Nittou Relay Plum Kombu Soup/Tea with Red Pepper

Sorry for the big label residue. There was an English label that was stubborn about being torn off.

There's an old SNL commercial spoof in which a couple argue over whether or not a product, Shimmer, is a floor wax or a dessert topping. Someone appears to be similarly confused about this packet of powdered foodstuff. It's referred to both as a soup and as a tea. The manufacturer's press information says that it has ume (plum) tea to refresh, but the package calls it "soup".

This actually raises a question that I've had come up recently in another context. It's the sort of question that only someone who reviews food for fun (not really "for a living", as the only living I could make would be sleeping over sewer grates and begging for pennies in front of Peet's Coffee based on my blogging income). That question is, "what makes "tea" tea?" This comes up because I have been sampling Numi's savory tea for review and those flavors include tomato mint, carrot curry, and broccoli cilantro. The Numi includes actual tea leaves as well as dehydrated vegetables, and, it's frankly, dreadful, but clearly there is no doubt that it can call itself a "tea". It may be horrible to drink, but there's no identity crisis to complicate the discussion.

This product is different because it includes no actual tea leaves. It has powdered kelp, red pepper, salt, sugar, plum, labiate leaf, MSG, citric acid, and labiate flavor. Techically, I guess this is a tisane, but it's not like we call anything which does not include tea leaves a tisane. Much herbal tea does not contain tea leaves, but nobody will call it anything but "tea".

So, semantics aside, let's get to this product. And, incidentally, it's actually soup, not tea of any sort. It looks like a soup, tastes like a soup, and has the savory properties of soup (Numi savory tea be damned!). What is more, it's a very tasty, low calorie soup which I wish I could pick up regularly at any old American market. 

The preparation method is to take 1/2 cup of hot water and then stir the powder into it. This produces something like looks like water from your fish tank that has not been cleaned for far too long. After stirring, the cloudy bits of kombu (kelp) move around the glass like a murky lava lamp. Mind you, I generally don't make my soup in a clear drinking glass, but did so to get a picture for my readers. I wouldn't recommend doing this in anything which doesn't have a handle unless you want to burn your fingers.

The soup mainly smells like the plum. When I say "plum", don't think of American sweet plums, but Japanese umeboshi (pickled plum). It lends a piquant acidic flavor that is the first thing that hits your tongue when you taste the soup. This is quickly followed up by the red pepper, which is just hot enough to add spice and heat the back of your throat, but not burn a hole through your tongue. The balance of these two major elements is perfect. I couldn't taste the kelp at all. I'm sure it was there adding flavor depth to a limited extent, but it was pretty overwhelmed by the plum, pepper, and salt. In fact, salt is the first ingredient.

For the serving size, this is pretty salty, unsurprisingly. A 2-gram packet provides 360 mg. of sodium. Even though sugar is an ingredient (the second one), this is listed as having zero calories. I'm guessing it's one of those deals where there are few enough calories per serving that they don't have to measure them. If you're on a diet which allows lots of salt, this makes for a pretty handy option when you're craving salty food or, as the package suggests, might want to spice up your pasta or rice. You can stir a packet into pasta or dump the soup over rice for a tasty variation.

I bought this at Daiso Japan for $1.50. There are 7 packets so that's a pretty reasonable price per serving. I would warn anyone who decides to try this not only that it is salty, but also spicy in a way which may not suit just everyone. If you're a fan of umeboshi and don't mind a little heat though, I think this is absolutely worth a try.

Yawataya Mini KitKat

When I was given wasabi KitKats, I remember having a discussion about chocolate with one of my students in which I mentioned that putting chili in chocolate was fairly common in America. She was shocked, and grossed out, at the idea of this combination. Of course, she thought that including wasabi was also pretty weird, but accepted it as something reasonable as a regional variation for novelty value. This is one of those rare cases when a combination is actually a bit stranger in Japan than in the West. I've been reading about American releases of chili paired with chocolate on other blogs for years.

If you look at the top of this box, you can see that there is an old-timey picture in sepia (because that's how we can tell it's "old-timey"). This is because this flavor is supposed to represent what was popular in the Shinshu area during the Edo period. The origin of the hot pepper that is used is thought to be the Amazon basin rather than Japan. It's a transplanted flavor that is commonly called "togarashi" in Japan. Apparently, we have Columbus to thank for spreading it all over the globe, first to Europe and then to Asia. I doubt that makes up for all of the stuff the Spanish did to indigenous peoples nor does it make up for the fact that he is seen as discovering something which was hard to miss and probably was located by many explorers before him, but, hey, credit where it is due. He spread some hot peppers for us all to enjoy, especially the folks in Nagano (formerly the Shinshu area).

I picked this box of 5 mini KitKats up at the airport on my way out of Japan. I don't remember what I paid, but the retail price according to Nestle Japan's web site is 350 yen ($4.38). As is so often the case with these types of KitKat, it represents significantly bad value for the quantity, but one does not buy these for the volume, but rather the novelty. Each KitKat is two mini fingers (about the size of one and a third regular KitKat fingers) and has 67 calories.

When I opened the packet on these, I smelled a very pleasant bittersweet chocolate smell. I deeply inhaled the scent of the bar to try and detect any spiciness or hint of the chili pepper, but there was really no hint. My first bite yielded a mild, slightly sweet bittersweet chocolate flavor with the usual crispy wafer freshness of a KitKat. Only after this did I get a bit of heat on the tongue. Each subsequent bite was the same. It was a one-two punch with each flavor hitting quite distinctly.

This is a pretty nice tasting KitKat, largely because it is a slightly dark, bittersweet flavor which is not too sweet and pairs well with the wafer's crunch. However, the spicy portion seems almost superfluous. It does not detract from the chocolate, but it seems to add nothing. It's like eating a candy bar and then a little hot pepper alternatively. 

I think this works best as what it is, a novelty. If you're in the area (or at the airport) and want to take something back for your friends to try which won't make them gag, but will surprise them, this ought to fit nicely. The heat isn't so intense that someone will have a burning mouth. You'd have to be extremely sensitive to hot pepper to suffer for sampling this. Though I'll finish this box (slowly), I don't think there would really be any reason to buy this again. 

Kameda Seika Togarashi Mayonnaise Rice Snack

Since I was a psychology major and continue to study psychology of my own volition to this day, I often run across various studies and theories about human behavior. One of them is that choice is good for people, but too much choice is very stressful for them. Having three types of chip to choose from is good. Having 20 is just going to make you stand in the aisle biting your nails trying to decide what to buy.

Apparently, most American manufacturers don't know about such studies as there are eleventy-billion (that's an "imaginary number" in every sense of the term) varieties of everything back home. How fortunate for me that I live in Japan where the only thing they saturate me with choice about are fish, tofu, panty fetish items and anime characters, none of which is of any particular interest to me. While there may be a ton of Kit-Kat flavors, more than three are rarely offered at once. These "Okome Kitchen" ("Rice Kitchen"), a brand made by my favorite sembei maker Kameda Seika, snacks come in three varieties, too. I found these on the shelf at a little market near my house for 100 yen ($1.24) per bag and had my pick from among red pepper and mayo, garlic and black pepper, and wasabi and salt. I choose the mayo because I figured it'd be the hardest child to love in this little snack family.

A good whiff of the freshly opened bag gives you the familiar scent of mayonnaise, as should be expected. The first bite, as is so often the case, is the best because you get the depth of flavor most acutely with a clean palate. The flavor of Japanese mayonnaise with it's eggy and rich taste comes through potently, but not overwhelmingly followed by a nice spicy hit of red pepper. The blending of these two components is damn near perfect as the mayonnaise taste is cleaved beautifully by the pepper's heat. There are also some savory flavors added in to provide a better backdrop including cheese, vinegar, pepper, chicken and seafood. These components don't come through as individual tastes, but as a melange of seasoning. This blending of savory spices with hot pepper stops this from tasting like you're sucking on a tube of mayonnaise.

The chips are light and cripsy and have the feel of being baked rather than fried, though vegetable oil is the third ingredient after rice and rice flour. This is like a cross between sembei (rice cracker) and a processed potato snack, but in a good way. They're a bit on the smallish side, at about half the size of a standard chip,  so it's easy to find yourself popping two or three in your mouth at once. Fortunately, the entire 60 gram (about 2 oz.) bag is only around 300 calories so you can indulge fairly freely without paying too heavy a price.

I was surprised that I really enjoyed these. I think mayonnaise flavoring is something which is quite easy to overdo and get very wrong, but felt this was well-balanced. While I can't say I was over-the-moon about these such that I'd be buying them again and again until they're taken off the market (and ultimately, they won't be around because that's the way it is in Japan), but I'd definitely buy them again.

Sakeru String Cheese (Togarashi Flavor)

I'm a fan of the idea of string cheese. The notion that you can have a bit of cheese which won't melt or leak oil at room temperature and that is high in protein and therefore makes a more nutritious snack is quite attractive. I also like the calorie counts on a fairly generous amount of cheese. Most sticks of string cheese are about 100 calories.

The main problem with string cheese is that it often lacks flavor, at least in its American and Japanese incarnations. It's usually some low quality mozzarella that tastes like nothing. It's also somewhat expensive in Japan. Two 30 gram (1 oz.) sticks are about 178 yen ($1.96). When I saw this togarashi (chili pepper) flavor string cheese, I figured it might show a bit of promise.

I can't say that the string cheese itself is better than what I'm used to, but I can say that this has a nice hit of Chinese chili pepper to help enhance the flavor. I wish there was more depth to the flavor. In particular, I wish it had more buttery or cheesy notes to it, but this isn't bad at all as a snack. If you have a bland cracker or some pretzels and want some cheese to go along with it, this would make a decent pairing.

I'm not doing cartwheels over this. It is string cheese, after all, but I would buy it again. The hot pepper addition makes it just enough of a cut above plain string cheese to warrant a happy sumo rating.

Togarashi (Cayenne) Sembei

In order to fulfill the notion that I'm doing this blog to sample new things, I have to stop showering myself with new flavors of KitKat and try some things which are more than simply the same main character cast in a different, but very similar play. I'd also like to stop eating so many sweets so I picked up this package of sembei at the local 99 yen store. It won me over with its promise of cayenne pepper hotness even though I am not a fan of either sembei (rice crackers) or nori (seaweed paper).

This sembei is made by a company named Kameida Seika, which makes a wide variety of sembei-based snacks and is the biggest maker of rice crackers in Japan. The company was started in the 1940's, but has since been reorganized several times and no longer bears much a resemblance to the business that started it all which was co-owned by a farmer. Like many food manufacturers in Japan, they are looking to diversify and expand their product line in order to increase sales despite the falling birthrate, and they hope to offer sweets and health foods in the future rather than mainly focusing on rice-based snacks.

On the company's web site, they mention that these are especially good in winter, presumably because the cayenne chili flavor will heat you up. Since it is winter, I guess I picked a good time to try these.



The packaging for these crackers is a brilliant example of the convenient, but over-the-top packaging in Japan. The crackers are each individually wrapped, placed in a plastic tray and then wrapped in a plastic wrapper. This keeps each cracker in great shape and allows you to leave the main bag gaping open without any fear of allowing the remaining crackers to go stale, but I frankly feel guilty about all that plastic.

The crackers look great. They are shiny, slightly red tinted, and partially wrapped in a crisp square of nori. Once liberated from their individual plastic prisons, they smell slightly of soy sauce and cayenne, though the cayenne has a bit of a tomato scent to it. You can also smell the seaweed if you sniff the part with nori on it.

The texture of the crackers is very crunchy, with some flaky areas on the surface where they have bubbled up during baking. It's very satisfying from a texture point of view. When you bite into it, it cracks off easily, but the nori doesn't tear very well alone the line of your bite. The first thing you really get hit by taste-wise is the seaweed, soy sauce and a fishy taste. This is followed by some cayenne pepper heat. The second bite gives you more of the flavor of a classic rice cracker. This flavor is hard to describe if you've never had sembei, but if you have had it, you'll know exactly what I mean. All rice crackers carry this taste no matter what flavoring has been applied to them.

The ingredients include rice, soy sauce, sugar, seaweed, hot pepper paste, mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine used in cooking), and seafood extract powder. This explains pretty much the entire range of flavors in the cracker. Personally, I could do without the seafood extract powder as I don't like overtly fishy flavors. There are 11 crackers per bag and there are 215 calories for the entire bag (about 20 calories per cracker) so this wouldn't be a too fattening snack, particularly since one is unlikely to eat an entire bag at once.

I probably wouldn't buy these again because, while I don't hate these, I don't love them either. I think they are very well made and enjoyable, but I don't think they suit my tastes. I love the heat, but not the fish or seaweed flavors, which I can certainly tolerate without difficulty, but find distracting. If you're a fan of all those flavors, these are definitely worth sampling. I finished off the bag, but I also pulled off the nori wrappers on them to do so.