TopValu Light Meal Konnyaku Jelly (Lychee)

Some time last year, I started to notice more and more zero calorie jelly (what we call gelatin) products for sale in convenience stores. This "light meal" nutritionally balanced drinking gelatin is something which has also been around for years, albeit not in as many zero-calorie forms. I wanted to sample it for my week of diet/health foods, but I'm a bit squeamish about the prospect of a drinking jelly.



I squeezed some of this into a glass, and what I saw didn't encourage me. You can't see it from the picture I took, but there are little wispy shreds of clear jelly suspended in a yellowish liquid. They resemble amoebas with a thyroid disorder. Of course, you're not supposed to squirt this stuff into a glass and drink it. You're supposed to suck it out of the tube at the top. This is good because it's very difficult to squeeze out. The packet is designed to keep it from spilling out. It works like a steel can of evaporated milk that only has one hole pocked in it. There's not enough of an exchange of air to allow the free flow of the jelly.

This is made with konnyaku jelly, something which I have been far less than keen on in the past. I tend to dislike the texture of it when it's put in stews and other Japanese dishes. If you don't want to read the Wikipedia entry, I'll tell you that it's jelly, often in a mottled gray block form, made from a plant (konjac). Konjac is a "corm", which is similar to a tuber or yam, but doesn't have the same properties. It is consumed for its texture, and its high fiber, which fills the stomach and aids digestion. In Japan, it's usually salty and used in traditional dishes, but it's popular in Asia in jelly drinks as well. People sometimes choke to death on it, but I can say that there is little risk of choking on the soft konnyaku in this beverage. It's too wispy for anyone to get lodged in his or her throat.


I chose the TopValu brand because it was cheap. I paid 98 yen at a local supermarket for this 180 gram pouch. There are a plethora of other choices, and I'm guessing most of them are roughly similar to this one in consistency and in having a huge list of added nutrients. Clearly, this is meant to fill the belly of dieting people who want to feel full, get nutrients, but consume no calories. This packet was fortified with B vitamins, D, E, Folic acid, and Panthothenic acid. It contains a pretty hefty cocktail of artificial sweeteners including Erythritol, Acesulfame K, and Sucralose. It also contains kale, which is popular in Japan for its nutritive properties. You can buy powdered kale and dissolve it in water to drink; it tastes as good as it sounds.

In theory, this is a great idea. The big question is about how it works in practice. The texture isn't nearly what I thought it would be. It's not slimy, but rather like drinking super soft tapioca bubbles. I have never had bubble tea, but I imagine this is a distant cousin to it texturally. The smell is rather fruity, like a cross between an apple and a peach. The taste at first is very sweet and like a fruit gelatin. I rarely eat lychee, so I can't know how faithful the flavor is to the fruit. It's not an impressive flavor, but it's unoffensive. The main drawback is that there is a bitter aftertaste after you've sucked down (literally) some of it. The only other drawback is that I feel goofy as an adult suckling on a tube like a baby with a bottle.

This type of food isn't meant to be some fantastic and tasty snack, but rather as a palatable health food to stop you from snacking on things that aren't good for you. I can say that it is inoffensive, and the sweetness is initially quite gratifying if you're hungry. I can also say that, without a doubt, it made my stomach feel full and that I would recommend anyone who counts calories and struggles with hunger give this a try. I don't know if it would actually replace a meal, but it would certainly help you stave off a case of the munchies between meals and I'd buy this again. In fact, I wouldn't mind keeping one on hand when I'm having one of those days when I just want to eat all day. Note that these last for months.

Chocochip Cookies — Country Ma'am vs TopValu

There's an intriguing web site called "Second Rate Snacks" which places big brand name snacks head-to-head with knock-offs. This is a concept which is especially useful in America where knock-offs are plentiful. In Japan, there aren't quite so many of these though there are a few, particularly of things like Pocky and Pretz.

While it may seem like I'm ripping off someone's cool concept, the incentive for this post actually came from my husband who saw both of these bags of similar cookies and thought it would be interesting to see if there was a qualitative difference. I can guarantee that this sort of comparison won't be happening very often. It's too much work and more junk food than I want to have around. My hat goes off to the folks at Second Rate Snacks who manage to do this regularly (and do it so well).

The way in which both of these packages are designed clearly shows that TopValu, maker of cut-rate food and goods all over Japan and Asia, was attempting to copy Country Ma'am. Country Ma'am, which is a brand offered by mega confectioner Fujiya, has been around for quite awhile and sells a variety of versions of it's semi-soft cookies. They're supposed to be especially good if you pop them in the microwave to make them softer.



The TopValu brand is about 150 yen ($1.50 USD) cheaper than Country Ma'am and contains 2 more cookies in the bag. All of the cookies come in individually wrapped packets. This is the sort of excessive packaging that Japan excels at and is often criticized for, though it does make it easy to keep the cookies around for a long time once the main package has been opened.

Country Ma'am on top, TopValu on the bottom

The cookies in both brands are the same weight, 10.5 grams (.37 oz.), but the TopValu cookies are smaller. It's difficult to tell from the picture, but they are also duller, paler and drier looking. They all carry essentially the same calorie counts at 50 calories per tiny cookie.

Country Ma'am chocolate, TopValu chocolate, Country Ma'am vanilla, TopValu vanilla (click to see a much bigger version)

If you look at the cookies when they are cut open, you can see that there is more moisture in the center of the Country Ma'am cookies. Both bags have the same claims on the front of their packages. They say their cookies are crispy on the outside and moist inside, but Country Ma'am clearly lives up to this claim much better than TopValu.

The proof is in the taste and texture, however, so here is what I thought:

• Chocolate TopValu: Crumbly outside and slightly chewy inside with a nice chocolate flavor
• Chocolate Country Ma'am: Crunchy outside, softer interior with a nice texture, good chocolate flavor which is richer and deeper than the TopValu chocolate cookie
• Vanilla TopValu: Crumbly outside, slightly chewy interior, bittersweet chips with a much heavier note of bitter than usual for this kind of cookie
• Vanilla Country Ma'am: Crunchy outside, soft interior, a bit of a pleasant cookie dough flavor inside, nice milk chocolate chips
  

Country Ma'am is, unsurprisingly, a better cookie. In particular, the vanilla cookies are far better than the TopValu vanilla ones which border on unpleasant with the heavy bitter aftertaste of the chips in their cookies. The main difference between the chocolate ones is in texture. TopValu's cookies are so dry on the outside that they nearly crumble into a powder in your mouth. Country Ma'am's crispy exterior is more like a crispy shell which cleaves cleanly. The TopValu cookies fail rather badly if you plan to microwave them a bit to warm them up. At that point, the dryness of the cookies becomes a serious liability whereas Country Ma'am holds up well.

A look at the ingredients list reveals that both cookies use similar components, but sugar is higher on the list on the Country Ma'am cookies. Since sugar adds moisture, crispness and softness to baked goods, this suits the differences between the texture of the Country Ma'am cookies and TopValu.

I consume Country Ma'am cookies very infrequently because I'm much more inclined to bake my own if I'm in a cookie mood. However, if I were inclined to pick up some chocolate chip cookies or have a bag to share with others, I'd pay the extra money, take a few fewer cookies, and go for the Country Ma'am cookies over the TopValu ones.

TopValu 16 Hato Tea Blend (16 ハト茶ブレンド)

Back when I was working in a Japanese office, my (Australian) boss used to buy 2 liter bottles of tea called "ju-roku cha". "Ju-roku" in Japanese is 16 and "cha" is tea. I'm not sure why 16 is the magic number for these types of tea blends, but I fondly remembered working with him when I saw this bottle of tea. Incidentally, "hato" means "dove" in Japanese. I don't know if this is supposed to be "dove tea" or if the name carries some other meaning, but there's no reason for doves to be connected to the contents of the bottle. Well, let's just say I hope doves are in no way a part of it.

When my boss was drinking this tea, he offered me a taste, but I turned him down because it smelled very "earthy" to me. In fact, I jokingly used to call it his "dirt tea." The brand he drank was bottled by Coca-Cola Japan. The brand I decided to buy is clearly a direct knock-off and is made by TopValu. TopValu specializes in making cheap versions of popular items. Most notably, they make a KitKat copy for about 28 yen (27 cents) less than the real deal. This 500 ml bottle of 16 Hato Tea Blend was 78 yen (77 cents). A similarly-sized bottle of the brand name ju-roku cha would be at least 100 yen ($1).

The tea is a blend of many other teas including barley (Hato barley), 2 kinds of green tea, and oolong. It includes brown rice, persimmon leaf, ecommia bark, jiagolan, wolfberry (all three Chinese herbs used in traditional medicine), shiitake mushroom, orange peel, vitamin C, kelp and "herb tea". It's quite the potpourri of earthy elements. It's no wonder I called it "dirt tea".

When I opened this bottle, I mostly smelled the mugi-cha (barley tea) and oolong elements. This sort of tea is marketed mainly at the health and beauty market and it is so for good reason. It tastes as good as the mixture of ingredients sound like they might taste together, which is to say not particularly good. The tea is unsweetened (the whole bottle has only 6 calories) and no effort has been made to really do much about the flavor. While you drink it, it's not so bad, but once you stop and your tongue has a moment to process what has just passed its way, it is a little bitter and tastes like you stirred a glass of oolong and barley tea with a dirty mushroom. In fact, I think the tagline for this tea should be something like, "mushrooms you can drink!" Honestly, I think it tastes like water that has been wrung out of an old, dirty sock.

If you're really interested in Chinese medicine or are willing to adapt your palette to a new flavor (or are a serious fan of mushrooms), this may be for you. If you love mugi cha, you may find this more appealing. Personally, I couldn't finish the bottle though I really did try. After choking down half of it, I had to throw in the towel.