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Afternoon Tea Cookies

June 28, 2009

What is up with all of these drink-inspired snacks!? This time around, we have three kinds of cookies inspired by the Morinaga “Afternoon Tea”, or 午後の紅茶, line of drinks.

Straight, Lemon, and Milk tea.

Straight, Lemon, and Milk tea.

There are three “main” flavors of the tea, and therefore, there are three kinds of cookies. The “Tea Cookie” goes with the Straight Tea, and it looks like a regular cookie to me. The “Lemon Tea Cookie” goes with the Lemon Tea, and it seems to be some sort of sandwich cookie with lemon cream in the middle. Finally, there’s the “Milk Tea Pie” that goes with the Milk Tea, my personal favorite. When they say “pie” in Japan, they mean something more along the lines of a flakey pastry crust and/or cookie and not the baked desserts that I would normally think of.

I'm seeing double!

I'm seeing double!

I just got these, and therefore, I haven’t tried them yet. I’d be a whale by now if I always ate everything as soon as I got it. Good for me, bad for productivity I suppose. Anywho, I’m curious to see what they’re going for with this, as I can see it being one of two possibilities:

1) Each cookie is made to accurately taste like its respective drink, and can be enjoyed alone.

2) Each cookie is made to perfectly compliment its respective drink so in order to get the full experience, you must enjoy the two together.

I’ll make a review post as soon as I find out.

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Sakana-kun chips

June 28, 2009

I was surprised to see that Sakana-kun got his very own brand of snack chips. If you don’t know who Sakana-kun is, watch this clip first. It’s how I first came to know of him. So yeah, anyways, onto the chips!

Sakana-kun Chips

Sakana-kun Chips

The official flavor is “Salted Seaweed”, but it also contains bits of Shrimp and Cod as you can see from Sakana-kun’s fine drawings on the bag.

When I first opened the bag, I got a large whiff of fish smells, but that was only at first. The chips themselves don’t really smell “fishy”, but rather, they just smell like salted chips.

The chips

The chips

These are also put out by “Baby Star”, so they are made of the same stuff that the Gyouza Chips were. They didn’t really taste anything like fish, which is good or bad depending on your preferences. It tasted exactly how they advertised it: Salty seaweed. The flavor was simple that of a lightly salted chip with a hint of seaweed, which taste kind of salty themselves. So, if you don’t like your snacks smelling and tasting like the sea, you have nothing to fear here. These chips are about as safe and delightful as Saka-kun himself.

I still really want his hat.

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Uji Green Tea Video Review

June 25, 2009
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Like herbs? Pepsi Shiso is for you!

June 23, 2009

Pepsi Shiso is the newest flavor of Pepsi in Japan, and it went on sale June 23rd, 2009.

Pepsi Shiso

Pepsi Shiso

I had never heard of Shiso before hearing about this, so I have no idea what real Shiso tastes like. The Wikipedia article states that while it’s a member of the mint family, it is not, in fact, a mint. Therefore, it came as no surprise to me that this was not simply mint Pepsi. Pepsi Shiso doesn’t taste like mint at all.

The first thing that came to mind is “herbs”. At certain points while drinking, I could imagine the taste being that of simply grass or leaves, but there was always a little bit extra flavor in there to bring it above such generalizations. It doesn’t taste like tea. It tastes like you walked into the herbal section of a health foods store, so if you like that herbal taste, than you might enjoy this.

My only problem with Pepsi Shiso is that they’re calling it Pepsi, and this isn’t the first time that I’ve made this complaint. With a lot of the other brands such as Coke, Dr Pepper, or Mountain Dew, their flavor variations still retain certain characteristic of the original flavor, but these Pepsi ones always seem to just go off in some random direction. I can’t really say that this tastes like “Pepsi and herbs”, because there’s not really any “Pepsi” in here. It tastes like a carbonated herb drink, yes, but no Pepsi, so I find it odd that they are calling it that. Perhaps they felt like the drink couldn’t stand on its own without relying on some Pepsi brand recognition with a dash of novelty, and I must admit, that I would not just up and buy some other herb flavored drinks if they were sitting right there in shelves next to the other drinks.

Pepsi or not, this is still an interesting drink to try out, but I wonder how much of that interest is simply because of the Pepsi logo on the bottle and not the “Shiso” itself.

2006-2009 Limited Edition Pepsi flavors

2006-2009 Limited Edition Pepsi flavors

It looks like this will be the last Pepsi flavor that I can personally try in Japan without having to get someone to send me a bottle (and paying dearly for it). Whether or not they can be called “Pepsi” is up for debate, but I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of them. Also, yes, my favorite out all of them is the 2008 Pepsi Ice Cucumber. I’m still hoarding a bunch.

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New “XTREME” Pringles are anything but.

June 23, 2009

On sale this week, XTREME Extra Pepper Pringles.

XTREEEEEEEEEEEEEME

XTREEEEEEEEEEEEEME

Holy crap, look at that Pepper machine gun beating the hell out of that dumb old bowl! These just HAVE to be awesome, right? Right?

Not at all.

I was suspicious of these as soon as I saw that they were “pepper” flavored. There have been at least three various of pepper Pringles within the last year or so, and they have basically all been just regular Pringles with some pepper sprinkled on. These are no exception. I thought the chips would be blackened by the Xtreme amount of pepper added, but alas, I had to actually look very closely in order to see that there was, in fact, pepper on these chips.

To make matter worse, these aren’t even the most “peppery” Pringles I’ve had, and they certainly aren’t “Xtreme”. I forget which of the two pepper Pringles won in this review, but they had much more flavor than these failures do.

It seems that “pepper” Pringles are the very definition of lazy when it comes to snacks. At this point, from my Xperiences, I’ve comes to Xpect little out of these sad Xperiments in marketing, because, not once, have they Xceeded my Xpectations, or even met them, which is  actually an Xceptionally easy thing to do. InXcusable.

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Three new flavors of Pretz

June 23, 2009

Within the last couple of days, I’ve run across three new Pretz flavors.

Apple and Cheese Pretz

Apple and Cheese Pretz

The cheese ones taste just like many of the cheese-flavored crackers back in North America like Goldfish and Cheez-Its.

The apple ones are very sweet, but taste strikingly accurate. I was pleasantly surprised. They mimic the tart yet sweet aspects of an apple’s flavor.

LEE Curry Pretz

LEE Curry Pretz

These ones are inspired by LEE brand instant curry that advertises itself as being “10 times spicier” than regular spicy curry. These taste a LOT like curry and are very addicting if you like curry-flavored things. They’re not as spicy as they’d like you to believe. In fact, they’re not spicy at all, but they are very delicious.

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Cayenne Pepper KitKat Video Review

June 21, 2009
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More “drink” snacks: Ramune KitKats

June 17, 2009

It looks like KitKats are also getting in on the “snacks that taste like popular drinks” bandwagon. Their drink of choice? Ramune.

Ramune KitKat

Ramune KitKat

The artwork on the bag suggests that these are the special flavor for Tanabata, but I don’t really see the connection. If memory serves me correctly, the Tanabata flavors for last year and the year before that were both banana, so yeah, I have no idea. I’m guess that it’s just because it’s being released around the same time.

As shown on the bag, the KitKats themselves are light blue. They have kind of a strange smell to them. A friend of mine said that they smelled like “erasers”. Luckily, they don’t taste like erasers, but pretty much like Ramune. Unfortunately, they taste more like Ramune candy than they do the actual drink. The chocolate itself tastes a little bit like Ramune, but it’s not very pronounced. They unfortunately didn’t mimic the carbonation effects from the cola caramel corn snacks.

The real flavor comes from a powder that they mixed in with the cream that’s inside of each stick. They mention that it’s supposed to be “bubbly” and taste carbonated, but it really just tastes like they crushed up the Ramune candies and mix those in with whatever cream they put inside. It doesn’t really mix well with the rest of the KitKat. That’s not to say that it’s bad, but you just end up noticing the two flavors separate from each other. At first, you taste the outer chocolate, and then, after chewing for a while, you taste the candy/powder but it’s as if you just put some of the candy in your mouth and not like a “ramune KitKat”.

If the cola Caramel Corn hadn’t beaten them to the punch, I might have been more impressed with these. I don’t feel that the powder was necessary, because it just tastes like you’re eating two separate things rather than one well put together one.

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Snacks that taste like drinks.

June 17, 2009

There’s a snack in Japan called, simply, “Caramel Corn”, and it’s a cross between actual caramel corn and a cheeto. It’s cheeto-shaped, but is very light and crispy. The normal flavor is, of course, caramel, but there’s always new flavors coming out. There are two special flavors that just came out for the summer: Vanilla Shake and Cola.

caramel_corn

Vanilla Shake and Cola

The vanilla shake ones taste like a vanilla version of the caramel corn, and that’s very good. I remember the vanilla bean KitKats being one of my all-time favorites. It has a hint of the standard Japanese “milk” flavor in there, but not enough to make it tase much like a shake. It’s fine as it is as a vanilla-flavored snack.

The cola ones are a bit more interesting. They have a powder on them that instantly dissolves as soon as it touches your tongue, and it does a really good job of replicating the feeling of carbonated drinks as you drink them. I’ve given samples to a whole bunch of people over the past couple of days, and every single one of them has had the same “Whoah!” surprised reaction upon tasting them, myself included. The flavor is also pretty spot on. If I had to choose, I would say that it tastes close to Coca-Cola if you were to get it from a fountain machine. The flavor itself is very sweet and, combined with the carbonated effect, does a really good job of tasting like cola. This is something I didn’t expect from a “dry” snack.

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New Cheetos, Pringles, and Koalas

June 14, 2009
Spicy Salami and Cheese Cheetos

Spicy Salami and Cheese Cheetos

Unlike the BBQ/Chili Cheetos Combos, these I just found in a regular convenience store right next to:

Cheetos mix: Wild Cheese

Cheetos mix: Wild Cheese

The full name is “Chester Cheetah’s Cheetos mix”. It looks to be a combination of regular Cheetos sticks and those shaped like paws. I’m pretty sure this is the first time they’ve used Chester Cheetah in Japan. On the bag, they have a little biography in which they state that his birth date is February 2nd, 1986. The starburst says that these are “Wild Cheese” flavored, and the text above Chester says that they use red pepper to spice things up. If I hadn’t been disappointed so much in the past, I might still cling to some hope that these will taste like Red Hot Cheetos.

Beef Kebab Pringles

Beef Kebab Pringles

These Pringles are based off of the, apparently, Turkish beef kebabs. There are small shops and trucks that sell these all around Tokyo and throughout Japan as well. Imagine slices of beef, lettuce, tomato, and some sweet sauce in something close to a pita, and that’s what these things are in real life. You might hear “kebab” and expect pieces of meet on a skewer, but that’s not what these are.

Milk Pudding Koala's March

Milk Pudding Koala's March

Lastly, are the new Milk Pudding Koala’s March. These taste milky and somewhat creamy, but I didn’t taste anything resembling “pudding” and the texture did lend anythign to that area. They are still yummy without it.

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