Pizza Hut and Morinaga Milk Caramel Pizza (product announcement)

The Japanese have to show that they can take anything America does and do it better. They've finally turned their attention toward the excess which is "dessert pizza". Given the enormous task involved in taking something as sacred as putting sugary delights on pizza dough, Pizza Hut decided to combine its research forces with that at Morinaga, a company known well for it's caramel delights.

As you can see by the ad, the pizza costs 800 yen (about $8) and is topped with "colorful marshmallows", almonds, and caramel sauce. It is 25 cm. (about 10 in.) in size. This monstrosity became available on June 10 and will be making new cavities for a limited time. You can have it delivered to you, but only if you buy at least 1400 yen worth of food at the same time.

Pizza Hut "Greedy Meat" Pizza (product information)

I'll be upfront and say I'm not sure if I'm translating the name of this pizza properly. And, in all honesty, I'm good with a bad translation because it makes for a much funnier product name. Being wrong in the service of being funny is something I do often, and more often intentionally than not. This sometimes gets pedantic people up in arms and makes them want to bitch slap me into "rightness", but that's okay. It's a win-win. They feel superior to what they perceive as my stupid self and I (hopefully) was funny. This is one of the small ways in which my meat-sack's presence on this planet is of a tiny service rather than simply taking up space.

Speaking of "meat sacks" (see how I cleverly segued there?), this is supposed to be an insane amount of meat though it is probably pretty anemic by American standards - of course, anything which isn't a bacon crust covered in meat is anemic by such standards. This is one of the very common types in Japan which offers four pizzas in one. The Japanese do enjoy and prefer variety, after all. This is Italian sausage with garlic, bacon, BBQ chikcen, and bulgogi.

Now, when I translate this, it comes out as "special horse" bulgogi, but I figure that can't be right. It has to be beef bulgogi prepared in a particular way that translates as "horse". It's not that I don't think that it could be horse as the Japanese do eat horse, but rather that it's really expensive. I'm sure someone out there who needs to feel smarter than me (and may indeed be smarter than me) will correct my bad translation and it'll all be win-win again.

(Okay, the truth is that "uma" is short for "umai" which means "delicious" or "tasty" in this case, but also means "horse" Sorry, smart people.)

Fast Food Christmas deals 2013 (product information)

Image courtesy of Domino's Pizza, Japan.

When you think Christmas dinner, you think of chain pizza places, right? Well, you would if you were in Japan - at least you would as a second thought after you found out that your local KFC no longer had any open slots for Christmas dinner meal reservations. They're the second line of defense in a country which doesn't give anyone the day off for holiday meal preparation. You'd look to fast food, too, if you had to try and pull a "special" meal together after a long day on the job. Domino's is offering the tasty-looking specimen above. It looks big and juicy, doesn't it? Well, if you view it in context, it's not so much a half "chicken" as a "half pigeon".

To understand just how tiny this is, you have to bear in mind that a "large" pizza in Japan is no bigger than and sometimes slightly smaller than a "medium" in the U.S. That is, it was about 12" (25 cm.) in diameter. You can get a Christmas dinner set including this half Cornish game hen with a salad, Coke, and a tiny cake for 4,900 ($47) or 5,900 yen ($57).

Pizza Hut is not to be left our. If you reserve the day before you want the order received, and between Dec. 21 and Dec. 25, and you spend at least 3,000 yen ($29) on your pizza, potatoes, and whatever else is in your fast food meal, you can get the above cake as a "present". The cake is 12 cm. (4.8 in.), so you've getting an itty bitty little thing, but at least it's free!

I checked out the last, and most popular, of the triumvarate of pizza chains in Japan. That would be Pizza-la, and, apparently, they want nothing to do with this Christmas nonsense and don't appear to be making any special offers. I guess they do well enough with their regular Japan-style offerings as well as things like their New Zealand pizza (cheddar cheese, cheddar sauce, chicken, mayonnaise, thick-cut bacon, onion, tomato, and parsley).

Of course, the "grandaddy" Christmas deal in Japan is KFC. They are offering their standard Christmas deal for 3,980 yen/$38 (pictured above) and it includes a medium-size commemorative plate. Note that this plate design, is very similar to the 2010 design on the one my husband and I got during our one and only KFC holiday celebration. It's a little different (people around a tree instead of around a merry-go-round), but similar enough that I confused them on first glance.

Happy Christmas Eve to my readers. This is actually my favorite day as the moment of anticipation is always better than the moment of any sort of reveal. I hope you all have a good one!

Random Picture #112

Image pinched from Domino's Japan's web site. 

I used to teach a lesson about holidays to my student during which I taught them the term "Hallmark Holiday". The awesome thing for Japanese companies is that they not only had their own versions of these types of holidays, but also were continuously folding in more Western holidays. The potential for profit would bring a tear to the eye of a Ferengi (if you're not dorky enough for that reference and too lazy to read the Wikipedia page I've linked to, substitute "capitalist pig" for "Ferengi"). In my last several years in Japan, I had noticed that there was an effort being made to insinuate Easter as a holiday into Japanese culture. I'm sure that it will eventually be just as successful as Valentine's Day as the year's go by, as a hollow mockery of a holiday that gets people to open their wallets even though their hearts are empty.

Mother's day is the next Hallmark Holiday on the horizon and Domino's Japan has an unimaginative offering for those who prefer to phone in their gift and have it delivered to mom's doorstep. They're selling a small heart-shaped pizza with a simple topping of tomato sauce, pepperoni and mozzarella for 1300 yen ($16.29). The size isn't given, but it says that this is good as 1 or 2 servings so it must be pretty small. I guess that it would be considerate of Mom's health not to feed her too much pizza.

Random Picture #89

Click to see a bigger version.

Shakey's Pizza is inexplicably popular in Japan. Well, that's not quite true. There's an explanation, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense in a country of relatively affluent people with ready access to good quality food. They are mainly popular for their incredibly crappy lunch buffet which is a festival of bad carbohydrates (fried potatoes, sparsely topped pizza, and spaghetti). 

The good folks at Shakey's have taken the cake when it comes to "weird" Japanese pizza. The specimen at the bottom has pumpkin, red bean paste, mini marshmallows and black sesame sauce. The marshmallows really are the kicker. This is a culture that reacts with abhorrence at the idea of candied sweet potatoes so my husband and I did a double-take when we saw this sign. Yes, they've finally become "one of us". 

Kameda Seika Pizza Sembei

There was a period of time in my life when I was absolutely bonkers for pizza. I call that the time "when I was young and lived in the United States". Since coming to Japan, several factors have conspired to undermine my devotion to that fattening delight. First, there was the year or so when both my husband and I were working full-time and every Friday night we'd come home and be so exhausted that we'd just order a barely adequate pizza from Pizza Hut. It got to the point where I actually was so sick of pizza, any kind, that I didn't want to touch one.

The second factor, and anyone whose lived in Japan for any length of time will understand this, is that Japanese pizza blows like a gale-force wind. It's not only that they are skimpy with the cheese and meat toppings, but the crusts always fail to inspire. Unless you go to a top of the line pizza place with equally "top of the line" prices, you're going to get something between a pre-made crust and a frozen mass-produced dough. Even when you stumble across a nice-looking Italian place (of which there are approximately a gazillion in Tokyo), there's a very high chance that they're using frozen pies or bases. Trust me when I say there's a very small chance that there's some guy in the back tossing dough, even in a relatively authentic-looking place.

Despite my loss of enthusiasm for pizza, I still love it "in theory" and what better way to get your pizza on in the abstract than going for a cracker with pizza flavoring? I was compelled to buy these for a mere 120 yen ($1.56) by the illustration which shows a copious slathering of pizza seasoning on the top. It actually looks like it has more toppings than the average Japanese pizza on a relative scale.

Tearing open the foil packet, a task I always have trouble with because my puny girl muscles are fueled by years of anemic pizza, I caught a whiff of lovely Italian seasonings - Parmesan, oregano, tomato. The crackers are medium-sized (about 2/3 the size of my palm) and of the "soft" type in Japan, which is to say that they are crispy but airy instead of crispy and very thin. The seasoning was strong, but not too strong and had a nice zesty bite.

These were better than pizza, or at least better than the pizza I can get here. I loved them and gobbled down half the (decidedly small) bag in one sitting. These are a great companion to a soft drink and would also be excellent movie-watching fare. Honestly, if you want pizza and you're in Tokyo, you're probably better off with a bag of this sembei than with the real deal. You'll save money and calories and these taste better.

Nippon Ham "Meat and Vienna" La Pizza

The DSM-IV is a reference guide for those working in psychologically related professions that sets criteria for mental illnesses. I no longer have access to one (and when I did, it was the DSM-III... yes, I'm an antique), but I wonder if there is a disorder listed in there which relates to people who crave bad pizza yet still are disappointed by it when they get it. I'm pretty sure that I suffer from such a disorder (malus pizza opto), and the fact that I bought this package of 3 mini pizzas is proof of that.

When I saw this for 250 yen ($3.00) at Yuakaraya supermarket, I could see enough through the clear parts of the packaging to see that there isn't enough cheese on one of these to satisfy an African Pygmy mouse. I knew that, yet I threw it in my basket anyway because the compulsion to buy bad pizza is utterly irrational. Considering that there was truth in advertising, not only from what I could actually see but also from the illustration in the upper right corner, I can't even hold Nippon Ham responsible for my disappointment.

Each pizza is about 12 cm. wide (4.7 in.) and comes with a decent amount of sauce and a serviceable smattering of little pieces of sausage. There are only 199 calories per pizza, but that's no surprise given the small amount of cheese. Frankly, I knew when I bought them that what I was really getting as "pizza-like bread". My hope was that the crust was a good experience and the flavors of the sauce and wieners pleasant. I don't eat much white bread (I mainly make my own whole wheat bread) and this was an indulgence that I wanted to enjoy with some leftover chicken breast.

While the cheese was practically non-existent, the crust was pretty nice, but not as a pizza crust. It was more like a mildly crispy, chewy bit of bread reminiscent of nan. The only thing is that I wouldn't follow the cooking instructions on the bag for the best results. It recommends 4 minutes at 1000 watts, but I got the best result using 500 watts for about 10-15 minutes. Cooking at the higher wattage for a shorter time just left the bread soft and warm rather than givng a bit of a crispy edge to it.

As a pizza, this really doesn't work at all unless your definition is limited to a smattering of toppings on soft bread. If that floats your boat, then by all means run out and buy this pizza as soon as possible and experience three nights of subjectively good pizza bliss. For me, this worked well as an interesting bit of bread, but it also was a nice base for building a better pizza by adding an ounce (28 grams) of cheese and some leftover cooked chicken. However, I wouldn't buy this again. I'm far more likely to try a new sort of bad pizza next time my disorder kicks in.

Random Picture 40

All I could think of when this menu arrived in my mailbox was "in Japan, pizza eats you." It looks like something is trying to crawl out of there to get me. I'm not sure if this is meant to scare kids into never wanting to eat pizza again or to make people want to buy pizza, but I know on which side I'd land.

Nippon Ham French Bread Pizza

I rarely buy frozen or chilled pizzas in Japan. In fact, I'm pretty sure that aside from a random Lawson VL "Mix" pizza for 100 yen (like this tuna one, only without the tuna and mayo) every once in a blue moon (however often blue moons make an appearance), every pizza I've bought of this type has been reviewed in this blog. 

I like to think I buy such pizzas when I have forgotten how bad they are in Japan, but the truth is that I occasionally sort of crave a bad pizza. That is, I crave one until I actually have one and then I am full of regret and bad carbohydrates. At the very least, I can always get a review out of these things when I take the occasional pizza plunge.

One "pizza" sealed for your protection.

This particular "chilled" pizza is "Japan's #1 brand" of said type of pizza according to the advertising. I have to wonder if that has more to do with the pricing and portions than the quality. I found this bag of 4 hot-dog-bun-sized "French Bread" pizzas at Seiyu supermarket for a mere 298 yen ($3.69). Any time each serving comes in at less than 100 yen ($1.24) each, it's on the cheap side for Japanese prepared foods. Each serving provides 245 calories and a small mix of cheese and a few scraps of ham and sausage. The ingredients include flour, "natural cheese" (as opposed to the ominpresent processed stuff in Japan), tomato puree, bacon, and very curiously, "apple pulp".

It sort of looks like the bottom of your shoe after you have stepped in something really nasty, doesn't it?

I had the first pizza as I imagine they are intended to be prepared. I unwrapped it from it's tight plastic and placed it directly on the toaster oven grate without a tray. The packaging makes a point of telling you not to use a tray so that you can get cheese all over the toaster oven and have a devil of a time cleaning the mess up later. The instructions recommend you toast it for a spare 3 minutes at 1000W, but that wasn't even long enough to melt the cheese. I think I gave it 7 minutes to get the cheese to the melted state you see in the picture above.

As for the pizza itself, there's a reason I compared its size to a hot dog bun and that's the fact that it tastes a lot like the devil's spawn of said bun and French bread, and this is an offspring which favors the dog's bun side of the family in texture. The bread does not get crispy at all if you heat it from the chilled state to a point where the cheese hasn't turned into a mass of brown bubbles. The results were a little better when I froze the remaining "pizzas" and toasted them longer. The bread had time to get slightly crispy before the frozen cheese got too over-cooked.

The flavor of this was pretty much like cheese on bread with the faintest hint of tomato. It wasn't a bad thing, but it was nothing like a "pizza" or even French bread. I did eat the rest, but mainly because it was there and easy to prepare. I also had a vat of lentil soup I had been trying to eat up over several days and this was a decent accompaniment. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're too lazy to put cheese on your own hot dog bun or piece of bread. You can do better even doing that if you use more flavorful cheese.

Viva Buono Bacon Pizza

When my friend April Marie mentioned having a personal pizza for under 600 calories, I developed a craving for pizza. She was kind enough to share her information about the pizza she had bought on her blog, but I couldn't find the Nippon Ham pizza that she was eating at my local market. Once one gets a craving though, it's hard to escape it. I picked up a similar looking pizza from Marudai, maker of a good many prepared foods including various meats, yogurt, and, of course pizzas.



My Marudai bacon pizza had one virtue that April Marie's didn't and lacked one that hers had. This pizza was only 505 calories, but she said hers was "delish" and mine certainly was not. The size of the pizza is quite generous at about 8 inches (20 cm.) in diameter. In fact, I could only eat half of it at once.


The page for this pizza claims it has "plenty of shredded bacon", but it doesn't have plenty of anything except sauce and crust. There's also supposed to be wine and clam in the sauce, but I couldn't really detect anything. The sauce was fine though. It has a pretty strong flavor, but the problem is that the sauce is almost all that can be tasted. The cheese is flavorless and after the pizza cools off, it's like a plastic layer on top. The bacon is so sparse as to present a simple ham aftertaste. The crust is soft, but inoffensive.

This pizza wasn't terrible, and I will eat the other half of it. That being said, it wasn't even as good as the 100 yen tuna mayo pizza that I got from Lawson's. I certainly wouldn't buy it again because I like my pizza to have more than a smattering of cheese on it.

Nippon Ham La Pizza Margherita

I have a confession to make. No, I'm not a man. I'm also not really Japanese. And, I'm not a sentient Japanese love doll come to life. This is a confession with a little "c". I like the sort of bad pre-made pizza that you sometimes get in deli and freezer sections. I prefer good pizza, of course, but I have an affinity for any type. That's why you will continue to see the occasional review of such things here.


Since I prefer a good one, I picked up this "La Pizza" brand pizza, by the folks at Nippon Ham when my friend April Marie Claire recommended this line on her blog. She mentioned that you can have a whole pizza for around 600 calories (depending on the type). She also mentioned that they are fresh, and I believe that is true since they have a relatively current expiration date on them and are kept in the refrigerated section instead of the freezer.

I had the choice of several varieties of pizza, including cheese with meat sauce, double bacon, sausage and beef stew. I decided to go for one that didn't have meat because the sausage and ham made in Japan can sometimes taste a bit funky and that's why I'm talking about the margherita one.

The pizza is a lot smaller than the package would lead you to believe. It's 22-23 cm. around (8.6-9 in.), but the package is 30 cm. (11.8 in.) square. The whole pizza has 624 calories if you skip the oily basil sauce packet. You can add in 41 more calories if you add the sauce.


I am trying to limit portions so I only made half of it at once and I cooked it in the toaster oven with a pre-heated tray. That is, I put the empty tray in the toaster oven and get it hot so that the crust is heated up more quickly. One of the problems I have with small Japanese ovens is that the cheese gets overcooked while the crust stays soggy because the heating element is too close to the top of the pizza. I put the basil sauce on one slice and left the other plain to compare the flavor. Because of the way I cut the pizza into 4 slices before cooking it, the cheese slid off onto the tray a bit and the crust stayed soft despite my efforts to crisp it up with a preheated tray.

One thing that I noticed about this pizza as compared to most of the others I've found in Japan is that it has more cheese, though it's still fairly concentrated in the center. It doesn't smell like much other than plain old vague pizza scent. The flavor is excellent though. The cheese is real and actually tastes like good mozzarella. The tomato sauce could be a bit zestier, but it is fine and fills the bill adequately. It's not acidic or too salty. Japanese pizza sauce that is sold in tubes for people to make pizza toast usually is very oily, acidic and tastes odd. This sauce has none of those bad points. The basil sauce, which I was worried would be too much, was excellent and added a very pleasant dimension. I wished I had put it on both slices.

This was a really nice deli pizza. It's by far the best pre-made heat and eat pizza I've had in 20 years in Japan. A big part of that is the cheese, but the basil sauces was also good. The only down side for me was that the crust was soft, but I think that could be fixed by placing the entire pizza directly on the rack rather than putting it on a tray. Unfortunately, I can't do that with mine since I already cut it into 4 slices and the cheese will leak off the edges if I put it on the rack. I add my recommendation to try this pizza to April Marie's. As she says, "it's delish."

Viva Buono Pizza Wiener Rapper

Several days ago, I spent some time listening to a lot of Weird Al Yankovic's somewhat more recent releases. Every time he said the word "wiener", it struck me as funny, especially when he used it as a euphemism for a male body part (because Al's songs are PG-friendly). It could be my inner juvenile asserting itself, but I think it has more to do with how Al sings the word. After all, he's a pretty funny guy.


I'm not sure if it was hearing him say "wiener" in his songs or if this simply looked like the better of a dismal selection (2 choices) of heat and eat burritos at the market, but I picked this up to eat when I was in a bind for something fast. As I've mentioned before, I rarely eat this sort of prepared food because it is bad for you, low quality and expensive in Japan. As I also said before, I would be more than happy to do a Heat and Eat Review style blog of Japanese food if there were enough of it around and it didn't suck so bad.


The forces that drove me to this type of food were copious amounts of badly-scheduled work. Even though I work from home, there simply was insufficient time between lessons and jobs to whip up something homemade and clean up after it. So, I had a choice of anemic, badly-made bagels in 3 flavors (blueberry, caramel, and ham and cheese), refrigerated pizza and pizza bread with almost no cheese or meat on it, and either a ham and cheese or "pizza wiener" Rapper. I chose this because it seemed to have the best protein potential due to the "wiener", but my expectations were very low. For what it's worth, this contained 311 calories and 15.2 grams of fat (8.9 of saturated fat), but I would never expect this kind of food to be healthy.

This smelled mainly like the wiener. Japanese hotdogs are a bit weird and clearly made with different meat or spices than American ones. A lot of people find them inedible because of this. The wiener in this was not nearly as intense with the strange flavors as some I've had (particularly on pizzas). It did have a very tough casing that was hard to bite through and a pretty mushy interior.

Mainly, this tasted like the hotdog. The "pizza" aspect was pretty close to non-existent. It's mildly spicy in a nondescript way, probably from whatever spices are in the wiener and a bit of a tomato flavor mixed in. The cheese had no flavor and added only texture. I was sure that it was processed cheese, though the ingredients said it was "natural cheese". The tortilla is okay, not bad, but a bit gluey and it sticks to your teeth (as does the cheese).

All in all, this wasn't horrible, but it left me with a stomachache for some reason. It filled the empty spot and it did it fast and with minimal mess (save the knife and plate I had to use to cut it for picture-taking). I also have to give the manufacturers credit for not making it look better than it really is with a misleading picture on the label. I wouldn't buy this again, but I can't say it didn't meet my expectations. That's mainly because my expectations were appropriately low.

And note that I know this wasn't a "snack", but I figure that I eat these so infrequently that a review now and then of these things might be interesting. What is more, I definitely want to remember how I feel about these so I won't buy them again. :-p

Variety Friday: Domino's Sirloin Steak Pizza (& a blog note)

image pinched from the Domino's pizza site

Domino's has come up with what appears to be a manly pizza. Who doesn't find slabs of dead cow on a pizza masculine? This sirloin steak pizza is the newest in their parade of freaky pizzas. Looking at it, I'm wondering how one would logistically handle biting into largish pieces of meat on a slice of pizza. You would have to gobble down all of it in one bite or have razor sharp alligator teeth to tear through it.

Don't be fooled entirely though. They've squeezed in certain girly attributes that may undermine the testosterone boosting aspects of placing large hunks of meat on the pizza. There's grilled eggplant and truffle cheese sauce. I think the truffle part is the white goop artfully squirted in a circle under the meat.

What is more, there are peppercorns on it, but they're not the usual black ones or even the less common white ones. They're pink peppercorns. I'm pretty sure that eating pink peppercorns automatically means you have to start wearing women's underwear under your suit.


If you want to sample this tomato -sauce-less pizza, which also has sauteed onions and steak sauce, you'll have to fork over 4200 yen ($45) for a large or 2800 yen ($29.40) for a medium. I'm guessing it's expensive because a chef is expertly preparing the steak fresh and carefully slicing off the pieces so that you have nothing but the best on your pizza. At least that seems to be what my menu is implying with the picture on the front. If you don't see him behind the red, white and blue uniformed Domino's staff, I'm sure he's just temporarily in the can in back.

••••••••••••••••••••••••

And, as a side note, I'm going to put the "Variety Friday" posts on an extended (but still temporary) hiatus and post a regular review on Friday instead. It isn't because I am having any issues with doing these types of posts, but rather because my review backlog is starting to get unwieldy and I need to deplete it a bit. I like to have two weeks of reviews behind me in case I'm busy or sick and can't work on new ones, but now it's approaching the point where things might be too outdated if I hold onto them for too long.

So, those who wanted more reviews can rejoice at getting 5 reviews a week instead of 4. Those who like Variety Friday posts will have to be a little patient. They'll be back later. Thanks for reading!

Variety Friday: Domino's Millefeuille Pizza

Japan is well-known for its weird pizzas. I've been here long enough that most of them don't even catch my eye anymore. Tuna and corn has become as normal to me as pepperoni and onion. Even artful lattices of mayonnaise squeezed across the top of a pizza elicits a yawn from me after all of this time.

Recently, I got a menu from Domino's in my mailbox which contained a pizza that made (even) me take pause. This one went above and beyond the normal weirdness into a whole new realm of culinary adventure. Domino's has stepped through the pizza looking glass and they've come up with this:

Click this image for a somewhat bigger one on which it is easier to see details.

The basic concept behind this pizza is that it imitates a millefueille pastry by layering thin crusts. The diagram you see on the right under the actual pizza describes the layering as follows:

bottom: Italian crispy crust
2nd layer: baloney sausage and mozzarella "mix cheese"
3rd layer: Italian crust with Camembert pepper cheese
4th layer first half: roast chicken, apple slices, almond slices, tomato sauce
4th layer second half: baloney sausage, grilled eggplant, grilled zucchini, red pepper, tomato sauce

If all of this is just a little too adventurous for you, you can order a pizza with only one side of the toppings. The apple version is called a Normandy Millefeuille and the eggplant and zucchini side is called a Bologna Millefeuille. There may be a place where apple and almonds on your pizza is mundane, but such a land is beyond my limited imagination.

I like apples and eggplant, but I'm not prepared to go for these funky pizzas. They may be incredibly tasty, but I'm just not adventurous enough, particularly when it comes to something which I regard as a relatively expensive indulgence. If I order a pizza, I'm going to be sure it's something I like that is worth the calories and the cash. For your reference, a 25 cm./10 in. medium is 2700 yen (about $26) and a 36 cm./14 in. large is 3950 yen (around $38).

teriyaki chicken, roast chicken (top right), shrimp mayonnaise, jalapeno (middle right), and meat sub (bottom right)

On the bright side, the same menu mentions that Domino's is starting to sell 15 cm. (5.9 in.) hot subs and those are in far more mundane varieties and much less pricey (550 to 680 yen or from about $5.50-$6.80). Such sandwiches are generally only available from places like Subway (of which there are none in my neighborhood) or somewhat expensive coffee shops in Japan. I'll be giving one of these a try, and passing on the funky pizzas.

Copan Italian Pizza French Bread Crisps

"Copan" brand toasted bread snacks have been around for ages, but they haven't really lured me in. Part of the reason for this may be that I'm not sure where they fall on the snack continuum. They seem more like a form of a bread stick than a snack. It was just hard to get excited about something that looked like a flat crouton.

Today, I saw the 42 gram bag of Italian pizza flavor Copan and decided to finally dive in. It was only 98 yen (about a dollar), and the flavor sounded appealing enough. Maybe I was misplacing a craving for pizza.


The bag contains a lot of little 5 cm (2 in.) pieces of what look like slivers of French bread sliced from a tiny loaf. They smell like those jars of "pizza seasoning" you sometimes find in greasy pizza joints. The scent includes tomato, Parmesan cheese, oregano, and a hint of the distinctive yeastiness of bread.

These don't taste like pizza, but that's no surprise. It's unrealistic to expect a little dry bit of bread to be like pizza. What they do taste like is really nicely toasted French bread with a lot of good seasoning. The tomato and cheese flavor are especially present and fairly "real" tasting. There's a nice tanginess to them and a deep savory flavor that comes from adding in some chicken and shrimp flavors. The texture is perfectly crunchy and they are neither too dry nor too oily. Someone definitely did a good job with the toasting process.

Much to my surprise, I loved these. I ate the whole bag (all 230 calories of them) at once. Once you get started, it's really hard to stop eating them. I'd definitely buy these again, provided that I didn't mind consuming all those calories at once.

Lawson Value Line Tuna Mayo Pizza

There's an excellent blog called "Heat Eat Review" which features frozen and ready to eat food reviews. I've often thought that such an idea would be interesting for Japanese frozen or prepared meals, but the truth is that there isn't much of such types of food around relative to the U.S. The fact that women tend to cook most of the time and housewives are still pretty common means people tend to get full and balanced meals rather than grab something quick. Also, the types of food that are available in this area tend to be expensive and of very poor quality. It'd require one to eat an entire meal of junk instead of just the snack size things that I review.

As I mentioned in a former review of a prepared ham and cheese bagel, I rarely buy prepared food, frozen or otherwise. The only time I tend to buy it is when I'm not feeling well and feel too tired or sick to cook. The night before I bought the Lawson's Value Line frozen pizza that I only slept about 4 hours, so I was ripe for an easy meal when I hit the local convenience store for milk. I found this pizza, along with a similar one called a "mix pizza" and decided to give it a go.


The pizza cost 100 yen (about a dollar) and is 14 cm (5.5 in.) in size. The entire pizza has 249 calories, which is what puts it into the "snack" range and not a meal. It comes in a plastic shrink-wrapped package inside of it's main plastic package. I guess they feel it needs the extra wrapping for freezer burn protection. The instructions on the package recommend that you cook this in the toaster oven for 5-6 minutes at 1000 watts, but I found that was not long enough for the cheese to melt or the crust to get a bit brown.


After cooking, the pizza smells odd. It has a bit of a tomato smell, but also a strange nondescript fishy smell which I associate with Japanese food. I'm guessing that smell would be the tuna. While the crust is your standard preformed crust, it actually has a little better texture than average. The outsides is slightly crispy and the inside is nicely chewy. The sauce is inoffensive, but not very flavorful. In fact, the main problem is that aside from the crust and the tomato sauce, there's very little flavor at all. The tuna is more of an aftertaste than an actual topping. The cheese is so sparse as to be undetectable as is the corn.


I should note that I had very low expectations of this given that it's very small and cheap, and frozen pizza in Japan is abysmal on the whole. The crust exceeded my expectations, but the toppings were about usual for a Japanese frozen pizza. This makes for a pretty nice "bread" if you manage to cook it just right in the oven. It really isn't much as pizza though. If you'd like a soft, warm pizza-flavored bread to go along with a salad or as a snack at tea time, this wouldn't be a bad choice. I'd say this is fine as long as you're in the mood for that and nothing more.

Baby Star Crispy Ramen Mini (pizza)

I'm not a ramen fan. In fact, I'm pretty much not into noodles of any kind, though I will eat pasta on occasion. I guess part of the reason for this is the fact that I lived at home during college and never had to subsist on cases of Top Ramen to make ends meet and therefore was denied the dubious salty, carby pleasures of dehydrated noodles. Nonetheless, there is no insignificant sacrifice I won't make on the altar of snack food reviewing so I decided to buy something I never would have purchased before starting this blog.

Bei is the fellow on the left. His twin Bi is on the right. They are dressed in Chinese garb because they endorse ramen. It's important to have ethnically correct cartoon mascots, after all.

Though it boggles the mind that the Japanese need to sell seasoned ramen noodles in little snack packages when they have so many opportunities to eat proper ramen, they do indeed sell it in tiny packets for snacking purposes. I found this 21 gram (.7 oz.) packet in the 4 for 99 yen (99 cents) bin at the local 99 yen shop along with several other flavors.

Since I don't eat ramen, I wasn't familiar with the company that makes these, Oyasu Company (おやすカンパニ). Their slogan, by the way, is "plentiful and happy." They make a variety of ramen under the name "baby star" which has twin mascots named "bei-chan" and "bi-chan". Put their names together and it's "baby" ("ei" in Japanese is pronounced similar to "a" in English). The mascots are garbed differently depending on the flavor of the product. The pizza ramen has the "gondolier Bei" on it because pizza is Italian. If you explore their web site, you'll see that Bei is quite the international dresser. There's cowboy, boat captain, astronaut, farmer, and maharajah Bei among others. Because Japan is a paternalistic culture, poor old Bi only gets one extra outfit.


As one might expect, the bag is full of crispy ramen noodle fragments. They smell like typical pizza seasoning (tomato and cheesy whey, mostly) with a hint of some sort of meaty smell. The ingredients reveal that beef extract is included as well as paprika and cheese, tomato and pizza powders. They are very crunchy, but in such small pieces that it's a bit hard to eat them. You have to grab a whole bunch between your fingers, drop a few down your shirt, and aim the remainder into your mouth. They're actually pretty good, but the pizza flavor saturates your taste buds pretty fast and you get more of a meat flavor mixed with a salty ramen taste.

These are pretty nice and I think they'd satisfy if you wanted a super salty junk food fix in a very tiny portion. The whole bag is 105 calories. It's total trash, but it's enjoyable. I guess that's why so many young people live on ramen throughout their college years.