Snack Review: Dodekai Babystar Chicken Flavor Crispy Noodle Snack

I know, when I’m not complaining about the passing of the Good Old Snacking Days, I’m complaining that we don’t have such cool flavors as competing snack-making countries – not only exotic locales and their green tea mochi, but even our sedate neighbors to the north and their maple flavored cookies.

Internet, I am here to admit: this is a thing you can take too far.

I saw these chip-like things in the Japanese market and I thought, hey, why don’t we have chicken flavored snacks? Well, at least now I have my answer.

Here’s what these taste like: did you ever peel the coating off batter-dipped deep-fried chicken and eat it on its own? You know that chicken-y, floury, cooked-to-brownness taste? These have almost exactly that flavor, except with a disorienting lack of the accompanying greasiness – they’re just crunchy-chippy textured instead.

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Snacks Come to Life in Japan: Part 1

All kinds of things come to life in cartoons and we don’t think twice. Walking, talking animals – that’s so normal it’s boring. Sponges that wear pants, whatever.

Food is usually food, though, even in cartoons. In this country, that is. But not in Japan.

Anpanman: he’s your classic superhero. He wears a cape, he fights for truth, justice and the Japanese way. And… he’s a bread roll with sweet bean paste inside: An Pan.

It’s a traditional Japanese snack, starring in a traditional genre of popular culture. Maybe that makes perfect sense. Hmm. I’ll think about it and get back to you.

His friends are other types of bread – plain sliced white bread, buns filled with melon or curry – as well as humans, who, I guess, see nothing odd about the situation.

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Asian Snack Review: Marble Pocky

A few evenings ago, I found myself in my friendly neighborhood Japanese supermarket. I’d assigned myself the vague mission of finding interesting J-snacks to review. I was having difficulty narrowing my selection, though, and found it far easier to lose myself in the barrage of sights, sounds and smells not often encountered at typical American markets.

Halfway through the cookie aisle, I was struck by a sight so familiar and so obvious that I nearly slapped myself for not already having reviewed it. At once, a slew of happy memories of teenage Otakudom washed over me, resulting in what can only be described as a full-body smile. I can’t say for certain, constrained as I was to my own body, but I’ve little doubt that onlookers witnessed my temporary transformation into a bouncing “chibi” caricature. Ah, but what snack could inspire such an intense reaction in a normally polite and unremarkable 24-year-old woman? None other than Pocky.

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Asian Snack Review: Kinoko no Yama and Crunky Biscuits

One evening recently I was overcome with a craving for a chocolate chip cookie. There were none in the house, but I remembered I had a stash of snacks from the Japanese market that I’d hidden away so as not to eat all of them at once. There were two kinds of cookies that combined chocolate with non-chocolate cookie, so I decided it was time to give them a try.

Kinoko no Yama are very cute. The name means mountain mushrooms, and I don’t know about the mountain part, but they do look like mushrooms. I am sure they would be great for decorating a cake in a woodland theme with mushrooms and - toads, maybe?

But as far as eating…. Since the cap of the mushroom is solid milk chocolate with a little cookie-stick stuck in it, the chocolate would have to be really great and.… OK, I am crazy about nearly everything Japanese. But when you think of a great chocolate-making country, you think of Switzerland or Belgium, not Japan. Unfortunately, there is a reason for this. I like the idea of these cookies, but the chocolate is just not good enough to make them worthwhile.

But, never fear: I had another possibility:

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Snack Review: Cream Collon

Our friends over at Candy Addict have mentioned Collon, but apparently were afraid to actually try it. But hey, I’ve eaten coconut-flavored maggots for this site. It takes a lot more than a funny name to frighten me off.

Collon is not a candy, it’s more of a filled cookie. My theory is that the name relates to some more innocent English word like ‘cone’ or ‘crown’ which has been transliterated into Japanese and then back, not entirely successfully. They seem like a sort of mini-interpretation of a common Japanese baked good which is a cone-shaped bread/pastry roll with cream in it.

I admit, I tried the vanilla flavor rather than that chocolate. Without a brown filling, the association to the more unfortunate English word is a lot weaker.

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