Morinaga Marie Lemon Tea Cookies: Lemon tea is a common drink you can find in grocery stores in Japan, basically like iced tea in the US but generally less sweet. Marie is normally a very plain circular biscuit from Japanese food giant Morinaga (hockey puck shaped and the type you'd see labeled as "digestives") but this box contained lemon-tea flavored sandwich cookies that had a surprisingly solid herbal black tea flavor with a bit of sweet lemon acidity. The biscuits themselves are crumbly and much more like cookies than... (read more) 3.5/5.0
recommended japanese coop morinaga marie lemon tea 3.5 cookies
JA Foods Kabosu Juice: This small aluminum bottle contains a non-carbonated citrus juice with pulp from kabosu, a relative to yuzu that's popular in Japan. The fruit looks like a round lime and is green on the outside but orangish-yellow inside. The juice tastes a little bit like calamansi and generally is more concentrated in flavor than regular lime juice, while smelling of a mix of tangerine and lime. Enjoyable overall and unique - I'm glad to be getting to taste different types of citrus-flavored food here! 3.5/5.0
recommended drinks japanese citrus jafoods kabosu juice 3.5
酢屋亀 Amazake: While they tend to be quite sweet, I do enjoy drinking amazake, a fermented rice drink made with koji that has a milky consistency and softened grains of rice mixed in. It's a little bit tangy and sweet, sort of like a yogurt drink but less thick and a little boozy (though this one has 0% alcohol). Even in small bottles, I tend not to drink the whole thing in one go since the flavor is quite potent and definitely on the sugary side. Purchased from Santouka. 3.5/5.0
recommended drinks japanese amazake 3.5 rice
Denroku Okay Pea Eel Peanut Snacks: Rice cracker balls that each contain a single roasted peanut, with a squid-flavored coating that's full of umami. Uses squid from Hokkaido. The balls are slightly smaller than puffed cheese balls but are just as snackable. Kind of like how some cereals feature only granola clusters rather than a mix of flakes and sliced nuts, these peanut rice snacks are typically the best part of rice cracker mixes, so I'm happy to have a bag of the most tasty bits. 3.5/5.0
recommended japanese coop ricecrackers denroku okay pea eel peanut snacks 3.5
あわしま堂 Mandarin Orange Daifuku: I've had surprisingly little mochi in Japan, even though it's one of my favorite snacks, but the orange-themed packaging of this individually-wrapped snack stood out to me, and since I had never tasted orange-flavored mochi before, I decided to give it a try. The mochi itself is dyed pale orange and is much more plump and pliable than any store-bought mochi I've had in the states. The filling is almost like an orange pulp, slightly stringy in texture, and is notably acidic, rather than tas... (read more) 3.5/5.0
recommended mochi tokyo daifuku mandarin orange 3.5
YBC Noir Cocoa Cookies: These are the Japanese equivalent of Oreo cookies, which I tend to have about once a year at the MIT Mystery Hunt competition. Since Mystery Hunt was completely remote this year, I wasn't able to partake in the normal consumption of college-dorm junk food normally shared in person to fuel late-night puzzling, but I still wanted to capture the spirit, which led me to purchase this snack. The YBC snack packs are ubiquitous and can be found at basically all convenience and grocery stores. Ov... (read more) 3.5/5.0
recommended cookies japanese coop ybc noir cocoa 3.5