Japanese Snacks Made From Sandwich Bread Crust!

Have you ever noticed how sandwiches in Japan often have their crusts cut off? Ever thought that it was a waste of food? Well here’s one use for them. Rusk is a popular snack food that many bakeries and confectioneries sell. It’s basically bread that has been toasted with lots of butter and sugar.

Lunch Pack is a popular sandwich made by the Yamazaki company and is sold in any grocery or convenience store. The two slices of bread are fused together with some sort of filling and the crusts are always cut off. The company obviously didn’t want those crusts to go to waste; they found a perfectly good use for them in their rusk snacks! Crusts are great to use for rusk because you really get that toasty flavour. The one pictured here is french toast flavour, but it also comes in chocolate, peanut, matcha and honey. 

French toast flavour

Sandwich bread crust rusk

Tirol Chocolate Flavour #18: Chocolate Cake

18. Chocolate Cake (2020)

While I've never been to Tops before, this restaurant in Tokyo seems to have a signature chocolate cake. It is layers of sponge cake and chocolate cream. They have collaborated with Tirol to create a chocolate that supposedly tastes like it.

Flavours: sponge cake, chocolate icing, walnuts

The inner layer seems to be made with shiro-an, or a white bean paste which gives it the texture of sponge cake. Although I've never had the chocolate cake from Tops before, the walnuts and the custard paste is a nice addition for some crunch and to replicate the overall flavours of a chocolate cake. Eating this chocolate makes me want to try the real thing at Tops!

Tirol Chocolate Flavour #17: Sacre Lemon

17. Sacre Lemon (2020)

There's a crushed ice dessert in Japan that you can find almost anywhere called Sacre Lemon. Although the first ingredient on the list is sugar, the next ingredients are lemon and lemon juice. It is a cool and refreshing cup of lemony goodness especially in the hot summer months. One of the signature features of this lemon slush is the frozen lemon slice on top, sweet and sour to wake up those taste buds and get your appetite going. Tirol chocolate has collaborated with the makers of Sacre Lemon to recreate the flavours in chocolate form.

Flavours: white chocolate, lemon

Upon opening the package the strong smell of lemon just wafted up to my nose! Inside there was a layer of a white powder that as it melted in my mouth created and interesting cool texture, as if I were eating something cold, what a strange feeling! There were also pieces of hard lemon candy making it overall a little bit crunchy just like ice. A great reproduction of the long-selling dessert in a chocolate-y bite!

Potato Chips for the Summer?

The Japanese are proud of their 4 seasons and are big on their limited edition seasonal products. Calbee has a line of potato chips that are geared towards the present season. For this summer their flavour is ume-boshi, a pickled plum. Normally salty and sour, it is an accompaniment to a bowl of steamed white rice.

Not only is this chip's flavour related to summer, the potatoes used are too. The Japanese really like to pay attention to small details! On the back of the bag they explain that in summer, they use potatoes from Kyushu because their harvest time is around May and June. This way they can use the freshest ones. Perhaps this is one reason why they also used Kyushu ume-boshi for the flavouring, aside from the fact that they are high quality and are on the more expensive side when it comes to pickled plums. The company also chose to cut the chips into ruffle shapes deliberately because they believe the crispiness of them matches perfectly with the light flavouring. The ume-boshi flavour was actually not that strong, but still retained the overall feel of ume-boshi, so I think they've achieved their goal of a summer chip!

Roll Cake: A Popular Longtime Seller in Japan

There are many Western-style sweets that are popular in Japan, such as shu-cream (cream puffs, or French chou a la creme), baumkuchen (a German cake) and roll cake (which I think is modeled after the Swiss roll cake). Walk into any convenience store and you'll be sure to find these pastries which have not gone out of style and are still popular as ever. 

Today I will talk about the roll cake. You may be used to seeing a thin sponge cake rolled with a spiraling layer of cream. However, in Japan, they really like their cream and the roll cake has become an outer layer of sponge cake with a filling of plenty of whipped cream or custard. You'll find all kinds of variations depending on the season and what's trendy. For example, there has been a chai roll cake, a baumkuchen roll cake, a creme brulee roll cake, a matcha roll cake and so on. 

This roll cake, from Family Mart, is a result of a collaboration with Kihachi, a famous upscale restaurant. With pieces of mango and kiwi, a dollop of mango puree and custard, this one seems a bit fresher and lighter then a plain roll cake. 

Tirol Chocolate Flavour #16: Gateau Chocolat

16. Gateau Chocolat (2020)

Chocolate and gateau chocolat (the rich and dense French sweet)  are two different things and Tirol has done a good job of distinguishing this.

Flavours: dark chocolate, ganache, biscuit

The outer layer is a smooth dark chocolate with the richness that a ganache would have. Inside there is a thin layer of chocolate syrup, and the texture of cake was emulated with the use of chocolate flavoured shiro-an (a white bean paste). There were small pieces of biscuit in it probably to convey the crispiness of the edges that a gateau chocolat often has.

Kit Kat in Japan

Although I talk a lot about Tirol Chocolates in my blog, Kit Kats are probably way more widely known. For the interesting flavours, usually you have to buy a big bag of them, but recently I found a couple loose ones available at a convenience store; Ocean Salt and Sakura Mochi (cherry blossoms).

First, let's talk about the Ocean Salt. I was very surprised to find white chocolate inside. Usually when I think of salt and chocolate I think of dark or milk chocolate.White chocolate is pretty sweet itself but the addition of salt brings out the sweetness even more.

Then there was Sakura Mochi. Although it didn't have the chewy texture of mochi, it tasted and smelled exactly like sakura mochi, even with the slight hint of salt that real sakura mochi has.