Nongshim Sweet Potato Snack

One of the lessons that I used to teach Japanese students had to do with symbolic hand or finger gestures. The sign for "ok" in America, creating a circle with thumb and forefinger and raising the other fingers, means "money" in Japan (or so I'm told). Humans do not naturally fall into the same sensibilities about symbols. However, due to globalization, we are coming to share more and more of the them.

I never thought too much about this point until I investigated the web site ran by the  South Korean maker of this snack. I saw that this company is a distributor for American brands that I would not have expected to see abroad. In particular, they sell products made by Welch's, V8, McCormick's, and Kellogg's, and, most strangely to me, Morton. That logo of the little girl with the big umbrella walking through the rain? I'm guessing they must recognize that in South Korea, too. It's weird to consider that they know salt the way I know salt. 

This is my first experience with a product by this company and they lured me in with the promise of a sweet potato experience. The potato on the front is the equivalent of a stick figure in potato form, but he does look pretty happy. I'd like to join him in yam happiness.

I should have looked at the ingredients list before forking over my 99 cents for this 55-gram/1.9-oz. bag of salty snackness. The first item is not sweet potato, but rather is "flour". This is supposed to be a sweet potato snack, not an alchemical abomination! You can't make sweet potato gold out of ground wheat. That is madness.

The second ingredient is sweet potato, but is listed as "white sweet potato". When it comes to sweet potato, I'll admit that I'm a bigoted woman. I like them yellow or orange and am fully prejudiced against white ones. If it's white, it ain't sweet in my opinion. So, I've already gotten off on the wrong foot with this snack and the other ingredients including one that takes up an entire line by itself - fructoooligosaccaride - is not encouraging me to go on.

Nonetheless, I tried to approach this mutant snack with an open mind, and then wished it had stayed closed. The substance within is fried, no doubt, and it is lightly salted, but it is far from being "sweet" or "potato". In fact, what it mostly tastes like is frying oil that has seen far too many re-uses. If you're really eating slow (which I don't recommend as then that frying oil taste is in your mouth all the longer), you can get a very vague somewhat sweet potato-y after taste, but your taste buds have to be flexing all of their buddy muscles to catch this. On a "lucky" bite, you may get an errant bit of sesame seed (a few pieces have one) and it'll taste better. Some are also sweeter than others (no doubt due to getting more sugar-coating), but they'd need a lot more than the occasional extra bit of sugar or sesame seed to make me decide not to throw most of it away.

This was a major disappointment and I won't be finishing the bag. It's not so much that it lacks appeal as the frying oil flavor makes it actively unpleasant. I'd rather have it tasteless than taste like French fries made in oil that had been used all day without a change. It's been awhile since a product has been bad enough to  warrant an unhappy rating, but this one easily took the "prize."

Taiko Sweet Potato Sticks

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the nice things about buying Japanese products in America is that they save me from having to translate the ingredients. While I can read a lot of the characters representing common ingredients now without trouble, there are, at times, unusual things which I need to look up and a bit of time is now saved. That being said, there is a new problem associated with the translations. The English labels are slapped over the information in Japanese such that I have to try and scrape them off to get to the Japanese when I want it. In this case, I wanted to see the name of the company that made the product (not the importer, which was all that was listed in English). I spent five minutes carefully scraping at the residue hiding the information I wanted to extract. Of course, I'm pretty sure nobody but me cares who makes the food I review, but now that I've gone to all this trouble, I'm going to talk about it.

These are made by a company called Taiko Confectionary and it's a company I've never sampled a product from before. They're one of those businesses that is so small that they have little web presence  beyond a couple of basic reference pages with addresses and phone numbers and a map. That means, unfortunately, that this product may be hard to find outside of where I located it in the U.S. (Daiso Japan) or in Japan.

These are called "sweet potato cookies", but they're really not a cookie. They're much more akin to the "bo" or "stick" snacks that are sold to children in Japan. That being said, the ingredients list is certainly in the realm of what suits a cookie. The first ingredient is sugar, followed by wheat flour, bread crumbs, corn grits, starch syrup, vegetable oil, sesame seeds, and only then sweet potato. So, there really isn't much sweet potato in these.

These smell very strongly of black sesame seeds. Each tube is hollow and super crunchy. The hole in the center makes them much easier to eat, though, if you are not careful, it's easy to bite into it the wrong way and send a shower of crumbs into your lap. They are very sweet and those who are sensitive to especially sugary treats may find them overwhelming. Despite being quite sweet, the intense flavor of the black sesame and the somewhat more delicate flavor of sweet potato come through well.

I often complain about "too sweet" sweets and this definitely has that potential, but it worked for me on multiple levels. First of all, I love the crunchy, crispy texture and find biting into one of these very satisfying. Also, there is a sort of shellacking on the outside of them which I'm sure is part of the heavy sugar concentration that works both visually and for the texture. I think that, if these weren't so sweet, there might be a danger of the flavor being flat. Sugar, like salt, is a potent flavor enhancer and works well when optimally applied. I think this is pretty nicely balanced, but it may be too much for some people with different tastes.

Despite all of the sugar, they are only 60 calories each for a cookie as long as the span of my  hand up to my longest finger (about 6 inches/15 cm.). You get a larger size I guess because they are hollow, but it does feel like a pretty substantial treat and pairs well with tea or coffee. I paid $1.50 (120 yen) for these and will absolutely stock up on them again when I find myself at the Daiso Japan. I loved them. They may be pure junk, but they are tasty as all get out.

Random Picture #90

I love the fact that I work near two shops that specialize in regional foods. It allows me to see stuff which is marginally different than that which is sold in Tokyo with different packaging. Take this "Imorin Monroe" sweet potato cakes from Hokkaido. Inside, they are the same old common long-shelf-life sweet potato cakes that you can buy at almost every convenience store and supermarket, but they've been given a Hokkaido cultural twist by naming them after... an... American... movie icon. Hmm. OK, not so much with the Japanese culture here. Still, it's a cute concept, and was worthy of a picture. 

Meiji Pucca Sweet Potato Cookies

Seeing Pucca cookies always reminds me of venerable Goldfish crackers in the United States. It appears that we enjoy eating cookies and crackers in the shapes of certain animals more than others. Actually, I know that probably isn't true. The most likely reason that fish are a shape of choice is that they require very little detail to convey what they are. If you've seen really cheap animal crackers, you're already aware that many of the giraffes, gazelles, and even monkeys come out as little more than amorphous blobs.

I've had very favorable experiences with Pucca before, but I was somewhat wary of a sweet potato version. While I've had plenty of good sweet potato treats in Japan, anything which tends to run on the sweeter side is a bit of a "risk" in that the manufacturers tend to either use a puree which is far too intense and has at least a hint of rotting sweet potato. Pucca tend to be better balanced, but this is a combination which is easy to get wrong.

Like all Pucca, the exterior is a dry pretzel shell without salt injected with a chocolate-based filling through a little hole in the bottom (sort of a belly button for the fish). It has a nice contrasting depth of flavor which usually betrays some earthy rye flour flavors. In this incarnation, I couldn't detect the usual rye notes because the filling's flavor is quite intense. That being said, it is intense in a way which is not so overbearing as to make it unpleasant. This is strong and sweet, but still good.

Each little cookie is 11 calories, and given how intense they are, I was satisfied with just 3 or so at a time. I'm not sure how I'd feel about these if I were to eat a lot of them at once. I tend to think I'd enjoy them less at greater volume. Among the Pucca flavors that I have tried, this is definitely my least favorite, but I'd still eat them again. However, given the slow rate at which I'm consuming the current box, they're likely to disappear as a seasonal treat before I have the chance to buy more. If you're new to Pucca, I'd still say go for the original version with chocolate filling, but if you're an old hand at these flavors and want to try something new, these might bring a smile to your face.

You can find these pretty much anywhere at the moment and they're generally only 100 yen ($1.20) per box for 46 grams (1.6 oz.). However, most sweet potato treats are seasonal and vanish by spring so you'll want to try them sooner rather than later. I'd be surprised if these were around past next April or May.

If you'd like to download some desktop pictures with the cute Pucca fish, you can get them here.

Pasco Sweet Potato "Stick"

When I was a kid, I remember visiting my maternal grandmother and having sandwiches with her "weird bread". That is, bread that was made with whole wheat, grains, or whatever that made it brown and "gross". I couldn't understand how anyone would choose such oddness over white bread. Now that I'm "old" (46), I can't see the appeal of the gluey cushions of nothingness that I perceive white bread to be. To me, it's just a step removed from cake, particularly in its Japanese incarnation.

Because I eat whole wheat bread and baked goods nearly everyday, turning to the Japanese bread section for anything is rare for me. I realize that most of the bread is relatively finely made with gobs of fat and sugar to make it soft as a cloud and to lend some very fine textural elements, but it just doesn't float my aging boat. However, I pondered these Pasco sweet potato sticks mainly because I'm sucker for all things sweet potato. Also, at only 65 calories per stick, they looked like very fine fodder for tea time.

I tried eating this three different ways. First, I had a bite as it came out of the package. The sense was decidedly "meh". It mainly tasted like fairly decent white bread with a hint of sweetness and a detectable margarine flavor. The sweet potato didn't come through much at all. Second, I wrapped it in foil and heated it a bit in the toaster oven such that it was warmed, but not too hot to handle. This made it slightly better as the texture of the bread was softer and seemed fresher and it seemed a tad sweeter. Finally, I heated it to a point where it was quite hot to handle using the same method and this is where it seemed to "wake up".

By getting it really hot (about as hot as you can manage without seriously burning your fingers), the sweet potato turned creamy and soft and the flavor seemed to open up. I could really taste the sweet potato as an element only when the bread was in this state. The only problem is that "near nuclear" hotness doesn't last long so they have to be savored rather rapidly if you want the maximum enjoyment.

I liked this, but I'm not a fan of super sweet pastries. This was quite subtle in its flavors and not very sweet. You really have to be as much a fan of plain, relatively decent quality white bread and sweet potato to want to eat something like this. In many ways, this type of "pastry" typifies a strong difference between Japanese and American tastes. There are plenty of these sorts of sticks or twists in Japan with mixtures of chocolate, "cream" (like custard), red beans, and sweet potato. They are all quite similar to this one in that they aren't incredibly sweet and have subtle flavors.

The big question which I find hard to answer is whether I'd buy this again. I probably would, but not soon and not often. I tend to favor whole grains and stronger flavors for breakfast, and I try to avoid products made with white flour because of the potential for a blood sugar spike and crash (which will make one very hungry after a short period of time). I could see buying this again when I was in the mood for a change of pace, but only perhaps once or twice a year.

Ryoma Sakamoto Purple Potato Tart Crunky

And so, we come to the end of my dalliances with political revolutionary Ryoma Sakamoto themed candies, because, frankly, I'm sick of them. His likeness has been slapped on everything these days and the snacks his face is applied to are nothing special. Though I liked the yuzu cookies, the other items haven't really lit my fire. This Crunky would be included in that sad group.

Frankly, Crunky has really let me down in most of its variations. While I like (not love) the regular bar, its malt puffs don't seem to work well with other flavor mixtures or textures. I think the puffs are too strongly flavored and compete with whatever they're with, and mainly milk chocolate works with them. Someone at the Crunky product design level needs to say that when they use the Crunky brand to crank out derivative products, they should use bland crispy rice, not their regular malty puffs.

I had some small expectations for this because "purple potato" is essentially the brother of another color of the yellow-fleshed sweet potato, and I love sweet potato. The candy even smells nicely sweet potato-ish and the very first sense on the tongue also conveys that lovely tuber's essence. Unfortunately, that hint rapidly turns into strong sweetness and malt puff flavor once you start crunching your funky crunchy little morsel. At the end, you're just in textured malt puff and buttery white chocolate land. If you adore white chocolate, that's not a bad place to live, but it wouldn't be my residence of choice.

You can pick these up nearly anywhere for about 100 yen ($1.20) for a box of 10 individually wrapped slabs. Each is only 22 calories and 3.9 grams (.14 oz.), so you're essentially getting a Hershey's kiss portion with about three times the wrapping with every bit. They aren't bad at all, merely not great. Though I think that they may be loved by malt puff and white chocolate fans, I wouldn't buy them again and I think it'll take me some time to finish the box. I'd rather spend my calories on other chocolates most days.

Yaokin Yaki Imo Youkan

Only after typing the name of this blog post did I realize what a tongue twister it might be. Perhaps it would be an enjoyable exercise to attempt to say it five times fast. Perhaps, not.

Youkan is a traditional Japanese sweet which is usually made of jellied beans and sugar. It's sold in brown, green, or yellowish bricks in a variety of shops. I have had red-bean-based youkan before (which looks brownish), though I have never purchased it myself. Salesmen at my former office used to buy it occasionally and give it to the office staff who remained in the office as a treat from whatever city they traveled to for business. Note that this sort of procuring of regional treats for the office-bound coworkers is a very common thing in Japan.

I remember feeling that youkan was okay, but too sweet and lacking in strong flavor. Sure, it tasted like beans, but red beans don't necessarily carry a strong taste by themselves, and less so in youkan form. I think the fact that youkan is made with agar (a seaweed derivative used for gelatin-style foods) dilutes the overall concentration of whatever the main flavoring element is. If you look at the youkan samples on the Wikipedia page, some of them are translucent rather than opaque, which shows that the beans or whatever are thinned and therefore not as intense in taste. To me, youkan tasted a bit like intensely flavored sweetened water drained off of beans you'd cooked.

Since I can't imagine buying youkan in a large quantity (which is how it's generally sold, though not always) for myself, I jumped at the chance to sample this single-serving (26 grams/.9 oz.) sweet potato version when I found it at Seiyu department store. I can't remember the price, but this was in the kid's sweets section and couldn't have been more than 50 yen (55 cents).This is made by Yaokin, a company whose kid's snacks I have reviewed on several previous occasions.

It annoys me that there is no nutrition information on the package or in the company's catalog (which I downloaded specifically in the hopes of getting such information) since I like to keep tabs on the calories of snacks I eat. I found a web site which offers basic nutritional information on Japanese foods which asserts that youkan in general has 89 calories per 30 grams, which would make this snack weigh in at 77 calories (if their stats are correct). The site also asserts that youkan is rich in fiber.

This youkan actually tasted like, well, sweet potato. It's a bit sweeter because it's made with sugar, but it also has an intensity or aftertaste to it which is either a result of the processing of the youkan, or the way in which the sweet potato itself is handled. It's not a bad taste necessarily, but it takes some getting used to and may not appeal to everyone. It tastes like concentrated Japanese sweet potato skin, though only as an aftertaste, so it's not too overwhelming but I could easily see how some might actively find it unpleasant.

The texture is one of the main reasons to choose to consume youkan. It's smooth, easy to bite into, and a bit like very firm, finely grainy gelatin. I think that it's supposed to be appealing in summer if you chill it, though I ate this at room temperature. It's good, but may be an acquired taste.

I was rather torn about this as a treat. I enjoyed the flavor and texture, and felt the sweetness balance was just right. The main problem I have is that the second ingredient (after sweet potato) is sugar and the aftertaste issue. That being said, if I were in the proper mood, I could definitely seeing buying this again. I can't say that it has inspired me to sample all sorts of youkan, but this sweet potato version is worth a revisit.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment.

Cisco's Shittori Sweet Potato Cookies

A few of my students know about my blogs, including this snack blog. I'm not trying to hide them from anyone, but I'm also not foisting them on Japanese folks. The main problem with telling a student about my outside projects is that they will feel somewhat bound to actually read or follow what I do out of politeness. That's a burden I don't want to put on them.

When my student looked over this blog, she told me she was amazed at the variety of snacks that I wrote about because she had never seen or experienced the vast majority of them. Considering she has two children, and presumably has purchased snack foods for them, that is an interesting reflection on the scatter shot nature of availability of certain foods in Japan. You really don't know what you'll find or where you'll find something new. There must be an elaborate manner in which shelf space is negotiated in Tokyo that I'd love to gain insight into, but I'm guessing it isn't the sort of information companies would like to share. After all, if they can effectively squeeze their products onto hotly desired shelves, they're not going to tell anyone else how they manage it.

I discovered these cookies at Don Quixote, a chain of stores that carries a variety of goods including novelties, housewares, clothing, and food. There are branches of this shop in Japan and Hawaii, though I don't think you can find them anywhere else in the United States. The package contains six 5 cm x 3 cm (2 in. x 1.2 in.) cookies and cost 98 yen ($1.07). The company that makes this is Nissin, a company that is better known for its cold breakfast cereals than its cookies, though they do make a small variety of cookies that tend to show up in 100 yen shops as well as some other sweets.

The ingredients for this includes the usual and expected suspects like flour, sweet potato, and sugar, but interestingly they also include white bean jam. It was my hope that the inclusion of sweet beans would lend these a nice, moist texture. They smelled pretty good, like cookies and sweet potato. Each cookie is 41 calories. The taste was disappointing. They're not very sweet, and though taste decently like sweet potato, the texture is a bit strange. In fact, it reminded me a bit of Play-doh.

These cookies were okay. I ate 5 of the 6 in the bag and then left the other sit around for awhile and eventually threw it away. It wasn't that they were really bad or anything. They just weren't very good. I think a bit more salt or more sweetness may have pepped up the flavor more. They also may have benefited from more butter, but the real issue was the texture. These cookies are moist (which is what "shittori" means), but that isn't enough. Frankly, I'd go for a traditional satsuma imo treat from a real sweets shop rather than these. I think these cookies are actually supposed to be an imitation of those traditional sweets, but they are too pale a one.

Lotte Kagoshima Sweet Potato Cake

While stumbling around Okashi no Machioka snack shop, I noticed that there seems to be a new line of snacks featuring a graphic of a stern-looking Japanese gentleman in old-style garb. The man who is represented is Ryoma Sakamoto, a political revolutionary in the mid to late 1800's. Is it me, or is that sort of a weird thing to put on a box of cakes?  This particular line of Lotte snacks represent areas of Kagoshima prefecture associated with Mr. Sakamoto and were released on June 22.

There are 6 snacks in this campaign, and I'll be reviewing at least two of them. Besides these sweet potato cakes, I also bought a box of yuzu (Japanese citrus fruit) cookies, but there are also purple potato Crunky chocolates, Toppo castella-flavored pretzel sticks (like an inverted Pocky), and some yuzu gum which I haven't located yet. In fact, I seriously considered doing a Ryoma Sakamoto snacks theme week, but most of these items are multi-packs and I could't finish them off for weeks if I bought that many of them. And frankly, doing a week of snacks themed around a guy who was assassinated at 33 and whose Smith and Wesson revolver is picture on his Wikipedia page is just too damn weird.

There are 6 cakes in the box and I paid 198 yen ($2.19). That price will probably go down as the product line rapidly ages. The back of the box shows a statue of a proud and tall Sakamoto with what looks to be a tiny Japanese woman slightly behind and off to his left looking on in admiration. I'm guessing this statue is in the area where the sweet potatoes used in this confection are from. Frankly, it looks a bit sexist in design to me as it brings to mind the idea of women walking 7 paces behind men in old feudal Japan.

When I unwrapped the foil packet and gave these a sniff, they smelled excellent. There was a definite good whiff of Japanese sweet potato. The first bite revealed what seemed to be brown sugar and buttery notes as well as sweet potato, though I will note that these use margarine (not butter). The second bite, however, actually wasn't quite as good as a strange flavor seemed to be revealed. The flavor seemed similar to coconut, but wasn't really quite the same. By the third and fourth bites, this flavor dominated and I couldn't detect the sweet potato much. I wonder if that weird flavor was a result of the use of "natural cheese" (probably Gouda if I know Japanese snack makers, and I do). Note that these are colored with anatto in order to bring them closer to a potato color. There is no real sweet potato in them, but rather a powder. Oddly, they also have cocoa powder in them.

These were fine, but not quite what I expected. Certainly as a generic sweet they're fine, if a bit oddly seasoned. The texture is moist and they're a bit fatty. Each small (16.5 gram/.6 oz.) cake is 77 calories, which isn't bad even for a morsel like this. I just wish the sweet potato flavor weren't diluted by so many other tastes. I will slowly eat the remainder of the box when I am in the mood for cake, but I'm quite certain I wouldn't buy these again.

Calbee Biyori Snack Osatsu

Calbee is a very large producer of salted snacks in Japan. Their potato chips line the salted snack food aisles more than any other manufacturers. The company employs nearly 1400 people. You'd think one of them could design a professional web site for this product, or that they could afford to hire some independent contractor to do a nice site for it, but the site for this looked like an old Geocities account (the site has gone away since I wrote this review so I'm sorry there's no link to it).



I found this 20 gram (.7 oz.) bag for 40 yen (44 cents) at Seiyu supermarket. Seiyu has a far more impressive snack section than any of my local stores and I go there with my husband once every two months and compile a huge pile of snacks for future reviewing. I still haven't worked through everything that I bought in the last trip. It appealed to me on two levels. First of all, it's sweet potato and, second, it's 103 calories for the whole bag. I like to keep my snacking calories no higher than 100 so the portion size really called to me.

These are heavily processed chips made with sweet potato and flour. They're seasoned with a dusting of sweet potato powder and a hint of sugar and are very lightly sweet and have a whisper of salt. Air should be listed as an ingredient given how light they are, but I'm not complaining. They're pleasantly crispy and fun to eat. I recommend eating them slowly by letting the chip rest on your tongue for several seconds so the subtle flavor sinks in.

Flavor-wise, I wish that the sweet potato flavor was somewhat more intense, but on the whole I really liked these. They make an enjoyable light treat and are fresh and crispy. I'd definitely consider keeping a bunch of these one hand for calorie-controlled snacking.

Kinsei Purple Potato and Sweet Potato Jellies

In what I have to imagine is a last gasp of seasonal treats for winter, I came across this bag of purple and sweet potato jelly candies at Seiyu supermarket. The front of the bag touts the fact that they have potato "paste" in them. I'm not certain how one makes "potato paste", but it doesn't sound appetizing. Nonetheless, seeing these little jewel-colored cubes of candy through the clear plastic package drew me in.

Like many of these relatively unglamorous types of candies, these are made by a "no name" company which doesn't have a web presence. I couldn't research anything about them and I can only say that their logo and name, Kinsei (金成), are unfamiliar to me.

Most of the hard candy, jellies, and manju that are sold in clear plastic packages in bigger markets are made by such companies and they're the final frontier in Japanese snack adventuring. They're far less likely to be constructed in the same manner as European-style treats or contain familiar flavors and they're a bigger mystery to those who are unfamiliar with Japanese snacks. I like to try these types of things, but I often feel they are of far lesser interest to my readers than things like Pocky, Japanese KitKats, chocolates, and Hi-Chew. Also, frankly, I can't eat them fast enough to sample them constantly as they tend to be in family-size bags.

There were 15 candies in my bag and 10 were purple potato and only 5 sweet potato. I don't know if this was just the luck of the draw, or intentional. It did seem like quite an uneven distribution though. I had to calculate the calories based on the weight of the entire bag because the information was only given as per 100 grams. Each candy is about 31 calories.

note the edible wrapping sticking far above the cube of jelly

When you unwrap a jelly, it has what looks like an over-sized thin bit of plastic film wrapped around the sticky cube. The film is edible rice wrapping which is similar to the coating on medical gel caps. I had to figure this out by tearing some off and putting it in my mouth to see if it'd melt. It doesn't add any taste, but it is an odd texture sensation to bite through what feels like thin cellophane wrapping. It's hard to escape the feeling that you were too stupid to take off the wrapper. Soon enough, the wrapper has melted away though.

Both of the jellies are firm, but not rubbery. They are easy to bite into and chew. The texture seems strange at first, but I quickly got used to it and rather liked it. It's like a very chunky version of a classic Western-style fruit gem without all of the sugary coating. It also turned out that it didn't matter how many yellow and purple cubes there were as they did not taste appreciably different. Both had a nice sweet potato flavor, were quite sweet, but not too over the top and the exact same texture.

I really liked these. In fact, the more I ate them, the more I enjoyed them and thought one or two were a great sweet to have with a cup of tea. If you like sweet potato and jelly candies, definitely give these a go if you run across a bag of them. The only thing keeping these from getting a "very happy" rating is the wrappers. I wish they were more carefully wrapped so that the excess didn't stick out around the cube and make you think you were eating plastic.

Roasted Sweet Potato KitKat

It's no secret that I am not a great food photographer and I'm comfortable with this fact. I don't consider myself so much a purveyor of great pictures as much as a writer. The pictures are just here to make the blog a little more interesting to look at and to show people what things look like as a point of reference. That being said, despite their second-class citizen status, I spend as much or more time taking and processing pictures as I do writing the reviews.

One of the things that causes me a great deal of consternation is the lack of light in my apartment. I literally get no sunlight at all because of my apartment's position in the bottom, center part of our apartment building and because we are surrounded by taller buildings. I've seen all sorts of tutorials on how to take better food pictures and they all start with natural light and reflectors so that you don't get all sorts of glare off of the things you're taking shots of when the flash is used. At any rate, I shrug my shoulders and keep taking my mediocre shots.


Every once in awhile, there is a food that I try to take a shot of which just kicks my ass. That is, no matter how hard I try, my camera won't focus. Usually, this happens with light-colored foods like white chocolate candy or light-colored cookies. I'm talking about this because my ass got handed to me by this sweet potato KitKat. I took 12 shots during two separate picture-taking sessions and then gave up. This is why you don't get yet another shot of the insides of a KitKat that looks pretty much like any other KitKat. I'm sure you're all disappointed but will somehow manage to carry on with your days as if all were well and good. (If you're really desperate, you can look at the daigaku imo KitKat, which looks very similar except that the filling between the wafers on it is kind of grey and this one had a whiter filling.)

This KitKat has been around for months and months and I've avoided it because it's sold as part of a multi-pack which is includes 7 regular milk chocolate KitKats and 6 roasted sweet potato ones. What is more, it was usually sold for over 300 yen ($3.35). I just didn't want or need a lot of plain KitKats along for the ride and refused to buy it despite quite a strong desire to sample the sweet potato ones. Fortunately, these finally went on sale at Okashi no Machioka for 197 yen ($2.20) and that was cheap enough for me to cave in.

I should have caved earlier because I loved this KitKat. It smells of white chocolate and sweet potato, which is to say, quite sweet. It tastes very sweet as well and has just the right amount of sweet potato flavoring. This is a difficult balance in some cases. Too much tastes like rotting potato and too little makes it hard to detect the flavor at all. There's also a certain sense of "creaminess" to it. It's hard to pin down but it's both a flavor and a sense of texture, though the bar is pretty much your usual firm chocolate with crispy wafer bar.

Each bar is 69 calories, and I should be glad that these are too expensive to get just any time and that they are made less appealing because of the inclusion of regular bars. I'd be wanting to have these all of the time if I could just buy them as single bars any time. If you like real sweet potatoes, there's a decent chance you'll like these quite a lot.

This has been reviewed at many other blogs by people far less fussy than me, but the easiest one for me to find a review on: Jen's KitKat Blog.

Halloween Manju (Pumpkin and Sweet Potato)

I usually don't post on Saturday, but this is a special extra for Halloween. A few weeks ago, my husband and I picked up some fresh manju (cake filled with sweetened bean or other traditional fillings) at a shop near the local train station. They were cute, and we both like manju. The orange one is kaboucha or Japanese pumpkin and the brown one is sweet potato.

These sorts of sweets are made exclusively by one shop and cannot be bought just anywhere. They are, essentially, like the product of a bakery. That is why this is a special post rather than a real review. Not only can my readers not buy these unless they happen to visit the same shop as us (or the same chain), but the chance that this exact same treat will be around at this time next year is pretty low. Mainly, this is just a one-off for some pictures of the type of cute seasonal fare you can get in Japan.


The pumpkin one has a bean/pumpkin mixture. I thought it tasted strongly and pleasantly of Japanese pumpkin (like a butternut squash), but my husband couldn't taste the pumpkin element at all. He said it was pleasant and nicely sweet, but couldn't really pick out the pumpkin. I ended up eating half of his as well as all of mine (the sweet potato one).


The sweet potato one has a chocolate exterior and sweet potato mix interior. You can see little bits of mashed sweet potato in it. The outside coating was surprisingly intense in cocoa flavor and overwhelmed the sweet potato flavor at first, but it was revealed a bit more fully after the first bite.

Both of these were fresh, moist, and really tasty. I think the cake exterior, which is very moist and a bit gummy (which sounds bad, but isn't), is made from yam flour. If you visit Japan, this is exactly the sort of thing you want to try from local shops and eat while it's absolutely fresh. You really can't beat this sort of experience, and it's the type of thing that isn't nearly as good the next day.

Happy Halloween to all of my kind readers!

Harvest Sweet Potato Biscuits

Harvest "biscuits" (from Tohato) have been around for about 30 years and I think I've eaten them once or twice during my 20 years in Japan. It's not that there is necessarily anything wrong with them so much as they're just not all that impressive. Like many other less than exciting food stuffs in Japan, they seem like they should be healthy because they aren't covered in frosting or chocolate and don't have a fatty filling, but they're really fairly caloric for what they are. A packet of 5 crackers, each about 6 cm. (2.4 in.) in diameter is about 60 calories.


The main appeal for me of the plain ("butter") Harvest biscuits is that they have a noticeable coconut flavor and aren't too sweet. That being said, they also aren't all that flavorful. I'm not sure what the intended market is supposed to be, but I'm guessing these are supposed to be a light treat to have with tea. They may actually be good for dipping in your tea, but I didn't test that theory out.


I picked up these because I was in a sweet potato treats frenzy. There seemed to be new goodies everywhere and these got roped in in my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten how boring these are. They're called "biscuits", as if they were a type of cookie, but they're really just sweet crackers with a sprinkling of sugar on top. They smell very much like the plain version of Harvest Biscuits. That is to say they smell like coconut with just a hint of sweet potato. The sweet potato flavor is a little more prominent than the scent conveys, but coconut still dominates. I love coconut, but I don't buy a sweet potato biscuit for that reason.

These are nice enough, and I will definitely finish the bag through time. However, they just aren't anything special. If you love lightly-sweetened crackers with a bit of coconut and sweet potato, these may even light your fire, but don't kid yourself about them being not as bad for you because they're so unassuming in composition. I just found them too boring and I wouldn't buy them again.

Note: If you'd like a desktop picture featuring the cracker with a smile on the cover of the packet, it can be downloaded at the bottom of the page here.

Tohato All Osatsu Cookies

If you're a kid and offered a choice of cupcakes, you will always take the chocolate one. The coconut one is probably your last choice, though raisin may trail behind even coconut. One thing about growing up is different sorts of food gets you worked up. It's not that chocolate isn't great, but you've spent your whole life gobbling chocolate and it's lost some of its luster.

I realize that the previous paragraph is likely heresy to some people, but if I were offered the choice of a chocolate chip cookie or a sweet potato cookie, I'd take the sweet potato one hands down. For the record, I'd also take a pumpkin or chestnut one over chocolate. I love chocolate, but it's pretty predictable and I'd like my calories to carry a bit more interest. I know that I risk dozens of chocolate lovers (possibly hundreds) wanting to beat me to death with Hershey bars, but there the truth is in its vegetable-preferring honesty.


In my quest to track down and sample all of the "All (insert flavor here)" brand of cookies, I was delighted to come across these sweet potato ones. Previously, I favorably reviewed the All Cranberry VEPlus ones. These cookies are similar in construction, though different in size. The cranberry ones were mini cookies and these are full-size at about 5 cm. square (about 2 in.). Each cookie is 28 calories and there are 14 in the bag. I bought these on sale for 98 yen (about $1) at a local supermarket.

The cookies taste pretty much like sweetened sweet potato mixed with a relatively bland biscuit-like cookie. The cookies are made like a flat bar cookie with a 2 layers of cookie dough sandwiching in some dried sweet potato. They're slightly chewy because of the sweet potato (which is like a mashed raisin after drying) and not too sweet. The texture of the cookie is between a cracker and bread. It sounds bad, but it's actually pretty nice. They look dry, but are tender.

I really liked these and think they'd make a great cookie to have with tea as an early evening snack. At 112 calories for 4 cookies, you could have quite a few without eating too much and I think they're likely better for you despite being a cookie. Besides being a sucker for sweet potato, I also love varying textures and these are unique in a pleasurable way. I'd definitely buy them again, but I think some people might feel they aren't decadent enough to be a real treat.

Tirol Purple Potato Chocolate

When I was a kid, purple was my favorite flavor for pretty much anything. My mother bought plastic tubes of syrup which you stuck in the freezer and then squeezed out and sucked on until your tongue turned purple. Purple was also my favorite lollipop, Kool-Aid, and sno-cone. Of course, "purple" was supposed to mean "grape", but none of that kid's stuff tasted like real grape. I don't know what flavor it was, but it was probably sugar, purple food coloring, and a little citric acid for bite.


As one becomes an adult, purple food starts to take on a different feel. Except for grapes, it seems like a "wrong" color for food as it carries with it the memory of those artificial treats from when I was too young to know or care what I was eating. For this reason, purple potato Tirol chocolate looks funky. It smells great though, like a yummy roasted sweet potato that you buy from a cart on the street in Tokyo in winter.


My candy melted a little across the top even though we haven't seen a day higher than 83 degrees and I have been keeping this in the refrigerator full-time. My guess is that it happened in transit and is a result of the fact that the chocolate coating is relatively soft. This makes it easy to bite into. The coating is fairly sweet and carries a strong, but not overpowering sweet potato flavor. The cookie adds texture and has no flavor of its own. When I cut this in half and saw that the center was a cookie, I was disappointed and thought that some sort of bean jam or mochi filling might have been better. After eating it though, I think that the cookie was probably the best choice to cut the sweetness a bit.

This was 40 yen (about 37 cents) at a local Family Mart and has 52 calories for its 1 inch square (2.54 cm) size. It's a nice little morsel if you love sweet potatoes (and I do). I'd definitely consider buying it again, though I'm not sure that I could eat more than one at a time. It's unique and enjoyable, but not the sort of thing you're going to put away in large amounts. I'd count that as a benefit.

Sweet Potato Chocolate Biscuits

Even though I'm not a fan of mixing chocolate with vegetables like sweet potato or pumpkin, I find it hard to resist anything containing either of those vegetables. When I saw this box of chocolate sweet potato cookies, I immediately thought of Koala's March biscuits because the hexagonal box shape is the same, they both sell for about 100 yen (about a dollar) and are typically stocked near the cash register. However, Koala's March cookies are made by Lotte and these are made by Glico.

The box features a happy cartoon sweet potato winking at you as a little girl tugs at a vine attached to it. I never understood the logic of having a happy version of the thing being chopped up and eaten as a representative on the packaging. Am I supposed to think the sweet potato coyly wants to flirt with me until I decide I want to eat it (hence the winking)? The package also boasts that there is 3% sweet potato and 1.7% cocoa mass in the cookies. They don't boast about it on the front, but eating all 50 grams (1.7 oz.) of these will set you back 259 calories.


The cookies are quite small and there are about 20 of them in the box. It'd be very easy to eat them all in one sitting from a volume point of view unless you were making a concerted effort not to do so. They're so tiny that eating them feels a little like tossing goldfish crackers or popcorn in your mouth.

The cookies smell vaguely of chocolate and even less so of sweet potato. The first bite reveals a very strong sweet potato taste which is not entirely pleasant. Once your taste buds get over the flavor shock, the sweet potato flavor mellows a lot. As long as you keep eating these tiny, crispy cookies, you're having a good experience. If you give your tongue time to recover, then it starts all over again with a big burst of overly strong flavor. Clearly, they're not kidding about being 3% sweet potato.

The chocolate flavor is very weak. To get any sense of it, you have to let the side with chocolate on it melt on your tongue for awhile. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this though as I think the balance of chocolate to sweet potato is pretty good when you just eat them as you would any other cookie. These are nice and I'd certainly consider getting them again if I was in the mood. I'm not sure that they could be any better, but I wouldn't say that they're absolutely the greatest cookie ever. However, they're a nice enough tea time treat for their price and the size.