Monday 30 May 2011

Japanese Junk Food Times - Pepsi Dry and Kit-Kat Zunda

Oh! I didn't see you there! Let me just put my gourmet hat on, and then tell you about my journeys in the realm of... flavour.


I don't need to go into how the Japanese snack food market retains its vim and vigour by trying out new flavours of existing products all the time, do I? I've read about a zillion other blog posts explaining the concept recently, so let's just say that I am thoroughly down with the concept. It reminds me of Grant Morrison's Seaguy a little, and also makes me think of white suited cowboys of the lab - pouring bubbling test-tubes into each other in search of the essence of... pistachio nut shells or something.

Above you will see Dry Pepsi. What is Dry Pepsi? It is non-sweet Pepsi. It makes no claims about being especially healthy on the bottle (though you would assume the lack of sugar is a good thing) and instead talks about being light and refreshing or something. I don't like Pepsi really, weirdly it is a little to sweet for me. So I figured that non-sweet Pepsi might be something worth checking out.

It was not.

It is not less sweet, as I was foolishly imagining, it is not sweet at all. In fact, it doesn't taste like Pepsi, it tastes like soda water, and I soon found myself wondering why it existed. If you like the bitter tang of soda, try it, or better yet JUST BUY SODA. After Shiso Pepsi, Azuki Pepsi and Montblanc Pepsi... this was a let down.


Better, but not incredible was, Kit-Kat Zunda - Zunda-Mochi being soy-bean rice cakes from Sendai. A quick google reveals that Pocky Watch - based in Sendai - reviewed this back in 2009. Tohoku was devastated by the tsunami in March of course, and now it looks like they're rolling out this flavour nationwide and giving 10yen from every bar to support the rebuilding effort. Good stuff.

The bar itself was nice, faintly bean-y, faintly rice-cake-y, but nothing to write home about. Wait, what am I doing here? Is this more effort or less than writing home? I'm lost. Anyway it was ok, but as usual they nail the scent a lot more than the actual taste - which comes out a little bit like funny white chocolate.

Anyway, that's my traditional Japanese food post. You're welcome.

No comments:

Post a Comment