Scon Japanese Barbecue Flavor

I'm not a fan of Japanese salted snack foods because many of them are bland (consommé) or come in flavors I don't care for (like seaweed). As I mentioned in a previous review, barbecue salted snacks are not what you'd expect because "barbecue" in the U.S. usually means some sort of super spicy tomato or ketchup-flavored potato chip. In Japan, it tends to mean the snack is meant to resemble barbecued meat.

The ugly granny mascot for Karamucho chips. She may scare you off, but they do make pretty good chili snacks. Image pinched from the Karamucho web site.

If you learn one thing about "Japanese tastes", it's that there is a general tendency to prefer mild flavors over intense ones. Therefore, it's rare to find a new product which is exceptionally spicy when you see the words "barbecue" (or in this case "バーベーキュー"). This isn't universal, however, as there are some super spicy treats out there like habanero rings and Karamucho (カラムチーチョ) hot chili chips and potato sticks. Karamucho, by the way, has what I believe to be one of the ugliest cartoon mascots ever. "Chili" and "barbecue" are worlds apart usually in terms of overall punch in spiciness with the former saltily beating up your tongue and the latter passively lying down and surrendering.

The same company that makes the Karamucho-brand chips, Koikeya (コイケヤ), makes the Scon snacks I'm reviewing today so I had hopes that they'd be strong enough for my American palate. I've seen corn snacks named "Scon" (pronounced close to "scone" with a long "o" as many Americans pronounce it) for decades and never bought them because the I couldn't work out why they'd be called "Scon" instead of, well, "corn". What was that silly "s" for? Was this going to be related to British tea time fare? At any rate, a look at the ingredients list reveals the "s" stands for "sweet" as in "sweet corn", which is the first ingredient. That fact that sweet corn is the first ingredient is encouraging, the fact the the second one is animal fat is far less so. The seasonings are not all spelled out, but, unsurprisingly, meat flavoring is one of them as is soy sauce. Stevia (a natural low-calorie sweetener) is also on of them.


The corn twists in the bag are very similar to Cheetos in appearance, but they're a bit lighter and airier in texture. To me, this is a good thing as Cheetos are a bit too hard for my tastes. The first whiff doesn't betray much. These have the same light scent of a non-descript bouillon cube as many Japanese barbecue-flavored snacks. The first bite has a bit of a chemical edge to it which is hard to pin down. This disappears after the second bite which leaves you with an intense, savory flavor. These are very spicy without heat. The flavor is meaty, though it doesn't taste like meat. It's also quite salty, and after you eat them for awhile, the sense of how salty they seem starts to pile up on the tongue. I can see where a beer-drinking sort might find these a really good accompaniment to imbibing.

I really liked these and have actually bought and consumed three bags of them in the past month. This is quite a bad thing as an 80 gram bag (2.82 ounces) has 446 calories and it's easy to eat half a bag at one sitting. That's a lot of empty calories to put away. Also, honestly, even though I like these because they're strongly-flavored, by the third bag the novelty was wearing down a bit and I was thinking that I had burnt out on them and probably wouldn't be tempted anymore. The sense of salt and soy sauce felt stronger the longer I ate them. Nonetheless, I'd still heartily recommend giving them a try if you're in the mood for something salty and tired of the "blander" salted snacks on offer in Japanese stores.

••••••••••••

As an aside, I've decided to mirror the food review posts on a separate site. I'm not sure why I'm doing this, but I think it'll help me keep tabs on how frequently I make these posts. I'd like to do them weekly as a means of encouraging myself to translate the packaging as well as sample new things. If you run across the blog, I just want it to be clear it's not a rip-off of this one, but intentional duplication. It's just started and needs to be tweaked, but it's starting up here.

Kyoro-chan Cake (Milk)

Back when I was a kid in Pennsylvania, one of my aunts used to make "whoopie pies". For those who are uninitiated in the delights of the whoopie pie, it is generally regarded as a Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) concoction and is very tasty, particularly to children. The filling is particularly yummy.

I haven't seen or eaten a whoopie pie in decades, but one immediately came to mind when I saw this box of Kyroro-chan (キョロチャん) Cakes (milk flavor). Kyoro-chan, by the way, is famous in Japan as a mascot for a candy called "choco balls". Choco-balls are tiny little fried peanuts covered in glossy milk chocolate and Kyroro-chan is designed after the shape of a peanut with a weird beak attached to it, hence the shape of the ugly bird on the box.

Not content to only attach his visage to small boxes of chocolate-covered peanuts, Kyoro-chan has been branching out and now his image is pasted on various sorts of candies of a similar size and shape to the original choco-ball. The only difference is that the body design changes to match the product. The reason he's looks like the unfortunate offspring of some odd coupling with a toucan and a holstein on this box is that the cakes are "milk" flavored and milk comes from cows.

With images of whoopie pies dancing in my head, I decided to take the plunge and buy this box of cakes. However, I know from experience that any product you buy in Japan that resembles an old home favorite is never going to live up to expectations. Hope springs eternal, however.

Click for a detailed image showing texture.

Six cakes come individually-wrapped in a cow-spotted package. This type of wasteful but very convenient packaging is very common in Japan. I can't remember what I paid for the box but it was around $2-$2.50 (200-260 yen). The cakes are very small, about 1.5 times the diameter of an Oreo cookie. They are exceptionally soft and have a good cream filling to cake ratio, though the filling is not nearly as generous near the edges as the box illustration makes it appear.

The filling is actually pretty good. It's very light without being airy though it has little taste of its own. It could definitely use a spot of vanilla, but it came close to approximating a whoopie pie's filling. One of the reasons for this is that the third ingredient for these cakes is "shortening" and whoopie pie filling has a lot of vegetable shortening in it. Unfortunately, that makes these cakes immensely fatty. One tiny cake is 140 calories.

What they aren't is incredibly sweet (sugar is the fifth ingredient, though I believe "sweet water/sugar water" is the second one). This is a good thing in some ways, but it also makes for a relatively flat taste experience. Cocoa is so far down on the list of ingredients at number 8 that you know that there isn't much chocolate in there. The cake portion has very little flavor and provides little contrast to the filling either as a deeper flavor or as a different texture. So, the super soft cookie plus soft filling with no deep flavors make it pretty disappointing.

I certainly wouldn't buy these again. It's not that they're bad, but just that they are really loaded with fat and high in calories for the portion size so that the pleasure to nutritional "badness" ration makes them not worthwhile.

Coconut Island Ice Milk Tea

The hard part was removing the damn label.

(Before I get rolling on this, I'd like to say that I learned about this beverage from Dateline Osaka's review of it. I'm not trying to rip her off, but just trying to mark my impression of this product for my own future reference, because, well, I really liked it.)

After reading Dateline Osaka's write-up, I actively sought this drink because it's coconut-flavored and I enjoy a good coconut confection or beverage. Strangely, I found this drink rather elusive. You'd think that it'd be the sort of thing that'd be easy to track down in convenience store's or supermarket's with large refrigerated drink sections, but it was not to be had in my local 7-11, Inageya supermarket, or QQ convenience store. The fact that it was so hard to find just goes to show that various manufacturers probably have to fight pretty hard for shelf space in small stores.

I finally located a bottle in the unrefrigerated section of Peacock supermarket. It cost ¥153 which makes it pretty expensive for something which is only 350 ml. You'll note that the bottle has a curvy shape that allows the bottle to have the same height and footprint as a standard 500 ml (like 16 oz. in the U.S.), but with a lot less product. For reference, most beverages which are sold in 500 ml. sizes and retail for about ¥150 and a pint-size carton of Lipton milk tea (which is also 500 ml.) can be had for about ¥100-¥130. Of course, specialty beverages are a bit more expensive and this is clearly going to be a limited edition drink which will likely be around for the summer then vanish forever (or at least until next year).

The first thing I did upon unscrewing the cap was to give it a good sniff to see if it smelled of coconut. It didn't. It pretty much smelled like tea. To be fair, I had just consumed a Japanese herbal cough drop and it's possible that my sense of smell had been affected. A much later sniff seemed to reveal coconut scent layered with the tea. My first taste felt incredibly sweet, but this smoothed out as I drank more of it. It's pleasantly and noticeably, but not overwhelmingly, coconutty. There's a good balance of milk and tea flavor, but I think that the tea taste is subdued because of the high amount of milk and sugar.

The ingredients list betray just how much sugar is in it. The first ingredient is milk and the second is sugar (the third is "milk sugar", likely lactose, and the fourth is tea). So, by volume, the sugar is pretty prominant. I think that the pre-made iced tea and coffee beverages in Japan tend to get a somewhat rich and thick look from the sugar. They are far less watery and thin than the standard tea you get when you buy a bottle of "straight" tea (unsweetened) in Japan. The strange thing is that I didn't read "coconut" in the ingredients list, though there was a generic "flavoring" ingredient. It may have been referred to in some string of characters I couldn't read, but coconut is usually written in katakana (as the phonetic equivalnet of co-co-naa-tsu or, in Japanese, ココナッツ) and is easy to find and understand.

If you drink the entire bottle, it's 122 calories. That puts it almost as high as a 12 oz. can of Coke (which is equivalent in size to this bottle of tea) as it weighs in at 155 calories. The tea probably carries a better nutritional impact though since it at least brings a lot of milk along with it whereas the Coke is pretty much sugar, oils, flavoring and carbonation. Of course, I don't drink (regular) Coke since I really don't like to consume beverages with sugar in them.

Despite my aversion to sugary beverages, I'd definitely go for one of these Coconut Island Milk Teas again if they're around in another month or so. It's refreshing and very satisfying, but a little too easy to just knock back all at once, so I wouldn't want to indulge too often. It took a bit of self-control to stop at drinking only half the bottle. I wish they made these types of drinks in two varieties, one with sugar and one with Sucralose, but the Japanese don't go in for sugar-free foods or drinks much because of the chemicals.

Garlic Doritos

One thing you notice if you live in Japan long enough is that food manufacturers are big fans of short-term variations on their core products. In the U.S., you find markets stocking a huge variety all the time, though they also introduce limited edition flavors regularly. In Tokyo, with such limited shelf space in most stores, you get more of what I'd call "serial variety". That means that you should stock up on some obscure flavor if you like it because it probably won't come around again for another year once it's off the shelves.

I've also been told by Japanese people that they like sampling a wide variety of flavors and, in fact, I've been told that the U.S. has little variety compared to Japan. Given that my CH's trip home last year included pictures of shelves chock-a-block with 12 different flavors of coffee creamer, the observation that the U.S. has little variety comes as a surprise to me. I think that what the Japanese people mean is that the U.S. doesn't have the flavor "revolving door" that Japan appears to have. The thing about these variations, and I have to give the marketing folks credit for this, is that they encourage you to sample. It's not only the novelty, but also the limited availability.

I'm not a big chip eater, but I decided to pick up these garlic Doritos at the 99 yen shop when I saw about fifty bags of them on display. I love garlic and I do like tortilla chips. However, my taste in tortilla chips is definitely more toward the baked variety. We buy cases of "Guiltless Gourmet" mucho nacho flavor chips from the Foreign Buyer's Club to have when the desire for something salty hits. I also pack a small handful of them with my CH's lunch most days. In general, Doritos are too greasy for me.


The garlic Doritos smelled like beef consomme when I opened the bag. The smell of garlic isn't all that strong. The taste, however, was pretty intense. When my CH tried them, he thought there was a hint of pepper in them but there is no pepper listed in the ingredients. I think that the garlic is so intense that it tastes a bit hot. If you've ever been foolish enough to bite down on a raw garlic clove, you know that it can taste rather hot depending on the age and type of garlic.

The chips definitely had a strong overtone of consomme flavor (like chicken or beef bullion cubes) and what are called "barbecue" chips in Japan. In the U.S., "barbecue" usually means a sort of spicy, tomato or ketchup flavored chip. In Japan, it is supposed to be a chip which tastes similar to barbecued or grilled meat.

While these chips aren't bad, they also aren't great. If you want something salty and they're around, they're serviceable. However, they aren't the sort of thing I'd find myself craving or buying again.

Mamador Bean Cakes

Two gifts from two different students (for my CH) in one day. A box of Mamador bean cakes from Takashimaya in Shinjuku and some macademia nuts from Saipan.

Sometimes I wonder how long I'd have to live in Japan to sample every white bean cake on the market. No matter how many we try, more keep popping up. And, we've tried a lot. My husband was given a new variety today as a gift from a student for no particular reason. Japanese people are like that.


When I say "new", I mean "new to us" only. Apparently the company that makes these has been in business since 1946. It's easy to miss any particular Japanese sweet when you're shopping. Department stores have miles and miles of them available and it'd be impossible to buy or try them all. That means that some real gems can slip under your radar and these cakes are pretty, shiny diamonds amongst white bean cakes. In fact, they're my husband's new favorite among the types you can pick up pre-boxed (and locally).


The picture of the inside of these cakes makes them look like like they're full of some sort of yellow or fruit jelly, but they are full of super moist white beans surrounded by a moist cake-like shell. Most bean cakes are relatively dry and their fillings can be downright powdery at times. These are full of butter and milk and the flavor is reminiscent of vanilla cake.

It strikes me that these would make an excellent souvenir to take back home as it's a Japanese sweet which I'm sure even squeamish eaters would enjoy. They're just a little hard to find though unless you happen to live in the right location.

Natchel Maple Bran Cookies

The pen is there to show you the size of the cookie. It's about 1/3 of the length of an average ballpoint pen.

There are some types of snack foods that will always get a sampling no matter how many times we try a Japanese version and find it lacking. For my CH, maple is one of those things which is irresistible. He's probably sampled most of the maple cookies, pastries, and cakes available at one time or another in Japan and found very few of them to be repeat purchases. Of course, sampling "all" of them isn't saying much. Maple is not something you see included in most foods in Japan.

Dare makes the most sinfully tasty maple cookie he's ever had in Tokyo and they are available on occasion in Japanese shops which carry imports. However, they are expensive and the bag is rather big. It's not the sort of thing you want to leave lying around the weak-willed and hungry. The purchase of a bag of Dare Maple Leaf cookies almost always is followed by a night of regret and physical discomfort.

When something new pops up touting maple flavor (and if it's maple, there's always a maple leaf on the box), I pick it up for my husband to sample. I'm not a huge fan of maple, but I do find it appealing at times. When I saw the tiny box of "Natchel" maple bran cookies pictured above for about ¥150 ($1.40), I tossed them in the shopping basket. The name is clearly meant to bring the word "natural" to mind. The Japanese characters for the word "natural" are rather close to the name of the product.

The filling to cookie ratio is just barely adequate to add maple flavor to the cookies.

The box contains three 5-packs of tiny cookies. And when I say, "tiny", I'm talking about a cookie roughly half the size of an Oreo. The description in green on the box mentions that there is bran in the cookies. You can see little flecks of bran in the biscuit. The cookies themselves are reminiscent of digestive biscuits in terms of their thickness and density and graham crackers in the coarseness of their texture. The cookies smell weakly of maple though the box goes out of its way to tell you that they contain 1.6% maple sugar. The sweet smell of maple really hits you though if you take the sandwich apart and expose the filling.

The biscuit has a hint of an earthy feel and taste from the bran. They strongly remind me of a maple breakfast cookie sold in Japan which I've had before. It's possible that the breakfast cookie was made by Glico (which makes these Natchel cookies) and the basic recipe wasn't modified all that much. They crunch just like a digestive biscuit. The maple filling seems to taste as much of caramel as maple, though the overall sweetness and flavor of the filling is relatively muted.

Though they do have bran in them, these cookies can't be mistaken for something "healthy". Each packet of 5 cookies has 161 calories and one could easily polish off an entire packet as a snack. Fortunately, the way in which they are packaged discourages one from opening up another and scarfing down more than 5. In my case, I managed to drop two on the floor from the first package we opened so we were spared some calories through my clumsiness. The main ingredients are (in order of concentration) flour, margarine, sugar, shortening, bran, brown sugar, dextrin, milk sugar, maple sugar, and salt. Since maple sugar comes in just before salt, you can see there's not much of it in there. Also, there are a lot of different sugars in the mix.

I asked my husband if he'd buy these himself if he was in the mood for a cookie and he said he would. They're not Dare Maple Leaf cookies, but they are pleasant and the size and packaging are very helpful in curbing over-indulgence.

Note: There is also a blueberry version of this cookie according to Glico's web site. However, blueberry is very resistible and my local market didn't carry that flavor.

Orange Dessert Pocky

Unlike many people who are interested in Japanese snack foods, I'm not a fan of Pocky. I don't really have a problem with it, but I'm not really keen on it either. That being said, I will occasionally pick up a flavor that looks like it might be interesting. There is a wide variety of seasonal Pocky and flavors with limited availability. One of my recent samples in that line was coconut. It was actually very good, but quite expensive for the volume.

I've noticed orange "dessert" Pocky on several occasions and thought it might have potential, but never took the plunge. While I really love the mix of orange and chocolate, I also have had experiences with Japanese sweets that have done a horrible job with the mixture of those two tastes.


Dessert Pocky is different from regular Pocky in that it has an extra swirling of chocolate coating around the base coating flavor. It is sweeter than regular Pocky because of this, but the orange chocolate one had a slightly bittersweet flavor which went very well with the orange. The flavor was exceptionally well-balanced and the orange wasn't artificial tasting.


The volume of chocolate on the pretzel stick is sufficiently thick that the stick itself is more like a vehicle to convey the coating and the biscuit itself doesn't have much influence on the experience of eating one of these except for providing a nice crunch.

You'd think that these would be decadent and pretty high in calories, but each bag of 3 sticks (and the sticks are big) is 95 calories. I think most people would be very satisfied with 3 of them as a treat. I'm not sure if this is because the volume is lower than it appears when you eat them or if because both sorbitol and sucralose (low calorie and artificial sweeteners) are among the ingredients. In terms of taste, I wouldn't have guessed that artificial sweeteners of any type were involved.

These are so good that I may find myself having to resist buying them again and again. The price tag is a little on the high side though. One box of 12 sticks (four 3-packs) is about $2.

Smile Oven - Tamago Pan

One of our local markets has been carrying a line of cheap baked goods under the brand name "Smile Oven". One of the items they offer is "tamago pan". "Tamago" means "egg" in Japanese and "pan" is a Portuguese loan word which means "bread". You can buy tamago pan in most markets that carry pre-packaged baked goods of some sort and at some convenience stores. A package of 5 of these cost a little over a dollar. Though it looks like a cookie, it's aptly named as "bread" since it's not particularly sweet.


Eating tamago pan is more about texture rather than taste. The ingredients are egg, sugar, flour, oil, and baking soda so none of the ingredients carry much flavor. The interior is tender, but dry. The part that you can savor is the outside shell which is satisfyingly crispy without being crumbly. I can't think of any sort of food which is similar in Western cuisine since "crisp" usually refers to a shell which is a lot harder than that on tamago pan.

Since I'm the sort of person who is more attracted to texture than taste, I find these very appealing. They are reminiscent of "melon pan" which also has a slightly crispy shell and soft interior. The main difference is that these are far less "bready" inside and a bit drier. These are excellent with tea or a sweet drink since they are a little bland on their own. Though these are cheap, they are by far the best tamago pan I've had in Japan.