I’m back.
Sorry for my absence. My parents came to stay with me for three weeks and that coupled with the need to clean the house before their arrival has meant that I have had absolutely zero time for blogging whatsoever.
However, I am now energised with hundreds of pictures and stories and the amount of content on this site is set to skyrocket.
Not today though, today I am tired, so we’ll be going back to an old favourite.
Yes, it’s time for me to review some kit-kats.
First up is the most normal of today’s contenders a dual pack of kit-kat minis; white peach and peach.
The packaging is nothing particularly special and not particularly well done although the peach illustration is nice. Having said that; peach kit-kats don’t seem as out there as watermelon or tea so they probably need less eye catching packaging.
So how do the flavours stack up?
Well peach is delicious. Even the smell is really overtly peachlike. Like all the fruit kit-kats the initial taste isn’t too fruity but there is a strong peach quality to it and the after taste is very strong. It’s a nice complex flavour too and not too sweet. Overall I’d say this was a real homerun for kit-kat.
White peach doesn’t fare quite so well. It doesn’t smell or taste as strong as peach. In fact it is a little bland. It is very creamy though and there are definite fruity notes to it. On its own this wouldn’t be too bad but it stacks up poorly next to peach.
Next we’re onto a pair of drink based kit-kats in the standard Japanese packaging (i.e. 4 finger split into 2 packs of 2) Espresso coffee and Jasmine Tea.
Espresso Coffee has great packaging with a delicious and inviting looking picture of an espresso and some funky swirls and dark notes. It all seems very jazzy. I approve.
I can’t really make up my mind about espresso. On the one hand it in no way shape or form tastes as strong as an espresso coffee. In fact the first few bites are almost totally tasteless. However once you get into it a really, really strong coffee flavour starts to emerge with a lovely aftertaste. I wouldn’t call this an espresso coffee, unless you drink espresso with about 4 sugars, but it is nice.
Jasmine has really cool packaging that is very over the top. Not only is it green and pink (the Japanese colours of spring) but it has tiny flowers on it and an inviting cup of jasmine tea complete with pot! Totally irony free this one, it wants you to feel all springy and by god you will feel springy. I should also mention that I am not allowed to throw away this packet because it has the kanji for jasmine written on it and these are the same kanji that appear in my girlfriend, Mariko’s, name. So she wants to carry it around and show it to random Japanese people.
I was surprised at the colour. Rather than being a white or off-white tea colour it was in fact chocolate coloured. And the taste is distinctly odd. Not unpleasant but very odd. It tastes of both chocolate and jasmine tea at the same time. In fact the jasmine tea flavour is uncanny, particularly the aftertaste. The flavour is a little bit too busy for me personally but they delivered exactly what they promised.
Now onto the truly oddball offers. These are a pair of kit-kats that can only be bought at Tokyo station. They come in a special kind of display package so you can give them to co-workers as gifts, a common practise in Japan known as omiyage.
The writing is all in Japanese in florid letters that I cannot decipher so the flavour could in fact be anything. In fact our brief attempt at decoding it came up with the flavour “shoyu,”… which means soy sauce.
Soy sauce kit-kats? Well, I’ll try anything once.
It is white.
The smell I cannot place.
Ah, it is soy sauce.
Technically it is sweet soy sauce, which is still soy sauce but Japanese people do use it as flavouring for sweets such as dango. I’m not hugely keen on it and my first bite of this was a little weird but actually they’re rather nice. They taste mostly of burnt caramel with a slight sour note and a little bit of a salt note. This means they have a really rich and complicated flavour that hits all the areas of your mouth at once. They’re sweet but not too sweet, a little bitter, a little sour and a little salty. Consequently they are really, really more-ish. A surprising success I’d say.
The next one we literally had no idea what to expect. Our best guess was mushroom but we weren’t nearly as sure as with the soy sauce guess.
I literally have no idea what it is meant to taste like but it does taste nice. It is mostly chocolaty and very, very salty. In fact it is the saltiest kit-kat I think I have ever eaten. There is also a very strong umami feeling (the fifth taste and a big focus of Japanese cooking) and a very complicated rich indefinite note as well. Curiously it lacks a strong after taste, something that flavoured kit-kts tend to have. Frankly I find it too weird and ephemeral to be a big hit but it isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination.
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