This is a post that started from a Mixi post I made about unusual donuts (in Japanese) and then purely by coincidence the next day I stumbled upon some other unusual foodstuffs. First, on with the donuts.
Don’t make donuts out of that
On the way home from Jiyugaoka one fine Saturday afternoon, I stopped by the Boulangerie Asanoya, a bakery in the newish Trainchi Shopping Center in Jiyugaoka. It is a nice bakery – there are actually a bunch of nice bakeries in the Jiyugaoka area, but this one is on the way home. I was really hankering for a nice doughnut, but I instead came across
some unusual doughnuts. This isn’t uncommon in Japan, but for whatever reason (mostly the Ham and Cheese) I decided to take a picture of it this time. In this case they are calling one of their creations a ham and cheese doughut. While that sounds like a perfectly reasonable food, take some ham and cheese, stuff it in dough, and fry the whole thing, I just don’t think it should be called a doughnut. I like my doughnuts to be sweet. I don’t know if these had sugar on them or not, since I didn’t want to try it particularly, but I don’t think they should be called doughnuts.
Next to those were the green tea and Azuki (red bean paste sweetened with sugar) doughnuts. The Azuki doughnuts are very common. I’m sure everyone who visits and gets a doughnut expecting a nice creme-filled center is surprised with the slightly thick, somewhat unusual taste of the Azuki bean paste. They are very common. They are pretty good too. This is the first time that I’ve seen Maccha doughnuts though. Maccha is a green tea flavor, and I suspect the taste would be bitter, but again, I didn’t venture a taste myself.
I went with the quite delicious, and exactly what I wanted, jelly-filled berliner.
Give me a break!
The other day while in a convenience store, I came across some unusual flavors of KitKat bars. Maybe I should back up a bit here. First, the Japanese really love the four seasons. You can have a very long and involved conversation about what your favorite season is, and none of them get short shrift really. There is a long tradition of poetry that extols the virtues of a given season. So, following that, there is a tradition of having foods and drinks that are exclusive to each season. Unlike poetry, Summer seems to get the lion’s share of goods here – although in Winter our vending machine at work sports more hot coffees and hot chocolate, which turns cold in the summer. Anyway, there are lots of things that only show up at certain times.
For some reason, KitKat bars seem to be pretty popular here in Japan, and there is even a strange breaktown.com web site with KitKat themed games and stuff. They normally have regular KitKat bars, a Maccha green tea variety, and Strawberry KitKat bars (which are quite good.) The other day I stumbled upon three more mutant flavors: Orange, Kiwifruit, and Pineapple.
Orange isn’t too bad. It is very similar in flavor to the regular chocolate KitKat bar, but has a really overwhelming Orange scent. I think they just added orange perfume to a regular KitKat and called it a day. Kiwifruit is pretty bad though. It has a really strange aftertaste. Pineapple is somewhere in between.
If I get around to it, I’ll try to track down the other unusual (to me) KitKat bar flavors. According to the website, I should at least be able to find Exotic Tokyo II White Chocolate flavor (white chocolate and gooseberries with mixed American cherries), Exotic Tokyo Chocolate flavor (with mixed fruit!), Exotic Hokkaidou 2 (with Red Wine and Strawberries), Exotic Hokkaidou (white chocolate with creme cheese and matched sour berries to express Hokkaidou’s oneness with nature), Exotic Kansai (with lemons and ginger), and Exotic Kyuushyuu (with Mango and Orange Caramel and black pepper).
On second thought, perhaps I’ll pass on trying to track those down (although, the lazy can order them from the web via the links.) I also vaguely recall seeing other strange flavors like Sakura (cherry/blossom) at some point. I’ll keep my eyes open at the local convenience stores.
Crazy country.
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