Snack Review: Morinaga Ottoto Korean Barbeque Flavor Crackers

I am sucker for animal-shaped food, and for anything Japanese. So just imagine if the animals were weird and Japanese: squid, crab, blowfish, starfish, tuna, shrimp, octopus, even uni (sea urchin)! Even those big weird ocean sunfish! Yes, I was beside myself.

The shapes are wonderful. The texture is really fantastic - they’re totally puffed up and hollow, even though they retain their animal shapes, and perfectly thin and light and crunchy.

The only catch is that I totally chose the wrong flavor. There are two choices of flavor, Salt and Korean Barbeque. I am not sure what I was thinking when I ordered the Korean Barbeque. I know that I am the kind of person who likes the simple, plain version of things. I never eat potato chips in any flavor other than plain, for instance, which I know is virtually un-American. I wouldn’t eat a barbeque flavor potato chip, for instance, if it were the last food in the house.

But, let’s be honest, Japanese crackers in the shape of squid and blowfish - if these had been Horrible Garbage flavor, I still would have wanted to try them. So I probably wasn’t thinking straight.

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Snack Review: Calorie Mate

They still haven’t come up with that meal in a pill that they promised we’d have in the future. Not that I would want all my meals to be replaced by a pill, but sometimes, when there isn’t time to make a nice event out of a meal, wouldn’t it be a useful thing?

Instead, we have a whole product category of power and energy and granola bars. The problem is, these look too much like candy bars, and have similar flavors to candy bars, so you’re set up to expect a candy bar… and are always disappointed.

I’ve tried a lot of them and have never found one that I’m interested in eating repeatedly. So I was curious to see if the Japanese had come up with something better.

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Snack Review: Japanese Snack Three Course Meal Roundup

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t stand the idea of going out in the cold and rain again to go grocery shopping. But the box I got from our good friends at jlist.com looked like it contained all I needed for a balanced meal. I had a spicy main dish in these Tohato habanero flavored crackers, a vegetable in asparagus Pretz, and my starch and dessert all rolled up into one in Meiji Usuyaki rice crackers coated in white chocolate. What could be more efficient?

The Tohato crackers are very neat little rings with a reddish-orange color that warns of their heat, if you hadn’t already gotten the message from the evil grin on the drawing of the pepper on the front of the bag. My Japanese isn’t up to deciphering the ingredients, but I am guessing this is a wheat cracker. It kind of doesn’t matter, because whatever it is, it’s just a vehicle for the spice. They’re either baked, or fried really brilliantly, because they’re not the least bit greasy.

These are a really fun snack if you like hot food. They are hot enough to wake you up - good idea in this cold rainy weather, as it turns out - and the heat lingers but not so much that you can’t eat more of them.

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Japanese Snack Review: Every Burger

Over the holidays I took my annual pilgrimage to the Mitsuwa marketplace in Edgewater, New Jersey. Now, I don’t want to hear from you West Coasters, taunting me about how you live right near one of these or some other equally large Japanese market. For me this is a big deal.

The biggest snacking news there was that one of the stands had black sesame soft ice cream. While you can now get a few ice cream products in that flavor that are made in this country - I’ve got one in my freezer that I’ll review for you as soon as I forget the soft ice cream, because the comparison wouldn’t be fair - I’ve only had it in soft ice cream in Japan. And somehow it’s just so much better that way than in any other ice cream type. So delicious that I did not know whether to jump up and down, or cry; I seriously considered moving to New Jersey instead of both of those, but unfortunately that is not a realistic option.

As for things I could buy and take home in a bag rather than my stomach, the market disappointed me by a lack of Crunky, and I remembered my vow not to buy any other Japanese chocolate snacks. But these Every Burger things - OK, there is some chocolate in them, but that is clearly not the point. The point is that they look like little tiny hamburgers.

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Snack Review: Ghana Cookie

Japanese cooking is my favorite cuisine in the world. And no one loves chocolate more than I do. Put the two together, and you’d think, how can it go wrong?

It is true that chocolate is not a native Japanese thing, but it’s not native to Belgium or any of those other places that are famous for it, either. And the Japanese have done a fantastic job of assimilating Western desserts – there is nothing I love more than a good green tea ice cream.

But when I buy a Japanese chocolate snack, it’s nearly always a disappointment. Unfortunately, this was no exception.

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