I filmed plenty of videos and sent a lot of stuff that I haven’t reviewed to my house in the US, so I will still be able to make updates while my backup supply lasts. After that, I should hopefully have people in Japan who can still send me new treats to try out. Don’t worry! Things will continue on, but the info will not be as breaking as it once was. Alas.

Anways, the most recent KitKat flavor I saw before moving was:

Ume Soda KitKat

Unfortunately, I forgot two separate packs of these in two separate refrigerators on two separate occasions, so I was never able to try them out. I sent a box or two to my house via surface mail, so I will try these out eventually. We will just have to wait until then. =(

Peach and Mango drink

Here’s a drink that’s a combination of peach and mango with an overall yogurt flavor to it. This “World’s Kitchen” brand often releases different kinds of drinks supposedly inspired by various countries, and this time around, they say that they got the idea from Hungary.

Dessert Mango Milk Tea

The Kocha Kaden Desserts line also brings out many different kinds of really sweet kinds of milk tea. They’ve done caramel, strawberry, and this time around, they’re doing mango. This really tastes like mango and milk tea separately, but at the same time (if that makes any sense). You can taste the mango, and you can taste milk tea, but for some reason, it doesn’t come off as tasting like “mango milk tea”. The previous varieties got a little too sweet about halfway through the bottle, but I’ve had no problem finishing off many of these.

Mango Pudding Country Ma'am cookies

Country Ma’am is a brand that I’ve, unfortunately, been neglecting since I started reporting on flavors. They always are coming out with new flavors of cookies every season, and have been doing so as far back as I can remember. Well the neglect ends now!

They certainly look the part.

For a cookie, these taste surprisingly accurate. There is a lot of mango flavor in these tiny little cookies. The while chocolate chips get completely overshadowed by the mango flavor of the cookie, but they still had that nice texture that comes with chewing on a chocolate chip cookie.

They normally reccommend that you microwave them for 20 seconds or so to make them hot and moist, and normally, this is a good idea.  I thought that they flavor was more pronounced when eaten “cold”, but what it lacks in flavor, it makes up for in being realy moist and warm (although doing so always makes them kind of oily).

Mango Pudding KitKat

Of course there’s a new KitKat flavor as well. Unfortunately, those ripoff “combo packs” are back in Pog form once again. At least this time around, the chocolate to mango ratio is a lot better than with previous flavors. In this particular bag, you get 7 pairs of milk chocolate and 6 pairs of mango pudding. Still a long way to go, but things are getting better (I gueeessss).

An individual mango pudding KitKat.

Unfortunately for the KitKat, there’s a lot of competition in the mango flavor department, and these don’t really stand up to the others, specifically the Country Ma’am cookies. There’s a nice mango smell to them, and there’s a decent initial mango flavor, but it doesn’t really last. As you keep eating them, the flavor kind of fades into more of a generic white chocolate wafer with a hint of mango. If these were the only snacks in town, I might have given them a more favorable review, because they are pretty tasty, but unfortunately, there are others who can do mango better.

Coconut Mango Cocktail

Even the alcohol gets frutier in the summertime, much to my delight. This “coconut mango” flavor sounded like it would be right up my alley, but by trying to pull off three flavors at once, they end up lacking with each one. They mix all of this with vodka, but these things never really taste like alcohol, so that’s never a problem. The mango doesn’t taste as good when compared to the peach and milk tea drink mentioned earlier, and the little bit of grapefruit that they decided to add in just detracts from the mango and makes it more sour than I felt it should be. That might just be to cover up the alcohol taste. In a time like this, I would expect the sweetness of the coconut flavor to come in and make everything better, but there was barely any coconut flavor to be had, which is what attracted me to this in the first place. If they had axed the grapfruit in favor of making the coconut flavor stronger, I could see myself enjoying this a lot more, but alas.

Soft packs of Pretz

Here we have three flavors of Pretz: Purple Potato, Tomato, and Asparagus. While these have been around since last fall, I still think they deserve some recognition. These are also the only flavors I have seen in these “soft” packages.

Hai Chu display

“Hai Chuu” is a pretty popular snack similar to taffy. They just started releasing a bunch of flavors under the “World Fruits” banner. In the above picture, you can see the new “Dragon Fruit” and “Blood Orange” flavors.

Koala's March

“Koala no March”, known as Koala Yummies in the U.S., just came out with these two flavors: Strawberry & Milk (with honey) and Banana Crepe.

Almond Pocky

The new Almond Pocky seems to put the almond flavor in the cream itself rather than sprinkle the real thing all over it like the Crush Almond Pocky did.

Mitsuya Cider Zero

I always tell people that Mitsuya Cider is a much cheaper, more available, and usually better tasting alternative to Ramune. Now, there’s a zero calorie version of it as well. It certainly does taste like a diet drink. It still kind of taste like the regular version, but, as you would expect, it’s not as sweet, and there’s a strange aftertaste that you don’t get with the regular stuff.

Baby Star Gyouza Chips

I like Baby Star, and I like gyouza, so this seemed like a sure thing. The chips themselves are like little wafers that are like the kind you’d get if you were a Christian and took communion at church. Unless those, these smell exactly like gyouza. Unfortunately, that’s their strongest point. They don’t really taste as accurately as I had hoped and they do have kind of a strange “cardboard-y” taste that lingers as well.

Teriyaki Chicken Pizza-La Doritos

Finally, there’s a new flavor of the long-running “Pizza-La” Doritos: Teriyaki Chicken. I’ll be doing a video review for these, and I hope that they taste better than the recent regular Teriyaki Doritos.

I just got finished filming video reviews for everything I still needed to do, so I have lots of things to keep me busy with this week. In the meantime, here are some short little reviews to keep you satisfied until the videos go up:

Lots of eating going on.

KitKat:

Yuzu Pepper – Tastes like dark chocolate and citrus with a pleasant pepper aftertaste.

Cayenne Pepper – Very little flavor and almost no spice. Disappointing.

Uji Green Tea – “Green Tea Light”. Less bitter than previous versions.

Apple Vinegar – Read about it here.

Lemon Vinegar – Didn’t taste the vinegar. Not too different from other lemon versions.

Kinako – Tastes like peanut butter.

Cheetos:

BBQ/Chili Sauce Combo – Like the standard BBQ ones with a little extra spice.

Garlic Soy Sauce – Pleasant garlic taste with salt added in.

Yokohama Shuumai – Very odd and hard to describe, but interesting and tasty nonetheless.

Doritos:

Men’s Chili – Not much flavor but very spicy as you keep eating them.

Men’s 7-spices – VERY GOOD! A fantastic blend.

Stick (Taco sauce) – Secretly Fritos. Nice flavor though.

Teriyaki – Good flavor, but it fades almost immediately. There are better teriyaki alternatives.

Cayenne Pepper Powder KitKat

The brand name is 八幡屋礒五郎 or Yawataya Isogorou which is a temple in Nagano City that has been making a special “Seven Spices” pepper blend since the Edo period. There are many different kinds that they sell, and these KitKats are based on the spiciest (大辛) kind of cayenne pepper powder that they sell. I only have two of these, so I’m going to hold of on eating them until I make a video review.

While shopping today, I found these:

Teriyaki Doritos

I tried these right away. They taste like regular plain doritos corn chips with a hint of teriyaki flavor. You can recognize the flavor right away, but it fades once you start chewing, and there’s no real lasting teriyaki flavor or aftertaste. There’s a teriyaki burger pictured on the left, but don’t let that fool you. These don’t taste like a teriyaki burger by any means. There is a certain brand of potato chips that have a “Teriyaki Mayo” flavor, and those taste exactly like a teriyaki burger. These do not. They just taste like corn chips with a hint of teriyaki at the beginning. Kind of surprising, seeing how a lot of Doritos flavors usually load up on the flavor powder to try and force the flavor on you. Good nonetheless.

*shudder*

Apparently, these are snacks based on the Oriental Instant Curry brand. Curry flavored snacks? Nothing new here. What first caught my eye was this guy:

Albino racist tribal chef?

What is this? It looks like the classic black racist caricature, still easy to find in Japan, with big hooker hoop earrings and, of course, a chef’s hat. As confusing as this is, it’s still not as bad as…

"I'm coming to kill you."

Look at those cold, dead, eyes. He’s looking at you, but not your face. He’s eyeing you up and trying to think of the best way to prepare your flesh in a way that would best compliment his (or the albino chef’s) latest curry recipe. His spoon is ready and waiting, and he’s already drooling at the thought of knocking you out and stuffing you in his giant pot. It’s already simmering and ready for the secret ingredient: YOU!

I was coming back from getting some ice cream, when I decided on a whim to stop into a Family Mart to see if they had some lemon vinegar KitKats. They didn’t, but they had three things I had never seen before instead, and they are:

"Uji" Green Tea

This is the same “Uji-macha” flavor that was earlier released in the ripoff combo packs, but apparently you could also just buy these separately if you wanted to only try the green tea flavor. This is the first time I’ve seen these since they’ve apparently been on sale.

Garlic Soy Sauce Cheetos

$5 says that these Garlic Soy Sauce Cheetos are guaranteed to give you bad breath. I almost didn’t recognize them, because the Cheetos logo was hidden in the upper left and was hard to see it on the shelves. It says that is uses garlic from Aomori Prefecture, and might have been a special Aomori exclusive, but that’s apparently over and done with, because I just walked into a convenience store in Gunma and found them.

Sweet/Spicy Chili Doritos "stick"

YET ANOTHER new shape for Doritos, and this time, the shape is a “stick”. It’s called Sweet/spicy Chili flavored, but there’s a picture of a taco right there on the bag, so I’m wondering how these compare to the taco Doritos that you can always find here. That will have to wait until tomorrow.

Ugh, these are piling up faster than I can review them.

Yuzu Pepper

It’s called 柚子こしょう or Yuzu Pepper. This is what all of the the KitKat “gift” boxes look like. You can usually only buy these in souvenir shops.

The inside of the box.

Inside, there’s space for 12 “mini”-sized bars.

A yuzu, jalapenos, and some green stuff?

I’m not sure what to expect here. When they usually say こしょう (koshou),they’re referring to your standard black pepper, but I don’t see any in the picture there. Is that green stuff a mountain of wasabi? Is it ground up jalapeno (what I assume those peppers are)? Will it taste peppery, spicy, citrusy, all, or none of the above? I look forward to finding out.

It looks like you can buy these region-exclusive flavors from Nestle’s online shop, so I might be ordering one of everything just to try them out. It’s certainly cheaper than running all around Japan.

On an unrelated note, I gave away a bunch of the leftover Pocky the other day, and they all looked really nice when they were lines up on some nice plates.

Can you tell them apart?

Fancy macro shot

Pocky Tower

Acen is this weekend, and I won’t be attending, because I’m a couple thousand miles away at the moment. People have also asked me to start reviewing snacks that originated in Japan and not just Japanese flavors of western snacks. So, in the spirit of Acen (or probably any anime convention for that matter), I’ll kill two birds with one stone and make a series of Pocky video reviews to be released this weekend.

I just went to the store and bought whatever they had, and here’s what I ended up with:

14 flavors

From left to right, back row: Almond Crush Pocky, “Thin” Pocky, My Calorie Pocky, Pocky, Men’s Pocky, Strawberry Pocky, Crushed Strawberry Pocky, and Bitter Cookie Crush Pocky.

Center: Choco Banana Pocky, Coconut Pocky, Tiramisu Dessert Pocky, and Chocolate Organe Dessert Pocky.

Front: Chocolat Framboise Marble Pocky and Mix Berry Marble Pocky.

So, I just spent an hour or so filming six shows to be released over the next couple of days.

After I had tried them all.

Some short comments:

• Marble and Dessert Pocky were very chewy on account of the large amounts of frosting.
• Cookie Crush Pocky were pretty disappointing.
• Those that had real bits of what they were supposed to taste like tasted a lot better than those that were strictly relying on flavored chocolate/frosting (go figure).
• I was pleasantly surprised by the My Calorie Pocky, Tiramisu Dessert Pocky, and Chocolat Framboise Marble Pocky

The first episode should be up sometime tomorrow. I’ll be comparing “regular” Pocky with “Thin” Pocky, My Calorie Pocky, and Men’s Pocky. Look forward to it!

:edit:

Here’s the little video intro I threw together:

I haven’t put up a new video in a while, and, of course, a bunch of new stuff has come out since, and they are:

Green Tea and Chocolate

A new kind of green tea KitKats came out last week, and a disturbing trend has also appeared. Like the “Choco and Rose” bags before them, these green tea “Assort packs” are kind of a rip-off in that less than half of the KitKats inside are of the new flavor. In this case, you get nine regular milk chocolate ones and only four of the new green tea ones.  Up until last month, you the entire bag would be filled with the new flavor, and I hope things don’t continue like this. Moving on…

Kinako "Bar"

In Japan, the “Big Kat” is known simply as the “KitKat Bar”, and, up until now, they only came in regular milk chocolate. This one is “Kinako” flavored which is a powder made from soybeans. I normally see “kinako bread” in a lot of bakeries, which is just a roll of some sorts covered in this kinako powder. There was already a kinako version of the regular KitKats, and you can get special “Bitter Kinako” KitKats that are only sold in Tokyo souvenier shops.

The newest "Men's hard-fried" Doritos

Two new kinds of “Men’s hard-fried” Doritos have also popped up. The red bag on the left is “Spicy Chili” and the bag on the right is “Black Pepper and Spice”. It also proudly proclaims that there are seven different spices in addition to the black pepper. These are a little bit thicker than regular Doritos, and therefore, they have a bit more crunch in them as well.

Yokohama Shuumai Cheetos

Shu Mai flavored Cheetos also came out sometime last week. I wasn’t aware that Yokohama was known for it’s Chinese dumplings, but I’m sure Tim did.

BBQ and Chili Sauce Combo Cheetos

They’ve thrown “chili sauce” flavored Cheetos in with standard BBQ ones to make these new “Cheetos Combo” ones. They’ve been out for a couple weeks, but it seems that you can’t buy them in any store, at least none that I’ve been to. For now, it seems that these can only be won at arcades via UFO Catchers or whatever other machines they have. You can me see winning a bag here:

This machine had you shoot the paper holding the bags up with pellets. You get five shots for 100yen. Apparently, I only needed one. =)