop when I saw about fifty bags of them on display. I love garlic and I do like tortilla chips. However, my taste in tortilla chips is definitely more toward the baked variety. We buy cases of "Guiltless Gourmet" mucho nacho flavor chips from the Foreign Buyer's Club to have when the desire for something salty hits. I also pack a small handful of them with my CH's lunch most days. In general, Doritos are too greasy for me.


The garlic Doritos smelled like beef consomme when I opened the bag. The smell of garlic isn't all that strong. The taste, however, was pretty intense. When my CH tried them, he thought there was a hint of pepper in them but there is no pepper listed in the ingredients. I think that the garlic is so intense that it tastes a bit hot. If you've ever been foolish enough to bite down on a raw garlic clove, you know that it can taste rather hot depending on the age and type of garlic.

The chips definitely had a strong overtone of consomme flavor (like chicken or beef bullion cubes) and what are called "barbecue" chips in Japan. In the U.S., "barbecue" usually means a sort of spicy, tomato or ketchup flavored chip. In Japan, it is supposed to be a chip which tastes similar to barbecued or grilled meat.

While these chips aren't bad, they also aren't great. If you want something salty and they're around, they're serviceable. However, they aren't the sort of thing I'd find myself craving or buying again.