Bourbon Petit Karinto Sembei

Awhile back, in a salt-craving induced buying frenzy, I picked up several sleeves of salty snack bits from Bourbon. This karinto sembei (rice crackers) completed my "petit" series trio of purchases from that time as the more accessible flavors fulfilled my craving and this one got left behind. They lay dormant in my aging snack pile for several months, so you can see how long it took me to get around to these things. I either need to eat faster, buy smaller packages, or review even less. Frankly, this is the "petit" series so I'm not sure it gets any smaller than this and I'd rather not cram more food into my snack hole just to get it used up.

Karinto is a brown sugar treat in Japan that resembles what you pick up after you take your dachshund for "walkies". I've only tried it once, karinto that is, not what comes out of ones wiener dog's digestive system. The type I tried was a cheap variety so I can't say I've given the real thing a fair shake. This sembei uses brown sugar from Okinawa, a place in southern Japan which is famous for a variety of foods including brown sugar. Of course, it seems that any place with an appreciable amount of agriculture is famous for a wide variety of edible substances, so it's hard to get too worked up by Okinawan brown sugar when they're also famous for things like sweet potato and goya.

These are marketed as "sweet" sembei, but they aren't really very sweet. They are as close to neutral as you can get before crossing the line to sweethood. They have a nice brown sugar flavor, but there's also a strange slightly herbal aftertaste which is vaguely familiar to me. I'm not sure that this is really any sort of spice, but it may be the effect of baking brown sugar to a hard crunch or highly cooked honey (which is also an ingredient).

The crackers are very crispy and you can taste both the honey and the brown sugar with every bite. The honey tends to hit in the front of your tongue at the start, followed by the mild brown sugar, and then the odd aftertaste. If it weren't for that, these would be a home run as a "buy again". I love brown sugar sembei and am pleased with the small size of the package.

I'm not sure whether to recommend these or not. I may be especially sensitive to that funky taste, or it may be something others would detect. I sort of like these. I love the crispy, somewhat hard texture and the honey and brown sugar flavors coupled with very light sweetness as well as the size (38 grams/1.34 oz.) for a low price even in the U.S. where they tend to sell for about a dollar (100 yen). If the main composition of this is appealing to you and you can get them cheap, I'd say give them a try.

Karume Sugar Candy

First of all, I must apologize for the fact that my picture shows a largely empty bag. I have developed a problem with keeping track of my pictures and I blame it all on Blizzard Entertainment and Apple Computer. If you'd like to travel with me now down my road of convoluted logic which allows me to misplace responsibility for my own carelessness on two major corporations, keep reading. If not, well, skip to the end and read the stuff about the actual food.

I am not a rich person. For some reason, the handful of pennies that Google ads net me for these blogs hasn't really kept me in enough scratch for a new computer. I've been using a Mac Mini for several years and it's showing it's age in multiple ways. However, I am also a fan of the Diablo series of games from Blizzard. They released Diablo III last May and my little Mini barely met the graphics card specs. Hurray... except, not so much because playing the Mac version of the game would have required me to pony up $70 in OS upgrades. I don't know why, except, perhaps, oh, corporate greed, that the Mac side needs a more updated OS than the PC side. If you have a Windows box, you can get by on the venerable old Windows XP.

Unfortunately, I left my Windows computer in Japan because it required an extra plane to lug that behemoth home (and it was about 5 years old to boot). The way out of this for someone as cheap and relatively impoverished as me was to install XP on my Mac and boot back and forth between the Mac and Windows sides on the Mac Mini. Hurray! Problem solved! I could play Diablo III and nobody got more money out of me for an upgrade that I did not care about.

Unfortunately, I now find myself downloading pictures into both OS's. It is, essentially, the equivalent of two computers without the convenience of two separate hard drives and displays. I get extremely confused about which side of the Mac has photos and think sometimes that I've downloaded pictures when I have not, or I simply can't find them on the Windows side because I forget where they were put as it seems they are put in a different place each time. This is why I am losing my pictures. You see, if Blizzard hadn't required Mac OS 10.6 or higher or if Apple didn't charge for incremental upgrades, you'd be getting the pictures you deserve as my patient, patient audience.

I do have a small picture of the full bag which I can crop out of a large picture of all of my purchases. This is the best I can do. Write to Blizzard and Apple and complain for me, won't you?

So, on to the candy, which I bought ages ago at Daiso Japan for $1.50 (120 yen ) and have been slowly nibbling on over a couple of months. This is made by a company called Ogawa confectionery and they have no web presence so there was nothing I could learn about their other products. This is a fairly simple and old-fashioned offering of a brown-sugar-based treat.

Inside the bag are 3.2 oz./90 grams of stubby nubs that have a very crispy texture and are laced with air pockets. This makes them have the feeling of a honey comb and they shatter easily when you bite into them. The flavor depth is very shallow, unfortunately. The ingredients list is brief, but a little scary - coarse sugar, granulated sugar, baking soda, and two artificial colors (which is unusual for a Japanese processed food). The taste is pretty much like a spoonful of brown sugar, but the textural element does lend a nice quality to it. I'm guessing that the baking powder is what makes these nice and airy while they are cooked up inside of 6-sided mold.  

I can't say that I regret buying this. I do like crispy things and brown sugar, but I haven't eaten it straight from the bag since I was a kid. I have been ever so slowly eating this, but ultimately, I need something more sophisticated to keep me coming back for more. 

Tokyo Nihonbashi Kuromitsu KitKat

This is one of the regional KitKat varieties that I picked up at the airport on the way out the door when I left Japan. It's important to say that my husband was the one who spied this and wanted it because he interpreted "kuro mitsu" (black sugar syrup/honey) in Japanese to mean "brown sugar". Since this was going to be one of the last things we'd purchase on Japanese soil, I didn't want to rain on his parade and I said, "sure, go ahead". The truth is though that I didn't think this wasn't going to taste like brown sugar as he knows it.

People who bake know that there are different types of brown sugar. People who eat may know so as well, but for most people sugar is sugar. Most people don't know what caster, demerara, muscovado and turbinado sugar are. The more sophisticated sugar consumer tends to know three things; white, brown, and powdered. I'm no culinary snob so I don't care if people can separate different types of sugars. Unfortunately, my husband is one of the types who knows only the three shades of sweetness previously mentioned. It's dark and sugar, so, it's going to be brown sugar. Yay! Brown sugar! He loves brown sugar.

I'm here to say that kuromitsu ain't no brown sugar. It's a type of syrup that is often used on warabi mochi and other Japanese sweets. It's fine and dandy for various applications, but it's not pleasing to the palate of someone who is looking for that very definable flavor that comes with oatmeal cookies, pecan pie, and spoonfuls of cavity-creating pleasure taken straight from the brown sugar bag. The question of whether or not the flavor pairs well with the white chocolate and wafer combo of a KitKat is also a very valid one.

I'm sorry to say that, having spend 840 yen ($10.63) and having 12 mini bars (69 calories each) on hand, that it isn't the greatest pairing. Speaking as someone who likes the sublime combination of kuromitsu when drizzled over soft blobs of kinako-coated warabi mochi, I was especially disappointed, but not surprised. I think that the bland mochi and nutty toasted soy flour (kinako) are a nifty pairing, but sweet white chocolate is not its friend. It's sweet and intense paired with more sweet and slightly milky.

On top of this being a very so-so KitKat, there is also the fact that it has to be one of the oddest  regions to offer a KitKat from. Nihonbashi is a business district in Tokyo. It's not a bad place to go or anything, but it's hardly a heavy tourist district and, as far as I know, it is not really related to kuromitsu. It does relate to the Mitsui family who brought Mitsukoshi department store to Japan so this may be a play on words (mitsu, Mitsui), but it seems a tenuous connection at best. I think Nestle Japan is either trying to hard, or not trying nearly hard enough.

Tohato All Azuki Cookies

I once said that I was on a quest to sample all of the "All (Fruit)" line of cookies and then I promptly forgot that this was one of my snack blog missions. In fact, I forgot that I had any missions of any sort, but perhaps all of the incessant commercials playing in Shinjuku station for the newest Mission Impossible movie sparked my memory. I must say that I wonder if it costs more to run ads in a station that about a million people walk through than it costs to run ads on television in Japan. That has nothing to do with these cookies unless Tom Cruise decides to appear in ads for them in the future. That's not outside of the realm of possibility, but I think that he's unlikely to smile and bite into cookies that smell a bit like mold or dirt, as these ones do.

That's right, these cookies smell pretty rank. Their unique bouquet reminded me very much of the dreaded oshiruko KitKat. Still, I'm nothing if not game to sample new foods, especially when I've already forked over my 100 yen ($1.24) to procure a bag of them and the only other option is to toss them and forfeit a review opportunity. I found these at Lawson 100, but you can find them pretty much anywhere that carries the All Fruit cookies. They are seasonal and will vanish after winter and reappear next autumn. So, if you want some cookies that smell like a zombie's armpit, act before it warms up.

All derogatory comments about the aroma of these cookies aside, they are actually quite enjoyable. The basic cookie used in the All Fruit line has a good flavor and texture. They are slightly flaky but soft. They're like a cross between a biscuit and a pie. Sandwiched between them are bits of moist sweetened azuki beans. There is also kinako  (toasted soybean powder) and black sugar syrup flavoring added, though the influence of these two ingredients are so subtle that you can barely detect them. They're like a voice in the next room that you can't make out, but they are nonetheless, present and contributing something to the overall taste. For all I know, they're also adding their own personal touch to the funk coming off of them as well. 

I'm not an enormous fan of red beans. The truth is that I like white bean sweets more than red, but I bought these believing that the moist nature of azuki would lend itself well to these cookies. That theory is supported by the taste, though there really should be more beans in them. It seems like Tohato continues to scale back the "fruit" portion of this line all of the time and you get more basic cookie and less of the filling then I recall in some of my previous reviews of these. Still, these are good and I recommend them. Just hold your nose when you open the bag and put the portion you want to eat on a plate so that the smell isn't so powerful.

Kurobo Brown Sugar Sticks

I often read blogs about cooking and one of the things that works a bit like a fingernail on a blackboard for me is people who talk about recipes for "Japanese bread" (shokupan), "Japanese castella" and "Japanese cheesecake" as well as "traditional Japanese baking". There are traditional Japanese baked items, but those things are all off-shoots of European culture, not "traditional Japanese baking". It's like saying "traditional American pizza". There is American-style pizza, but it's not "traditional". Be forewarned that I may be getting rather curmudgeonly in my old age. Feel free to ignore my silly crabbiness. However, I promise not to go on about having to tie an onion on my belt.

These types of cookies are a classic sweet in Japan, and as far as I know are not a derivative of a European treat. While their shape and size is reminiscent of a biscotti, the experience of eating one is in no way the same. The interior is coarse and spongy while the outside is crispy and sugary. The brown sugar exterior forms a slightly crispy "crust" which provides a pleasant textural contrast to the soft, springy interior. They smell a bit like brown sugar and molasses, but there is also an element of coffee. I'm guessing that that relates to some sort of roasting process involved in some of the ingredients.

I often say of traditional Japanese snacks that they are pretty much the same so it doesn't matter what sort you by, but the truth is that this particular treat is one in which quality seriously matters. I've had hundred yen shop versions and I've had types like this which are closer to 200 yen ($2.46). The cheap kind lack the sweet, crispy exterior and the pleasantly gritty brown sugar qualities that pricier types have. The company that makes these, Kurobo, makes a very fine version. It uses flour, eggs, and brown sugar syrup.

My students often talk about how black sugar is "healthy" and I sort of smile and move on to another topic. The back of this bag mentions that using black/brown sugar means that these have 50 fewer calories per 100 grams than those made with white sugar. I calculated the calories in each stick at 71. The web site also claims that these have more vitamins and a high alkaline content. Eating foods with high alkaline is supposed to reduce heart disease by balancing acids in the blood.

So, these "sticks" (actually, a type of cookie) are not only tasty, but also nutritious. In moderation, these would be an excellent part of a well-balanced diet. However, you shouldn't eat them for the nutrition. You should enjoy them for the brown sugar tastiness.

Kashiwado Jumbo Black Sugar Bread

Most of my snack shopping takes place in relatively predictable places like convenience stores, supermarkets or snack shops. Very occasionally, something interesting will show up in one of the local green grocer's catch-all bin of snacks and low price foods near their registers. The shop these were purchased at is a bit grungy, but the prices for vegetables, fruit, and meat are low. The snack foods in the big bin are often a jumble, and sometimes look worse for wear. The boxes can actually look beat up, scratched, or worn on some foods; it's like someone kept them in the back of their cupboard for a few months then decided to sell them.


Normally, I ignore the snacks at this green grocer, but my husband plucked this bag of brown sugar bread out of the bin while he was foraging for Portuguese strawberry cookies that they had recently started carrying. The shop I bought this from is called Takano and we paid 198 yen ($2.20) for a package with 10. Each is 20 grams (.7 oz.) and 7.5 cm. x 5.5 cm. (3 in. x 1.2 in.) in size. I'm not sure if you can call that size "jumbo" or not, but they are big for a cookie-like treat in Japan.


Though these are called "bread", this is one of those times when translation doesn't work very well. These are more like a cross between a bread and a cookie. They are a variation on the classic Japanese "tamago pan" (egg bread). That means they are firm, dense, and have a somewhat crispy exterior with a dry, but tender interior. They are a small carbohydrate bomb, and eating them is as much about texture as taste. The ingredients include flour, brown sugar, white sugar, egg, and margarine.

These smell of molasses and brown sugar and unsurprisingly taste fairly strongly of brown sugar and molasses. They are quite sweet, but not in a throat-burning way. Like other types of tamago pan, they have a slightly crispy exterior, and a dry, cookie-like interior. They are very satisfying with a cup of coffee or tea as a more substantial snack.

I liked these a lot, but I love the sort of dense, dry cookie-like interior these have. They remind me of the sugar cookies my mother used to make, which were not your usual crispy, sweet sugar cookie. I find the texture of tamago pan immensely satisfying. The flavor of these is icing on the cake. I can recommend them without reservation to people who like similar types of food, but I'm not sure they'd be a knock-out winner with just anyone.

Country Ma'am Black Sugar Cookies

You never see molasses for sale in Japan. In fact, it's actually rather difficult to explain the concept of molasses to students. Gingerbread doesn't exist in Japanese culture (as far as I've seen). Commonly available Japanese brown sugar is also really light in color and weak in flavor, so you get the feeling the native's don't have a taste for strong molasses flavor.


These cookies are called "black sugar" cookies, but what they actually are are molasses chocolate chip cookies. The goop pictured on the front of the bag even looks like molasses, though the web site calls it something like "black sugar nectar". So, maybe Fujiya is trying to cultivate a taste for molasses, or just coming up with yet another flavor of Country Ma'am cookies.


There are five tiny cookies in the pack and it costs about 150 yen ($1.60). Each cookie is 3.5 cm (1.4 in.) in diameter (10.5 g./.34 oz.) and they're 48 calories per cookie.


Unsurprisingly, the cookies smell like dark brown sugar or weak molasses. The texture is perfect. They're crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. There are generous amounts of chocolate chips in them, so you can taste the chocolate very well and the sweetness level is about right. The flavor, however, is a matter of taste. My husband liked these, but I couldn't get on board with the combination of chocolate and molasses. To me, it was just not a good mix.

I think someone who likes chocolate chips in their gingerbread would love these and though I certainly wouldn't buy them again, I can't fault anything about the cookie. It's just a matter of my tastes.

Black Sugar Kinako KitKat (Mini)

After a very satisfying experience with a Tirol Kinako Premium chocolate, I was in the market for all things kinako (toasted soy flour). In fact, I was ready to go on a kinako-flavored foods binge. When I saw this big bag of mini KitKats with a shallow bowl full of kinako on prominent display, I happily cracked open my wallet for the 285 yen ($2.91) to buy it.

I have had several experiences to date where I expected to love something and bought a big portion and then regretted it and where I expected to be indifferent to something so I bought a small portion and wish I'd gotten more. I need to keep those experiences foremost in my mind when I opt to buy a big bag of mini bars because it'll save me some money and the guilt associated with buying a lot of something and tossing it out or giving it away.


I love black sugar and I like kinako a lot. The problem is that the marriage of these elements with a KitKat is far less gratifying. The main problem as my taste buds see things is that brown sugar (called "black sugar" in Japan) doesn't naturally go well with chocolate. This is one of those rare situations where I would have liked it more if Nestlé had used a white chocolate base and flavored it with brown sugar rather than used a milk chocolate base and worked the brown sugar into the cream in the wafers.


The bars look like regular KitKats, but smell vaguely of brown sugar. They taste strongly of molasses with chocolate. These are not two great tastes that taste great together in my opinion, particularly because the molasses flavor is really strong. It reminds me of having foolishly sampled molasses straight from a bottle as a child. The kinako flavor seems to be completely overwhelmed by the black sugar/molasses flavor and the chocolate is an unwelcome passenger which is along for the ride in the back seat.

It's unfortunate that this isn't better balanced because the filling has potential. There's a slightly grainy sugary texture to the filling between the wafers which is nice and the bars are firm and fresh. Some of the mini KitKats I've tried before melted easily on the fingers at room temperature, but these weren't messy in that way at all. Each mini bar is 66 calories of black sugar badness.

If you really love molasses, you may like this. Then again, I think that you'd have to love huffing open jars of molasses to enjoy this and I don't know if anyone's tastes run so kinkily.

Morinaga Black Sugar Milk Caramels

The packaging on a lot of Japanese sweets is pretty clear cut and designed to give you a good idea of what is inside. Most of it is also modern-looking. Morinaga, which has been in business since 1899, has quite a few products with rather old-fashioned packaging. One of my former students was married to a man who worked at Morinaga and she told me that the company was deeply steeped in old-style thinking and culture and reluctant to change their ways.

If you look at the box for these caramels, you can see a lot of their old-fashioned design on them. The same goes for their plain chocolate bars which come in a plain brown wrapper with an ornate frame design around the name of the company. The company's old-style logo (an angel holding an "M" can be seen in a square at the top of the box). There is a more modern-looking logo on other products, but its line of caramels, retains the old-fashioned design. This is probably because caramels were the first confection the company made and can be considered a signature product. They may also not appeal to young folks so much as nostalgic older people. I've noticed that the caramels are much harder to find than other Morinaga sweets.

At the moment, there are three types of these caramels on the market: the original milk caramel, black sugar and adzuki. I've never seen the red adzuki flavor box in any store, and I can only locate the black sugar ones in one of the 4 markets in my immediate area. "Black sugar" is what Western folks call "brown sugar", though it seems more heavily influenced by molasses than the "brown sugar" you buy in bags (to cook with) in Japanese markets. In fact, brown sugar sold for baking and whatnot is very light and only a stone's throw from white sugar in taste.

The black sugar sweets you can buy, on the other hand, are very richly flavored. These caramels are no exception. When you unwrap the foil, there's a smooth bit of caramel which is only the tiniest bit sticky to the touch so your fingers don't get messy. It smells sweet, milky and somewhat of honey. In fact, the American candy that it very much reminds me of is "Bit O' Honey."

Though the blocks are firms, they quickly soften up once you put them in your mouth and start to chew. They're also rather nice to just allow to melt a bit by sucking on them like a piece of hard candy. While it is sticky like most caramel, it doesn't stick terribly to your teeth. I'm not sure how Morinaga manages this feat, but it's appreciated. The caramel is rich and floods your mouth with a sweet, buttery, brown sugary flavor. It's delicious.

The ingredients include sugar water, brown sugar (60% grown in Hokkaido), milk with added sugar, sugar, vegetable oil, rice flour, salt, sorbitol, caramel coloring, and flavoring. As you might expect, you're essentially getting a whole lot of sugar in these. The size of the caramels is rather small which makes them much easier to chew as well as provides good portion control. There are 12 candies per box and a box costs about 130 yen ($1.24). The whole box is 245 calories so they weigh in at 20 calories apiece.

Given that these are both traditional and tasty, they are a great item to sample if you have a chance. I'm guessing they'd also be the ideal thing to just toss in a bag and keep around for awhile for those times when you'd like a little sugary pick-me-up.

"Oishi" (Delicious) Black Sugar "Marshmallow" Sticks

When you first arrive in Japan, there is a cornucopia of food items which look pretty strange. Some of them you will be brave enough to sample and others look just too strange to even consider. The snack item pictured above looks like something you might find floating in a toilet. The funny thing is that this is one of the better looking varieties of this particular snack.

The "translation" of this particular food is pretty weak. These aren't marshmallows, but, like sushi, there isn't a good word to describe this treat simply and easily. There are many varieties of these in Japan and they all are coated on the outside with brown sugar, or, as the Japanese call it, "black sugar". Some varieties are a little hard on the outside and firm on the inside and others are very soft on the inside and a little soft on the outside. The cheapest varieties are white on the inside. I'm guessing that they have less flavor and that's why they're cheaper. I have read that these are a specialty of Kyushu and it's possible that the more pedestrian varieties are knock-offs rather than the real deal.


My hunch regarding the reason these are (at least sometimes) translated as 'marshmallow' is that they are a bit spongy like a marshmallow and they are quite sweet. The process by which they are made is likely very different as the ingredients are different and these are more like a super airy coarse cake inside than a marshmallow though there is a certain textural resemblance when you bite into one. These are, essentially, a type of baked good. The information I found on them states that their origin in Japan is unclear, but that the speculation is that they are a sweet inspired by the West rather than something absolutely indigenous to Japan.

If you love brown sugar or molasses, these are an incredible treat. They are sugary and light. The firm texture on the outside makes an excellent contrast to the airy interior. They smell like molasses, but don't have an oppressively sweet smell. They aren't chewy and are a bit like eating a super soft, spongy biscotti. Though they feel quite hard if you press on one through the bag, they are actually very easy to bite into.

The main ingredient is flour followed by various types of sugar (brown (black) sugar, sugar, and grape sugar), eggs and a leavening agent. These are not nutritious, but they are also not high in calories. Each little bite (about 1.25 inches) is about 20 calories and you'd be hard-pressed to eat too many at one time given how sweet they are. They are very satisfying when you have a craving for something sweet and I can see how they'd pair well with coffee or tea.

This particular variety is a little more expensive than the types that are geared toward kids or families. This bag has 3 packages of about 16 bites (80 grams or 2.8 oz.) for 350 yen ($3.24 USD). It's worth every yen of it. I'm certain to buy these again. This variety is made by Nagashima (ナガシマ) and they are 'carefully' "handmade" in Kagoshima and have been making them for 70 years with flour and brown sugar made in Kyushu, Japan. I searched a bit on the Internet to see if I could find any on-line sellers who might be selling them in the U.S. and not only could I not find an agent that sold them abroad, but I couldn't locate them at Amazon Japan. You can get them direct from some of the manufacturers if you can deal with Japanese web sites, but the easiest way is to visit Japan or have a friend here pick you up some. I'd highly recommend giving them a try despite their suspect appearance.