Savoury Japanese snacks like traditional sembei rice crackers are really good. Japan has produced all kinds of more modern snacks since and there really is an enormous variety to choose from. If you walk into a konbini, you will find a great variety. I'm sampling a few of these along with having a nice Asahi beer while watching some anime to relax.
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| Beer snacks assortment from Japan. |
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| Always a favourite, these are Cheeza crackers that have 53% cheese in them. Great if you like crunchy and cheesy. |
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| Shrimp curry cracker sticks with peanuts. Very savoury and curry tasting. |
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| These little pretzel bites had a very nice smokey, pepper bacon flavour to them. |
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| Ramen flavoured pringle chips. These come in a mini-can and are even mini-sized chips. Tasty, with a general ramen-like flavour. |
UHA Mikakuto Croquettes
I've really wanted to try these for a long time. Finally was able to order them online as I'm not in Tokyo again any time soon. You can buy these at Don Quijote and konbini. These are an interesting snack food as UHA makes an entire line of freeze dried snacks and also facsimiles of sui mai, gyoza, and croquettes. How close could these croquettes come to the real thing, which are delicious?
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| UHA Mikakuto Croquettes. The front of the bag shows a delicious looking croquette broken open to show the filling. These bags are quite small, and you get five croquettes in a 30 gram bag. A bag costs about 140 yen. |
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| Croquettes inside the bag. |
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| Closeup of a croquette. Croquettes are deep fried for a crunchy, crispy exterior and a soft juicy interior. The breading looks nice. |
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| After ripping one open, you can see that the croquette actually has the structure of a croquette with different filling and breading layers. Neat. |
An actual croquette is really tasty. Often it is a breaded exterior with a potato and meat filling on the inside. You can get these at konbini and stalls on the street. They are super tasty, quite hot if fresh out of the fryer and are just really good. These UHA croquettes were fried and then freeze-dried I think to remove the moisture and preserve them. Some kind of amazing food science goes into making these as they stay crunchy on the outside with a moister interior. There is no meat in these, but meat extracts give the croquette an amazing meaty taste and with a good crunch. I'd definitely bring home a few bags of these when I visit Japan next time and they would be a nice snack on a hike or a trip. I definitely recommend trying these. Now onto my snack platter with my beer.
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| I had a handful of cheezas in the top left, followed by Cratz in the top right, then the curry sticks and peanuts in the bottom right, and then a couple of the croquettes in the bottom left. |
These snacks went really well with the beer. Three out of the four snacks were new to me too so it was a fun experience to try them out. The Asahi beer was good as usual.
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| Beer and snacks. |
A little extra bonus for some other savoury snacks follows.
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| Tempura seaweed and shrimp flavoured chips. Both delicious. |
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| These are an old Japanese staple. Little mini-bags of battered peanuts, rice crackers, little nori wrapped sembei, and even some little dried sardines. Good with beer. |
Thats all for now. Take a break, have a snack!
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