Harajuku Mochi Chocolate

Getting old is a weird experience because you find yourself stepping into the experiences that you used to snicker at your parents for having. You get those weird yellow toenails that are hard to cut so there is nothing you can do about how you're now getting "old people feet." You look in the mirror and see your parents' faces more clearly because you're moving into the age range that they were when you were a kid growing up. You find that normal things, like sleeping in a bed for an entire night, will result in pain. Of course, that assumes that you sleep through the night at all as the body actually forgets how to sleep as you get older.

Why am I talking about age in a review of Harajuku Mochi Chocolate? It's because I missed last week's posting because it was my 53rd birthday. I had plans to go to a very nice hotel with a jacuzzi on the Southern Oregon coast, but the fires in that area rained down ashes and filled the area with smoke. I'm not really complaining because people who lived just north of my hotel had to evacuate their homes. I'm not a fan of arguments of relative privation (as I think they are just a way of invalidating the feelings of others), but it's hard to cry too hard over a cancelled vacation when people are fleeing their homes due to a nearby inferno threatening to rob them of everything they have.

Another aspect of aging is that my appetite for any food isn't as high as it once was. It has been taking me far longer to get through my stash of traditional Japanese sweets from Nippon-ya than I would have expected. Despite that, I have to say these sweets have aged very well. They aren't as soft as the first box of these that I reviewed, but they are far from stale. They are just a bit chewy and less pillowy soft after four months in the closet. Frankly, I'm impressed.

In terms of flavor, these are very potently chocolate-y, while not being too sweet or bitter. It's quite an impressive balance between the two as most strong chocolate flavors have the bitterness of a dark chocolate or they are washed out by overly sweet milky flavors.

While these are awesome as a delivery system for chocolate and as a way of enjoying the texture of mochi, they aren't especially unique. I think they are a great choice for someone who is squeamish about exotic flavors who you want to share a mochi sweet with, but I don't think I'd get them again despite how good they are. I enjoyed them greatly, but I'd rather have something more unique and I can get good quality chocolate in cheaper delivery systems than this. However, if you like chocolate and you like mochi, these are a big winner.

Where I bought it: Nippon-ya (San Francisco)

Weight: 11.6 oz.

Price: $9.99

Osaka Sikasen Mochi Assort

Nippon-ya did a survey and this box of sweets was their most popular. I can see why that is the case if only based on the packaging. It has beautiful wrapping and wrappers. The fact that I even think about things like that shows just how much I became affected by the culture of style over substance while living in Japan. I was once like you, dear reader, and felt that this sort of business that makes things look pretty was wasteful. What really matters is what is inside, right? Right?

I don't know if Japan changed me or if age did, but I really was excited to try these based on the variety of content as well as the packaging. The main difference between what I bought in Japan and these are that they are very, very small. In fact, I was stunned at how tiny they are as they are about half the size of what I'd get in Japan.

If nothing else, the packages are fairly descriptive of the contents so you don't have the same problem you have when deciding which chocolates have whatever filling in a box of candy in the U.S.

Anko (red bean paste):

This is the most old-fashioned of options for mochi so I didn't expect it to have an aroma, and it did not.  It's a classic pairing of flavorless, chewy mochi with red bean paste in the middle. Since these are small sweets, it's a little hard to know for sure, but I think this has tsubu an or coarse ("pebbly") bean paste in the middle. The mochi is nice and chewy and the powder on the outside makes it sweet before you taste the filling. The filling is earthy and slightly grainy. I noticed the "chew" on the mochi on this one was a bit tougher, but not in a bad way. It is just a bit thicker and less fine than in some other sweets. I liked this in the way that I like Reese's peanut butter cups. It's a classic, old-fashioned combo that hits familiar notes.

Shiro an (white bean paste):

This one was very similar to the anko one except the filling is finer, slightly sweeter, and less earthy. The "beany" nature just whispers at you rather than announces itself firmly and definitively. This is more of a textural pleasure than anything else. I love the feeling of the bean paste on my tongue and the chew of the mochi. However, this was definitely the least impressive flavor-wise of the bunch.

Sakura:

It's hard to believe that the Japanese don't use artificial colors when you see something like this sakura mochi. It's a bordering on radioactive pink. It's the kind of thing that even the most twee princess might find a bit much for her tastes. Nonetheless, I hear you can do marvelous things with beet juice, and perhaps that, rather than fallout from Fukushima, is responsible for the coloration.

The first thing I did was give this a whiff expecting it to smell heavily of "cherry blossom". It didn't smell like anything, surprisingly. The flavor, on the other hand, was very intense. It was quite sweet and very floral. In fact, the taste bordered on "soapy." I'm betting it wasn't even all that sweet, but that cloying flavor upped the sense of it being more sugary than it was. Sakura isn't generally my favorite, but I did enjoy the Sakura Harajuku mochi. This was okay, but definitely hit more of the notes that make sakura something I tend not to seek out.

Sesame:

This was the only mochi with a scent. In fact, as soon as I cut open the package, I smelled the sesame seeds. It smells awesome and the seeds lend a wonderful nutty flavor to the sweet. It also gives it a nice crunchy exterior. The first bite was completely overwhelmed by the sesame flavor, but the second brought out the beans. This was far and away my favorite of the group, though I can't say that I disliked any of them.

In terms of this assortment, the main point that I noticed is that the Harajuku Mochi was softer and fresher in feel, or made differently. These had a more elastic chew. I'm inclined to believe that they are just a differently made mochi because they seemed quite fresh. Mochi that is going stale tends to get a bit hard and these were in no way hard, though one of them had a few cracks in the side (not from drying out, but from torsion).

I liked this, and I do not regret buying it at all. It's a solid group of old-fashioned flavor combinations, but I probably wouldn't order it again for several years. One of the things that I heard time and again while binge-watching "The Great British Bake-off" was that, if you do a classic, it has to be superb and perfect. These are solid, but they are not superb and perfect. That being said, since I hadn't had these types of sweets for a long time, I was really grateful to have them on hand for the duration of the box. It'll just take awhile for nostalgia to enter the equation again. I also think that these are close to ideal if you want to give someone a box of manju as a souvenir or gift.

Where I bought it: Nippon-ya (San Francisco)

Weight: 14.5 oz.

Price: I don't recall exactly, but I think it was $14.95

Harajuku Mochi Chocolat Sakura

Natto is often considered to be the most unique and strange food experience when it comes to introducing Japanese cuisine to foreigners. It's stinky, sticky, and reminds you of mucous. While as a singular food, natto may indeed be one of the strangest things you can eat in Japan, there is a class of food that I discovered is a bit bigger and more broadly used than what I regard as its nearest Western cousin. That is a group of foods that, after processing, are fairly flavorless. 

My first experience with this came when I mentioned to a student that the chanko nabe (a sort of sumo wrestler's stew) that I'd had on my tour of a sumo stable had these weird little grey blocks with black specks in them that found distasteful in appearance. The student practically gushed about how wonderful konnyaku was and how much she loved it. She said it tasted so good and was really healthy. I told her I didn't eaten these little somewhat gelatinous blocks because the reminded me of frog's eggs and asked what they tasted like. She paused and said, "They don't taste like anything."

Such was my experience in Japan with certain foods. People would tell me something was fantastic, but it didn't taste like much of anything. That included jiggly blocks of pale tofu, konnyaku, and mochi. While we have bland foods in the U.S. (potatoes, rice), we don't have foods that are processed and end up flavorless with the exception of gelatin... at least not that I can think of. And, even if we do have such foods, we lack the same level of enthusiasm that I saw for them in Japan. 

Most of these foods are about their texture as well as the flavors that they can absorb from other ingredients. It took me awhile to come around to enjoying such foods, but it helps that I'm a texture junky. Mochi in particular is very much about how it stretches and the sort of chewy, softness it offers. Fresh mochi is amazing. Stale stuff is inedible. When you order shelf-stable sweets like this Harajuku Mochi Chocolate, there is always a risk that it'll be tough as you don't know how long it has been sitting around or how well it is packed. I'm pleased to say that this much have industrial strength oxygen absorber packets and is sealed well. 

The mochi comes in a square box with a little plastic two-pronged fork so you can stab the hands of people who try to eat your delicious, delicious mochi without piercing the skin and risking a lawsuit. Though there are ample numbers of pieces, they are quite small. Each is a little bigger than a quarter and fairly thin as mochi goes. The "chocolate" is a soft, creamy white substance that runs thinly through the center. When you eat it, it imparts sweetness, but there is too little to get a good sense of flavor or creaminess. 

Each bit of mochi is a soft little pillow that is somewhat chewy, but easy to bite into. Even after I'd opened the package and consumed the mochi over several weeks, they remained fresh to the last morsel. The first hit on your tongue is sweetness, perhaps from the coating which could be cornstarch mixed with powdered sugar. It could also just be that the filling is spread evenly enough and is sweet enough to leave a lasting impression.

The second bite is more floral and yields more cherry notes. On the back-end of a tasting, it can even leave a whisper of herb-like and slightly medicinal flavor, but not in a negative way. As mochi goes, this is fairly flavorful, sweet without being cloying. Of course, mochi often lacks a very strong flavor so saying it is "flavorful" isn't meant to convey that it's a flavor-blasted experience, but just that it is present.

In terms of how I liked this, I liked them very well and was happy to have tried them. That being said, I mainly chose these because it is spring and sakura is a seasonal flavor that won't be around in several months. I likely would not buy them again as I regard this more as a curiosity purchase than a standard snack that I'd like to have again. If you enjoy sakura's cherry and floral notes, then you likely will enjoy this more than me (and I did enjoy them). If not, you may want to try a flavor more akin to your tastes like chocolate or green tea.

Where I bought it: Nippon-ya (San Francisco)

Weight: 10.2 oz.

Price: $9.95

Tirol Sakuramochi Chocolate

You probably don't know this, but the packaging on this candy is attempting to pander to different regional audiences. You also probably don't care, but it's my job to, as the tag line says, "tell you more than you need to know about Japanese junk food." It's not just my blog's motto. It's my lifestyle.

Let's start with what sakuramochi is. It's a Japanese sweet which has red bean paste in the middle and is surrounded in some fashion by rice cake - not the sort of rice cake that Quaker sells in stores which looks like popcorn that has been fused together in some sort of horrible industrial accident and tastes like Styrofoam packing peanuts. No, no. This is Japanese stuff, mochi, which is rice pounded into a stretchy, somewhat taffy-like substance which people can more easily choke to death on (especially old folks).

At any rate, there are two styles of sakuramochi pictured on the lower right of the package. The rolled up one with what looks like a bit of a turd poking out (such elegant prose from my keyboard) is Tokyo- or Kanto-style. The kind that looks like an innocent pink blob of fuzz is Kansai-style. Each has a sakura leaf wrapped around it. Mainly, they have textural and aesthetic differences, or at least I think that is the case because the truth is that I never ate sakuramochi in Japan. I ate plenty of wagashi (Japanese sweets) and lots of mochi and red bean stuff, but never that particular type. So, I'm not going to be checking this candy for verisimilitude to the real thing. I'm guessing that is actually for the best.

This is, obviously, one of the spring releases from Tirol. Well, it's obvious to me because spring is when everything "sakura" pops out of the marketing woodwork in Japan. It's all green tea and sakura now, with great lashings of strawberry thrown in for good measure. It's a thing in Japan. It's similar to how pumpkin flavored everything starts flooding the market in July in anticipation of Halloween in October and how it sticks around until March of the following year because they can't possibly sell a million products in pumpkin flavor in the span of time that encompasses the winter holidays.

At any rate, I didn't know exactly what flavor to expect from this, but the smell caught me by surprise. When I gave it a good whiff, it smelled distinctly of red beans. There really wasn't much else to smell. The first bite into the candy yielded a moderate amount of red beans with some flowery sakura flavor. As I chewed into the little gummy center, the bean flavor asserted itself much more strongly. It tapered off and revealed a fairly sweet taste at the finish that developed the sakura flavor a bit more and made it border on, but not cross over the line into being "perfumey". The final taste left in my mouth was a mixture of both the red bean and sakura.

For a tiny little candy (33 calories, about the volume of a Hershey's kiss), this packs some complexity both in terms of flavors and textures. The chocolate part on the outside is soft and yielding. The gummy is quite chewy, bordering on a little bit too hard to bite into. There are earthy, sweet, and perfume-like elements, but you have to either eat slowly and pay attention or eat more than one to really pick up on the multiple subtle flavors.

This is not the sort of candy that you eat to stuff your pie-hole with sweeties. It's the sort of thing you eat for a unique experience. You pair it with tea, one little package next to your cup, and take the tiniest bite possible and try to discern the mysteries in your mouth. Take a drink of tea and give it another go. Repeat until you're done.

This is a good candy in a way, and a less good candy in another. It's one of those things which you would never find in the U.S. because it's complex and not necessarily easily accessible by most palates. This doesn't make it a bad thing at all, but it does make it something that you absolutely have to either already have a taste for or be in the mood for. I'm glad I bought this, especially at the relatively modest price of $2.19 at Nijiya Japanese market (for an eight-piece bag). However, I would not buy another. Once is enough.

Random Picture #193

One thing which I was much slower to learn about compared to when I lived in Japan was what "year" it would be next year. I found out that it was going to be the year of the horse by seeing these tiny mounds of mochi with plastic horses on top of them at a local Japanese market. Had I still been in Japan, I'm guessing I would have seen these thing at least a month ago.

These mochi balls are shelf-stable and designed for decoration more than consumption. I bought one of these a few years before I left Japan because it had an adorable little plastic tiger on top of it. I had it for about a month and then decided to pop it open and sample the mochi. I didn't expect it to be like freshly-made mochi. What I expected was something akin to the dried stuff that you buy in bags in supermarkets. It was far "worse" than that shelf-stable mochi. It was so tough, even with heat and moisture added in, that I felt it was inedible. 

While I may have gotten a bad batch, my guess is that these are "mochi" only in name and that these are really meant only as decoration. I'm guessing Japanese people already know this and wouldn't even attempt to eat them when the holiday is over - much as we might view fruitcake. ;-)

Yuki & Love Mango Mochi

Have you ever been in a situation in which someone tries very hard to convince you of something and the more they try to get you to believe them, the less you do? If your friend was trying to get you to go on a date with another friend, you'd probably become suspicious if they used too many superlatives. "He's a great guy, really. He works hard, has a great job, and is trustworthy. He's the best cook I've ever known. He's great, really!"

By the second "really," your suspicions are going to be aroused and you won't be shocked when you meet him and find he has an enormous horned toad tattooed on his face and is still living at home with his mother. He probably also has a collection of pet reptiles in his basement "bachelor pad," and an unabashedly displayed collection of adult diaper pron. No, I'm not speaking from real life experience, fortunately.

I think that there is an inverse relationship between how good something actually is and its claims of how good it is. This not only applies to dates, but also to food. I should have thought of that before buying this mango mochi, but Asian food so often has such claims earnestly displayed on it that I've learned to tune it out. This one says, "Tastes good, absolutely delicious products." If that weren't enough, there is a little crown on it that says, "King of the Tawiwan mochi." That was the one that should have told me that this was a potential toad-faced loser with a stack of diaper porn.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh on this, but I did have somewhat high expectations. I found this at "Ranch 99" Asian market for around $2.00 (200 yen) and was happy to find a new flavor among the more common taro, sesame, peanut, brown sugar, and green tea. I wished I'd tried the green tea instead.

The mochi itself was actually quite good. It is tiny - about the diameter of an American quarter or a little bigger than a Japanese 100-yen coin - and only 90 calories per serving, but it manages to pack a little funk into its petit package. The mochi is soft, fresh, and nicely chewy, but the thick jelly-like center which is supposed to be mango has a strange taste to it.

This starts out okay with a bland flavor that becomes sweeter as you get more of the center flavor. It is definitely mango, but the finishing flavor is polluted by something which tastes like melon, but not any melon that you'd want to eat. I'm guessing this flavor comes from the cassava starch in the ingredients list, but I've never had cassava so I don't know what it actually tastes like. All I know is that something ruins a fairly promising mochi and I'm going to say the cassava is the toad tattoo on an otherwise decent-looking face because most of the other ingredients are sugar (maltose, water, sugar, cassava starch, mango juice, gelatine, glucose, sorbic acid, natural flavor, and a bunch of artificial colors). The weird thing is that that is mochi, but there's no rice listed!

I may choke down one or two more of these, but chances are I'll spring them on unsupecting visitors or throw the rest out. Life is too short for weird-tasting fruit mochi. I'm sure you'll see that on a bumper sticker one day, just as I'm sure you'll meet someone with a toad tattooed on his face (likely sooner rather than later given how many people tattoos there are in America these days).

Yuki & Love Japanese Style Sesame Mochi

My experiences with "Yuki & Love" brand mochi snacks has been a very mixed bag. In fact, I started off flying high on their blobs of goo-filled rice cake with their taro mochi. It was all a thundering downhill ride from there. They even ruined peanut butter mochi for me. It was like one of those friendships that start out great and, not so slowly, you find yourself bored and then repulsed by the idea of spending time with a person. In the end, you're putting them off when they ask you to spend time with them because you're dreading the experience.

The truth is that I was treating this box of sesame mochi like such a bad friendship. It has been in my possession for five months and is currently past its expiration date of June 2013 by a fair margin. I feel obliged to say that because, clearly, I'm not having this at its best.

In fact, I may not even be having it when it is safe to eat. However, my feeling is that these packages are sealed pretty well and there are little oxygen absorbing packets in them. If I don't go blind or projectile vomit, then it probably is okay to eat. Mind you, I would only do this with a sealed product. If it had been open for five months, I wouldn't be eating it now. Suffice it to say, this is not a "do as I do" sort of thing. I don't recommend anyone eat expired mochi. Don't try this at home, kids!

Fortunately, there were no infestations of insects in the package and I couldn't perceive visible growth on them. In fact, it looked pretty innocuous in there. My main concern was that the mochi would have gone very, very stale. That being said, the other Yuki & Love mochi snacks which I didn't care for tasted stale even when they were supposedly on the fresh side.

I'm happy to say that this was actually pretty good, especially given its status as aged mochi. In fact, the mochi texture was better than my previous two experiences. It was relatively soft and easy to chew. No, it was not like fresh, handmade stuff, but this is shelf-stable and much cheaper - not to mention the fact that I can get it at Ranch 99 Asian market any time rather than make a special trip to the nearest Japan town.

The mochi was pretty pleasant cold, and downright pliable and almost fresh when popped in the microwave for a few seconds. I tried it both cold and (too) hot and I preferred the filling cold and the mochi warm. The sesame coating on the outside added a nice nutty quality as well as the unique flavor that comes from the roasted black seeds. The interior is a little on the milder side for sesame, but still quite flavorful. It lacks intensity and richness, but is not bland.

I would absolutely buy this version of Yuki & Love's mochi again. In fact, I'd say that it is very serviceable and a good variety to keep around for emergency mochi cravings. Yes, I realize that only I actually have those... well, me and possibly pregnant Japanese women. Each little blob is 130 calories, which is not low for the size, but is pretty good for something which contains seeds (which are fatty and high calorie relatively speaking).

It seems that sometimes you avoid a "friend" because you expect to have a bad time, but then you discover that good times can be had after all. Next time, I'll try not to wait until the snack is two and a half months past its expiration date to give it a go.

Morinaga Kinako Mochi Choco Ball

Candy makers speak in a sort of code. As children, we come to understand this code, but, as an adult, I had completely forgotten about the spycraft of sweets marketed toward the short set. For instance, "hot" in candy code often means, "strong cinnamon". It does not mean that chili is infused into the mix. That is only the case for candy designed for adult buyers and candy snobs who think that mixing hot stuff with sweet stuff is the bee's knees.

American candy makers have their code words and Japanese ones do as well. This was a fact I had not considered when I spied this box of "kinako mochi" or "toasted soy bean and pounded rice cake" flavor of Choco Ball. When I think "mochi", I think of chewy, slightly elastic, and soft covering on the outside of a traditional Japanese sweet. In candy code, however, "mochi" is what they call "gummi". That is necessarily a bad thing, but my level of enthusiasm would have been dialed back a bit had I remembered that this contained a core of German ingenuity rather than stretchy Japanese rice.

I found this small box (26 grams, a little under an ounce) of candy at Mitsuwa Japanese market on what I would consider a "very good day" in terms of scoring both interesting and affordable snacks. It was $1.19 (119 yen), which is still more expensive than it is in Japan (85 yen or 85 cents), but is very reasonable for an import.

When I flipped open the "beak" on the top of the box, I felt the very familiar scent of kinako "chocolate"; that is to say, white chocolate infused with toasted soybean. This is a smell that I love and welcome, and I think that kinako makes a very good match for white chocolate because it has no sweetness. I carries more of a nutty flavor from the roasting and only a hint of its soy roots. When I say, "soy", think soy beans, not tofu. There is quite a big flavor difference.

Each tiny little ball is about the size of an M & M, though, obviously, shaped differently. There 19 balls in the box, and the whole thing is 118 calories (about 6 calories per ball). I tried to get a cutaway view, but they're too small and soft for that. Biting into the white chocolate exterior causes the outer portion to crumble off of the gummy inside. Clearly, these are meant to be eaten in one go. Considering the small size, I imagine they're much more likely to be designed to be consumed a few at a time rather than in two bites. 

The outside has a nice sweetness and an earthy, nutty flavor from the kinako. The gummy inside is fresh, soft, and chewy, but it's so small that you have to make a special effort to get much of a "chew" in on it. That's okay. It invites you to be mindful of the experience. My tongue detected no flavor from the gummy inside, but that is no surprise both because of the size and the fact that they probably wouldn't trouble themselves to infuse it with something resembling the mild flavor of rice cake.

I really liked this, but I'm a kinako junkie. I think this is a very approachable option for those who may be a bit reluctant to try Japanese sweets, especially since it tastes a little bit like peanut butter. If you can find a box for a reasonable price, I say, go for it. 

If you're interested in a wallpaper showing Kyro-chan, the illustrated bird mascot on Choco Ball, you can download a few designs here. 

Yuki & Love Japanese Style Peanut Mochi

Have you ever wondered which part of an Oreo cookie makes the cookie better? Is it the slightly bitter, not terribly sweet and crispy outer cookie or the creamy, sweet death-mush in the center. If eating habits are any indication, that is, our tendency to mush together two cookies divorced of one half of their outer cookie sandwich, then the filling is the star of the show. That being said, in Japan, they used to sell only the outer cookie sans the sugary goo. Tastes are relative, after all.

When thinking about mochi treats, one can ask the same question, though I'm figuring those that are not aficionados of Japanese traditional sweets would say, "neither". Those who are connoisseurs would likely say, "both." As someone who just buys snacks for a living, I'm definitely saying the proof is in the rice cake (mochi) and that a substandard mochi experience will make or break the experience. 

The peanut filling of this is lightly sweet, dense, and pretty fatty. The texture is rich, but it's a little kludgy, like "natural" peanut butter before it has been stirred (though not quite that bad). The mochi is where things fall apart. It's actually nicely balanced in terms of taste and lends a sweetness from the rice cake having been infused with a bit of sugar and a nuttiness due to the powder on the exterior. The place where it all goes wrong is the mochi's texture.

The first time I tried a "Yuki & Love" Japanese style mochi, I loved it. It was soft and tasty with a delicate taro (like a potato, only, not) filling. I was so excited that I was dying to try another flavor and scooped up boxes of other varieties when I found them on sale. The second time was a more so-so experience, but that was largely due to the weirdness of the brown sugar flavor in that one. This time, the mochi was just crummy. It was too thick and rubbery, like chewy on the eraser on the end of a number 2 pencil. I don't know if this was old or if they just did a bad job on this particular one, but it really ruined the experience. Despite being quite good with the flavor (and being an enormous fan of all things peanut butter), I didn't finish the box. I kept going back and trying them, even microwaving them to soften the thick exterior, but it didn't help. I ended up throwing out half of the box because they just weren't worth the 130 calories per rubbery lump.

I hope this was a "bad batch", but I'm unlikely to try this variety again. I'm not giving up on the brand and will try another, but if it doesn't get better after the next sampling, I'll be saying goodbye to "Yuki & Love", or at least their Japanese style mochi offerings.

Random Picture #159

Most, if not all, of the mochi I had in Japan was made domestically. The Japanese are pretty fussy about their rice and don't trust foreign-grown rice and mochi doesn't tend to age well. Most of what I saw in terms of mochi was white unless it was mixed with some other food like pumpkin or sweet potato. Occasionally, there would be pink ones that were colored with beet juice in order to make them match some seasonal or holiday colors (white and pink or red are festive colors in Japan).

One thing I don't recollect ever seeing were mochi as vividly colored as the ones pictured above. Most of the tones I saw were closer to pastels and these are more akin to jewel tones. Though these have Japanese writing on them, they were made in another Asian country (likely China or Taiwan, but I don't remember). My guess is that this sort of color can only come with the use of artificial coloring and that is frowned upon in Japan.

Though these are actually very pretty and reasonably priced, one of the lasting impacts of life in Japan for me has been a suspicion of anything which clearly shows unnatural coloring. I'd rather buy a muddy-looking or grey blob of mochi that looked real than something lovely such as these.

Yuki & Love Brown Sugar Mochi

Writing a blog sometimes causes you to face problems that most others don't have to think about. For instance, the name of the maker of this product is "Yuki & Love". When I tried to use the name of the company as a part of the title of the post, Blogger threw up a red flag and said that I could not pass "Go" and I would not be given my $200 (aka, it wouldn't save my post with that name).

As you can imagine, it's a bit perplexing to see how my title so offends the Blogger gods, but I actually did know what it was on about. This is one of those dumb things about computers that you don't think about until it steps up and smacks you in the face. Blogger's glove slap to my cheek was the result of using an ampersand (&) character in a title. What was worse than that was the fact that it had a digital hissy fit was that it did it on a post I'd written on a Mac, but not on a similarly named post that I'd written on a PC (yes, I'm "bi-platform", call me a pervert if you like... in fact, I'd like it if you did call me a pervert).

This is one of those "under the hood" issues that makes no sense unless you're someone who has lived on the deeper edge of the computer-using continuum, and while, I'm no geek, I have had to tussle with these problems before as part of my work in publishing textbooks. All of these letters that are showing up on your screen have various codes and such associated with them and, while it may look like an ampersand is an ampersand to our eyes, the computer begs to differ with our assessment of such things. What you're seeing isn't necessarily what is being gotten. (Yes, I solved the problem by choosing a different ampersand with a different code from the Mac's character palette. Even though they looked the same, one choked the system and the other went down nice and smooth.)

Such is the case with this "Japanese style brown sugar mochi". What I seem to be seeing is a super creamy center that is just barely failing to ooze out of it's pounded rice cake wrapping. It looks like a chocolately delight, though, of course it's actually brown sugar. What I saw on the front of the box though, was not precisely what I got. 

Opening the package and seeing the dusty little balls with a scuffed tops filled me with a sense of foreboding. Cutting one in half to reveal the dark innards further filled me with a notion that these were not going to be as good as my previous experience with the taro mochi. It resembles more closely what you'd scoop out of a cat's litter box than what is shown on the box with a sugary, creamy center.

One of the things I was extremely happy about when I tried the taro version was that the pounded-rice-cake  was soft and chewy as real Japanese mochi should be. I was very disappointed when I discovered that the brown sugar version has a fairly tough mochi casing. The thing that tends to make or break these types of treats is the texture as they are usually not incredibly sweet or intensely flavorful. Ideally, you get a multi-faceted experience in which you get the texture of the smooth, somewhat grainy center with the soft, chewy rice cake with subtle but pronounced flavors. This was slightly better after I gave it 5 seconds in the microwave, but I have to caution readers from repeating that procedure as these types of sweets get molten hot super fast and the center can burn your tongue pretty badly if you go just a few seconds too far in your irradiating.

Though the texture was disappointing, my main problem was with an odd flavor that came along with it. I think this funky taste may have came from the use of sulphered molasses (the sulphur acts as a preservative, but it does make the molasses taste different). However, I'm really not sure of the source of this taste. I only know that it greatly undermined the quality of the experience of eating this. It tasted generally fine and sufficiently "brown sugary", but that off flavor which seemed concentrated in the powdery coating on the outside was a real spoiler.

When I reviewed the "Yuki & Love" taro mochi, I lamented that I hadn't taken advantage of a sale at Ranch 99 Market to buy up other flavors while they were on sale. As luck would have it, all varieties were placed on sale for $1.50 a box and I scooped up a few more. Given how happy I was with the taro version, I had high hopes that the brown sugar version would make me as happy as brown sugar appears to have made the Rolling Stones in their song. Alas, it failed to meet my expectations.

This isn't really "bad" mochi, and it certainly was in line with the price point, but it also was  not especially "good" either. I'd call it a decidedly "meh" experience and I wouldn't buy it again. In fact, it's safe to say that I wouldn't really care to get a box for free, though I will likely slowly finish this box because it's still mochi.

Random Picture #142

Next year is the year of the snake on the Chinese astrological calendar. That means convenience stores and markets all over Japan are selling shelf stable packages of "kagami mochi" with cute little plastic figures of snakes on them. Only in Japan could they make a slithering fanged menace that is the stuff of Indy Jones's (and my) nightmares look adorable enough to want to collect a figure of it.

If I had been paying attention, it might have been nice to collect all 12 plastic figures by buying these cheap and not very tasty bits of mochi each year, but I only picked a couple up when I was in Japan and the figures I got (a tiger and a dragon) didn't make the journey with me. Oh well, they are just cheap plastic figures, and the mochi from these offerings was really pretty much the worst. though no inedible, it didn't compare to the fresh stuff. 

Yuki & Love Taro Mochi

People tend to believe that something is exclusive to an area or culture because they have no experience with it in another area or culture. When they do encounter it elsewhere, they often assume it is a copy of the food from their place of origin rather than consider that they may be the ones doing the copying. Living in Japan, I encountered many people who believed Japan invented something or some cultural aspect was absolutely indigenous. Later, a little research would often reveal that something was not Japanese at all, but rather a riff or copy of some other country's culture.

This is not exactly a criticism of Japan. It's more food for thought which I hope people will set aside and chew on when they have time. Americans, because our country is relatively young and a mutt nation of people and cultures from all over the world, tend to assume things are actually not invented here. We know we didn't invent French fries, not because they have the word "French" in them, but because we didn't invent hardly any of our cuisine (and French fries are from Belgium, right?).

At any rate, I assumed that anything which I first encountered in Japan was, by default, Japanese. By doing this blog, I have discovered that many of those things are of Chinese origin if they appear to be based on foods that tend to be more predominant in Asian culture (rice, noodles. etc.) or Portugal if they tend to be based on things you would find in Europe (wheat, almonds, etc.). That being said, I never questioned the idea that mochi or any type of Japanese sweet for that matter was purely the province of the Japanese.

It turns out that I was wrong. Other Asian countries have their own variations on pounded rice cake with various fillings. I went to a small Asian market not too far from my current residence and found a pretty reasonably priced multi-pack of mochi treats and snapped it up. When I got it home, well, let's say that either I was unlucky or Chinese-style mochi isn't exactly the same as Japanese. The mochi was thicker, tougher, and the fillings were not as finely processed. I was disappointed and rather put-off by future purchases of non-Japanese style mochi treats.

When my husband and I were exploring the 99 Ranch Asian market, I was persuaded to give the whole idea another go by the low price on several boxes of "Japanese-style" mochi. At $1.50 per box of 6, it was a bargain compared to the usual pricing for such things. Also, it says "Japanese-style" on the box, so, you know, it must be the nice, soft little pillows of mochi with smooth fillings that I got used to in Japan, right?

The company that makes these is Taiwanese and their web site is in Chinese, so I have imperfect access to the information about them. They make a lot of interesting looking sweets including some with mochi and others with cake-style enclosures. If I run across other variations by this company, I'm likely to give them a try considering that they include a lot of flavors that I like like sweet potato, mango, and brown sugar. 

The flavors on offer at Ranch 99 were brown sugar, taro, peanut, and sesame. The truth is that they all sounded good, but I chose taro because I'd never had it before. I was also inspired by what I thought was a mention/review of a McDonald's taro pie on the Impulsive Buy, but I can't seem to find said review to link to. Perhaps I dreamed it, or my mad search skills are insanely bad rather than good. I wanted to get some idea of what taro tasted like, so I splashed out the buck fifty for this version.

For those who don't know, taro is a corm. That's a way of saying it's not a potato, but sort of looks like the ugly love-child of a ginger root and a tuber. Before I even sampled this taro mochi sweet, I guessed that it would probably not have much of its own flavor, but would likely be like a potato or other starchy food that tends to reflect the flavors it is prepared with. This rather defeats the purpose of wanting to sample taro, but it's not like I stood in the supermarket deeply reflecting on this when I decided to buy this. Nobody thinks that far ahead about buying a simple box of snacks, right?

The previous paragraph is my way of saying that I still have no idea was taro tastes like. I can say that this mochi sweet tastes very nice though. The flavor seemed to have a bit of a caramel note with a hint of some sort of cream. It was quite sweet, but not over the top. The mochi case was lovely and soft, just as one would expect Japanese mochi to be. This was immensely gratifying as finding a shelf stable mochi snack for a good price has been very difficult since I came to California. The Japanese-made ones that are sold in such packaging costs between $5-$7 (421-589 yen) and tend to be in fruit flavors for some reason.

I really liked these and would buy them again in a hear beat. In fact, I regretted not buying a box of each flavor after sampling this one. While I don't think that I could count on the taste of each flavor being good, I think that the basic textural components would be similar and that is often where a good mochi sweet lives or dies.

As a little reminder to readers who may have missed it, or to those who haven't gotten around to entering, I'm offering a box of the current Tokyo regional KitKats (rum raisin) as a contest prize. You can read about it and enter here. The contest ends on Christmas day 2012, so enter early, but only once, please. Also, please remember that comments are moderated so there is a delay between your making the comment and it being posted. Many people are submitting comments two or three times because they are not showing up immediately. Rest assured that your comment will be posted and it is not necessary to submit multiple times. 

Montoile Mochi Mochi Kinako Mochi

I've been on a big mochi snack kick as of late. It could be that my affinity for the stretchy, chewy textural delights of pounded rice cake have finally lodged in my brain after years of having them. It could be that I have a death wish and like to take risks with my snacks. After all, the two most dangerous foods in Japan are venomous blowfish (fugu) and mochi, which many people choke to death on over the New Year's holiday. Of course, they eat big honking blobs and I'm nibbling on delightful little packets of it full of sweet fillings.

When I spied this package of mochi treats, I snapped it up in no time because it not only is a mochi snack, but is a collaboration with Tirol. For those who haven't had Tirol's reputation written into their memory cells by my copious numbers of reviews of their products, they make little square chocolates with unique wrappers. Many people collect the wrappers and many more pick up their blocks of limited edition "premium" chocolates for sampling. In my case, I can say that I've probably been as disappointed in their offerings as delighted, but I love trying them. It's a small amount for a small investment, and usually a pretty interesting taste experience regardless of how good I believe it is.

This combines Tirol's kinako mochi chocolate with Montoile's "Mochi Mochi" brand. This is a brand which I had not encountered prior to this, but the company makes a lot of this type of small mochi based treat as a shelf-stable snack. They also collaborate with a wide variety of company's including snack cake makers and Bambi caramels. Besides this kinako variety, they make a coffee and "milk" collaboration with Tirol.

Each little blob of mochi is filled with marshmallow and has a core of kinako chocolate. The size of the entire piece is about the diameter of a quarter with a pea-size chocolate center. Most of the kinako flavor comes from the powder on the outside of the mochi, but a flavor burst comes from the center with the kinako chocolate bit. The mochi and marshmallow mainly add texture, but there is also a little sweetness from the marshmallow.

This is pretty good, but hardly the greatest mochi experience or kinako snack I've ever had. I'm not sure that a shelf-stable mochi snack really gains much from having a bit of Tirol chocolate put in the center. That being said, I liked these a lot because I think the marshmallow filling complements the mochi and kinako well. It isn't as good as a "real" mochi snack like something fresh and filled with bean jam, but it isn't a bad thing to have around for a quick chewy bite.

I found this at Inageya supermarket for about 150 yen($1.86) and you get about 10 pieces for that. Each is about 28 calories. I think this is interesting as a novelty, but I don't think I'd buy it again. Oddly, however, I think that,  had I found this back home, I'd regard it more highly. Right now, I have free and easy access to freshly made mochi at traditional sweets shops. Packaged shelf stable treats like this are far less valuable in the face of fresher options. If you find this in an Asian grocer, I'd certainly recommend it if your options don't include fresher versions. It's not the real deal, but it's pretty good nonetheless.

Yamazaki-pan Hitokuchi mochi bread

Sorry that there is no cutaway shot. I took one, but lost it in the huge number of photos I've taken lately. If I find it, I'll add it in later.

When we first moved into our neighborhood, there was a Mos Burger fast food joint not 3 minutes from our apartment. Mos Burger, for those who don't know, is the best Japanese rip-off of Western chains like McDonald's. Not only did they pilfer the big "M" logo, but they initially started out with a yellow letter on a red background. As time has gone by, Mos Burger has differentiated itself favorably (for the most part) from Mickey D's. They tailor their menu to suit the Japanese market and offer fresher food. This has the up-side of tasting better, but the down-side of taking a lot longer to serve your order.

When that Mos Burger was still in place, my husband and I used to occasionally go there for food when we were too tired to cook. My favorite was their spicy chili dog. Though I'm not much of a hot dog eater, it was the closest thing to a chili dog I could find in Japan and I grew up with access to very good knock-offs of the famous Skyline chili. As long as a dog had that sort of chili sauce on it, I was in love. I can't say Mos Burger's chili dogs come close at all, but there aren't many other options in Japan.

Before that branch of Mos Burger faded away due to a lack of business, they once offered something called a "cheese pon". This was one of those temporary deals that is on hand for several months then goes the way of the dodo bird. I mention this because those cheese pon were almost the same as this bread which I purchased at Lawson 100 (for 100 yen/$1.24). Eating these brought back memories of spicy chili dogs and greasy bits of chewy bread.

There are 8 little doughy balls in the package and each is a stretchy little dough ball. They are greasy feeling on the tongue, but not so oily on the fingers. The inside looks a lot like mochi (pounded rice cake) and is chewy like mochi, but less refined. The cheese flavor is so subdued as to be nearly absent. In fact, I wonder if the "cheese" aspect is mainly to get them to look orange. The ingredients list does include "cheese cream" and "natural cheese", but they are a bit far down on the list after the basic bread-making ingredients.

I ate these over a three-day period and I really liked them as a sort of wicked little bread snack. I don't know how bad they really are for you because Yamazaki-pan rarely gives nutrition information on its packaged bread products. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've had an interest in something they offer but passed on it because I had no idea what I was eating. This time, I just took the plunge anyway.

I wish these were cheesier, but they really hooked me with their texture and overall taste which I wish I could describe more effectively. The flavor is very subtle and probably would have been more pronounced with a bit more salt in the mix. At any rate, these pair well with soup or simply as a snack with some weight. If you come across them, they're well worth a sampling and are a unique experience.

Uchi Cafe Sweets Mochi Puyo

One of the great things about doing this blog while actually living in Japan (as opposed to buying imports) is that Japanese people will recommend or give things to you that you may  not bother to sample for yourself. I learned about this pastry secondhand via my husband, who was given one as part of a little "party" at the end of the year that his last student of 2010 "threw" for him. Of course, I don't know if you can call a small bottle of some champagne-like substance and a couple of mochi ball sweets a real party, but it was the thought that counted.

My husband is not the greatest fan of Japanese sweets, so when he tells me he has tried something like this and likes it enough to buy it again, there's a good chance it's going to be pretty darn dandy. The "Uchi Cafe" line of sweets can only be purchased at Lawson's. There are three types of Lawson's convenience stores in Japan: Lawson 100, Natrual Lawson's, and just plain old Lawson's. We found this for 150 yen at the last type and I don't know if you can get them at any of the others, but I doubt it.

Note that, though this is a Lawson's brand, it is made by Yamazaki Pan. I've done a few reviews of Yamazaki Pan sweets and had an indifferent response to those treats, but the truth is that they make some of the best pastries in Japan, particularly when you're looking at anything which is made with cream or custard. If you ever see a Yamazaki Pan package which contains two disks of chocolate cake with whipped cream between them, buy it and enjoy the goodness. It's one of my favorites, but it's also a calorie bomb that you can't indulge in often if you want to look good in your Speedos.

Each little pastry is about 6.5 cm/255 in. in diameter and 155 calories. The top ingredient is "milk flour paste, followed by shortening then eggs, and flour. Though "mochi" is pounded rice cake, rice is nowhere to be found in this. This isn't really mochi so much as a dough which bakes up with the chewy properties of mochi. I also find it odd that no sweetening agent is in the top ingredients yet these aren't low calorie and are sweet. I think the calories are coming from the heavy carbohydrate load and the sweetness from some sort of lactose configuration (but I can't know for certain).

When you open the package, the cakes smell like vanilla custard. For the cutaway picture, it was hard to cut through with a knife because it is as tough as real mochi. The outside is slightly chewy and the custard inside is slightly thin, smooth and creamy. The two textures make for an interesting contrast. The outer mochi-like cake doesn't have a strong flavor, but it does have a baked good sense and even tastes a little like rice. A Japanese person who reviewed this said they thought the outer shell was salty, but I didn't pick that up at all. The white custard has a nice rice eggy flavor along with solid sweetness levels.

I really liked this and would definitely buy it again. It's one of those all too rare treats which balances a very Japanese element (mochi) with a very European one (custard) that makes it unique and delicious. Unless you aren't a fan of chewy bread products, you will want to try this.

Kubota Pudding Mochi

Mochi, or pounded rice cake, is a fairly common component in many traditional-style Japanese treats. It doesn't tend to show up that often in the more "glamorous" snacks that are familiar to English-language speakers. Nestlé Japan has made KitKats with "mochi puffs" (that taste like mothballs), but has never made a real "mochi" KitKat. When mochi gets used in chocolates, such as Tirol's mochi sweets, it tends to really just be a bit of a gummy blob and not actual mochi. I believe this is because the texture is delicate and it can go hard, tough, or moldy easily.

Real mochi has a very fine textural element that you can't easily incorporate into things like mass produce chocolates. It's soft, slightly chewy, and delicate when used as a shell to wrap some other filling. It's a bit like a fine dough. You can see why many Japanese people prefer wagashi, traditional sweets made with a variety of indigenous ingredients including mochi, over other types of sweets because the ingredients are used in a way which maximizes their appeal rather than bastardizes them for mass production.

Since I can buy wagashi at many places in Tokyo, I have less of an impetus to buy mass-produced mochi sweets. Frankly, the same applies to Japanese people so the market shelves are not overflowing with a wide variety of them. I've only reviewed two sweets (Yukimi daifuku, yuzu mochi) which used traditional-style mochi. I found this latest entry at Seiyu supermarket for 198 yen ($2.24). There are 10 pieces in the bag and each is about 44 calories for a blob which is about 3.5 cm (1.4 in.) in diameter (that's an average since they're not circular).

These are made by a company called Kubota, which is yet another one of those small snack food makers which squeezes an occasional product onto market shelves and of which I have never heard. Annoyingly, they don't have a web site. I'm guessing their target customer is at an age at which this new-fangled "computer" stuff might seem to only be accomplished with the aid of ghosts or demons in the metal box.

The ingredients for these include barley sugar, sugar, mochi powder, gelatin, eggs, and carotene (for coloring, no doubt). The fact that the list starts with two kinds of sugar should clue you in that these are pretty sweet. When you open a packet, you don't smell anything as mochi is really just rice so it has little smell. After you cut it open, you can smell the rich, eggy pudding inside. If you've had flan or custard, you know what it smells like. I expected this to mainly be a nice textural experience. This is not only because of the soft, chewy mochi, but also the marshmallow lining around the little soft pools of custard pudding.

It was, indeed, a very nice mixture of textures, but it also tasted very good. The pudding itself was more flavorful than expected and the sweetness made up for the bland mochi. You can also actually taste the soft marshmallow. In fact, this is impressive because every component can be detected on the tongue. Everything was soft and seemed very fresh. My feeling about these after sampling one was that these would make a great souvenir for folks back home because the flavor is familiar and palatable to all but the pickiest types, and they remain uniquely Japanese because of the mochi.

The only caveat I can offer to someone before buying this is that they are rather sweet and won't suit those who are sensitive to such things. That being said, these are truly lovely to have as a little treat with a cup of tea. The fact that they are packaged in such a way as to remain fresh over a longer period of time allows you to have a wagashi-like experience without worries about them going hard or stale rapidly. You can keep a bag around for awhile and sample at will. Note that I bought these on July 12 and they're good until September 28, 2010.