Nanao Green Tea Papiro Cookies

When I hear "Nanao", I think "monitors", not confections. Apparently, my knowledge is rather outdated, however, because that company is now called Eizo, no doubt because they were tired of people walking into their stores and expecting sweet, sweet candy and finding that gnawing on the edges of a display did nothing but damage their dental work. Actually, I'm sure that the display maker is much better known than Nanao Confectionary, which is a relatively small business in Kitakyushu with a mere 280 employees as compared to mighty Eizo's stable of 1637. When you're me, you learn these types of things. I do this not because such things are important, but just because the information is out there... like a digital Mt. Everest only with much less death and excitement.

I know Nanao Confectionary best from the "Golusia" gaufrette European-style cookies and their even tastier Japanese-style ginger cookies. I reviewed both of these products favorably, and probably underestimated the appeal of the latter in my review. With a good track record, I was looking forward to sampling these papiro cookies. Incidentally, "papiro" is French for "papyrus" and refers to the fact that these are thin sheets of dough wrapped around themselves like a paper scroll. Papyrus scrolls, however, are not filled with tasty cream, just things like Egyptian hieroglyphs and family histories that Dan Brown can use to write novels.

I've had similar ones in Japan before, so I had some idea what to expect. My previous experiences taught me that these would be a crispy outer shell with supremely light, fatty filling. In fact, they are a rolled version of the gaufrette cookies and are likely made with exactly the same recipe. The outer shell is rather hard and quite brittle. It's mainly there for texture and as a delivery mechanism for the light as a cloud cream filling and it's modest green tea notes with faint sweetness. This is one of those very subtle Japanese sweets that is designed more for texture than taste. Your tongue has to almost strain to detect the flavors, but your mouth is so happy for the feeling that it's indifferent to the effort. At about 47 calories per small cookie (each is about the size of my pinkie finger, only a bit fatter), they won't break the calorie bank as long as you have some self-control.

I liked these a fair bit and I'd buy them again, but I have to confess that I have a lot of nostalgia associated with this style of snack and that they aren't especially sweet or strong-tasting. I found them and a Japanese market for about $2.20 (220 yen) and probably overpaid for them at that price. I think this is the sort of thing that Daiso Japan carries for $1.50 when they carry them. In fact, they often carry the vanilla papiro version of this so I may see if I can pick it up and try it out, too. Unfortunately, you can't order these online from Daiso Japan as their snack selection is very limited for web shoppers (it's much better in the actual stores).

If you like something subtle with some satisfying textural contrasts, then you may enjoy these. I'm not sure, however, that what is to my tastes in this case would necessarily suit my readers.

Shouga (Ginger) Sembei

Modern life is fraught with choice. In fact, I've read that psychologists have done studies in which too much choice causes stress and people need to tune out a lot of the options in modern stores because it is overwhelming to them. In Japan, there were often items in the snack sections that my eyes pretty much slid past. I saw them, but there were so many choices and I knew that I couldn't try them all so some were left behind. As the time of my planned departure drew near, I started noticing all of the things, especially in the traditional/granny's snacks areas, that I had never gotten around to reviewing. I regretted that I couldn't get to them all, but I also know that there are vast swathes of food that I never ate back home either.

Next time you're in a market, take a close look at what you reject out of hand everyday because it falls outside of your regular consumption. You may be surprised at how many items you've never put in your shopping basket because they didn't light your fire compared to other items of a similar nature. We tend to form chains of preferences rather than to step far beyond our circle of likes. Part of what people who review food do for you is tell you about products such that you might feel compelled to take notice and buy outside the box, or confirm that you probably would like to make sure that a certain item never gets into your box.

I saw a lot of these little crackers/cookies. They look like the mutant offspring of a fortune cookie and a frosted flake. Part of what made me dismiss them in Japan was that I had been mislead by streaky white stuff on sembei before which looked sweet, but was just coatings of weirdness. However, during my feeding frenzy at the Daiso Japan, I dived in and bought this 90-gram (3.2 oz.) bag for $1.50 (118 yen). I took the presence of such things for granted, but somehow was not punished for my lack of regard.

I've mentioned before that the Japanese call a wide variety of rice-based crispy snacks "sembei". While western folks who are somewhat familiar think of them as savory rice crackers, largely flavored with soy sauce or sesame, there are a number of sweet versions and this is one of them. They're more like a cookie than a cracker, except that they lack the textural elements of a cookie.

Each little bit of sembei is coated with a hard frosting and they smell very strange, almost like some odd chemical is at work. The flavor is very strongly infused with ginger and quite sweet. This is no surprise as the ingredients include sugar, glucose, fructose, and dextrin. All those sweeteners are held together with a little wheat flour, eggs, and margarine and flavored with ginger. Health food, this is certainly not.

In terms of the sugar, this is probably going to be far too much for people who aren't fans of especially sweet food. However, if you like candied ginger, this is like a crispy version of it. Fortunately for me, I am a fan of said version of ginger, but there are limits to how much one can eat at once before the sweetness and intense ginger start to overwhelm. You can look at that as built-in portion control, or as an impediment to finishing the bag before it goes stale. The latter did occur in my case, but I wasn't eating small amounts daily so it would be possible to have a few a day and still have the last one be crispy.

I loved these, but I recognize that they may be far too strong and sweet for a lot of people. I can't rate it for others, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy this again. That being said, I wouldn't want to have it around all of the time or eat it day in and day out. There's really only so much super sweet ginger that I need in my life, but this has an excellent flavor and great crispy texture. Candied ginger fans should definitely seek it out. Others will want to give it a pass.

These are made by a company called Nanao, but it's my guess that any ginger sembei that resembles this will be much the same. It's one of those companies which is small and has little presence in the market in terms of name recognition. You can buy this particular brand online at Pacific Mercantile Company, or the Marukai e-store, though I got mine at the Daiso Japan shop in Mountain View, CA.

Nanao Vanilla Golusia Gaufrette

I've never been to Europe and my first experience with European food is largely through living in Japan. As someone who grew up poor in the deep boonies of western Pennsylvania, I really didn't find much in the way of sophisticated imports, or unsophisticated ones, for that matter. American-made Cadbury chocolate was about as close to "European" as I ever got.

Gaufrette, which is a thin, lightly sweet cookie which is similar to a crispy waffle, is a French creation that is very popular in Japan. While a dictionary of cuisine says they are usually "fan-shaped", they're usually round here and sold most often as souvenirs in stations and department store basements (where food is usually sold). I used to be given these on a semi-regular basis when I worked in a Japanese office and when I saw this box of them on sale at the local 100-yen shop, it was my sense of nostalgia that motivated me to toss them in my basket.

 There's nothing like a cookie to make your life comfortable.

The cool thing about these Japanese-style gaufrette cookies is that there is almost no difference between the more expensive ones that you get in department stores and these cheap versions. The main reason for this is that the cream is very thin in the middle and lends very little to the flavor. Most of the taste comes from the crispy waffle cookie exterior, and it's pretty hard to mess up.

The exterior has a deeply baked waffle flavor. It's like a waffle cone, but less intense in flavor due to the thinness. It is lightly sweet and makes a good accompaniment to tea or coffee. It would also go very well with ice cream. If you want to actually taste the cream, which is very subtle in flavor but richly fatty, you need to slide the cookie apart and place the inside against your tongue. This is what I do, and fortunately the cookies slide apart as if they were stuck together with butter.

These cookies are easy to like, but not so easy to "love". They are mainly appealing for their texture. They are crispy in a way which is very gratifying and also have a pleasant flavor. For 100 yen ($1.24) for a box of 8 cookies slightly smaller than the size of your palm, they're a nice thing to have around for a light tea time treat. They're also only about 45 calories per cookie and that makes them light on the hips. If you're a fan of subtle, crispy cookies that work well with a beverage, I'd say they're worth your shelf space.

Taiko Sembei

When Japanese people explain sembei, they sometimes call it a cracker and at other times a cookie. It turns out that sembei is one of those words like "biscuit" in English. That is, it can apply to more than one type of food. Taiko sembei is not a rice cracker, but a dense cookie.


The reason these are called "taiko" (Japanese drum) sembei is that two cookies are wrapped together in a little shrink-wrapped package. The cookies are meant to resemble the two ends of a drum. I bought a big package with 10 double packets in it for about 200 yen ($2.22). That means that each generously sized cookie is only 10 yen (11 cents) each. That makes these much cheaper than Japanese-made Western-style cookies.

These are made by a company named Nanao Seika. The company started doing business in 1957 by making "crackers" (these cookies are called crackers on their web site). Their main products continue to be hard cookies and crackers, but they also make doughnuts and fruit gelatin snacks (called "jelly" in Japan, but they are essentially what we call gelatin or "Jell-O".) Their line of products is limited, and as far as I know they have no "signature" products which are commonly exported, though I'd be surprised if their peanut sembei or these taiko sembei didn't make their way into Asian supermarkets in other countries.


These cookies are dense, dry and brittle. There are three or four roasted and unsalted peanuts in the center of each cookie. The cookie itself is lightly sweet and tastes of toasted flour, margarine, and mild sweetness. They are incredibly crunchy and have a flavor which is just a bit shy of being burnt.

The only thing which I'm not necessarily happy about is that they're a little dense in calories for a cookie which isn't very sweet. The calorie information states that there are 475 calories for 100 grams, but they don't give the weight of the entire bag. My unreliable kitchen scale places 6 cookies at 100 grams. That makes each cookie about 70-80 calories, and I'm always going to eat two because of the packaging style and the fact that they will most certainly be no good if they are stale.

I really like these, but texture often factors more strongly into my enjoyment of things than taste. These are not very sweet and they lack the flaky nature of most butter cookies. They remind me of what might happen if you flattened some yellow cake batter into as dense a disc as possible and then cooked it to the "dark" toast setting. I'd definitely buy these again, though not incredibly often, but I can't guarantee that others would find them as appealing as I do.

Nico Nico Niccori Jelly

These Japanese "jelly" candies are really just gelatin in disguise. This is something which I sort of forgot when I bought this bag of "jellies", but was quickly reminded of when I sampled them. These are essentially prepared, all weather (as in they require no refrigeration), individually wrapped tubs of gelatin made from kelp instead of animal parts. I must say, looking at it that way either makes these much more attractive (hurray! no animal died in the making of these gelatin treats) or less attractive (yuck! eating seaweed derivatives).

I don't know many people who make their own gelatin desserts in Japan. There are boxes of gelatin as well as plain gelatin available in shops, but the variety and quantity is very limited. Most people buy these individually packaged versions. I guess that the joy of slowly moldering Jell-O in the fridge and it's fake fruity jiggliness hasn't caught on here.

back row: orange, melon, pineapple front row: grape, strawberry

You can get about one-cup-size tubs or ones with tiny amounts of gelatin like the ones I sampled. If I had to guess at the volume in one of the containers in the package I bought, I'd say it's about a tablespoon. The bag I bought lured me in because it was incredibly cheap. It contains 27 itty bitty tubs of gelatin for only about a dollar (98 yen). There are five flavors, grape, orange, melon, strawberry, and pineapple.

The first ingredient in these is grape sugar and puree, fruit sugar and puree from the various fruits represented by the flavors, and kale. The fact that there are a lot of sugars in them is a clue of what is to come. These are very, very sweet. In fact, they're far sweeter than any Jell-O I've ever made from a mix or gelatin I've had back home.

An unmolded orange jelly, with a small deformation from pushing it out of its tub.

When I opened the bag, it smelled like lollipops. Even though the tubs look airtight, they clearly are not or the bag itself wouldn't smell so fruity. Eating these requires you to tear back the top and then push the bottom to "pop" the gelatin out. The size, shape, and mechanics make it clear that you're meant to pop them directly into your mouth. No utensils, no mess, no fuss, but a lot of trash for a tiny bit of gelatin.

I was going to review each flavor individually, but the truth is that I can sum up the flavor of each of them in the same manner: super sweet and intense. The fruit flavors are real, but concentrated. It's a lot like eating a spoonful of cheap, off-brand jelly (yeah, the type you spread on toast) on the flavor front and slightly soft gelatin on the texture front.

It wouldn't be bad to toss these in the refrigerator (Nanao Seika recommends you eat them cold) and have one on a hot day as a quick, sweet pick-me-up, but I really am not a fan of the super sweetness or the concentration of the flavor. Frankly, I think these might be marketed more towards children rather than adults. More expensive and larger size versions of these types of gelatin desserts tend to have bits of fruit in them, which adults might favor. I gave away the rest of the bag and I don't plan on buying them again.