Yatta-Tachi Eats: Dagashi – Part 1

Dagashi Kashi is one of the tastiest anime of the Winter 2016 season, but are the snacks featured any good? Lets find out! I’ll be looking at 13 different snacks, all of them featured in the Dagashi Kashi Manga, and most of them in the Anime as well. Want to try them out yourself? Luckily for you, you can buy these and many other awesome Japanese treats at J-List.

Umai-bou

Puffy corn sticks? Sounds boring, but it’s quite the opposite in fact. Umai-bou means delicious stick, and they didn’t lie one bit. I got supplied with 3 whole sticks, which sounds like a lot until you realize that the suggested retail price is 10 yen, which is 9 cents. 

First on the chopping block: Pizza Umai-bou.

When I opened the package, it smelled amazing, and upon biting into the Umai-bou, it only got better. Tomato and herbs are all very clearly present, while cheese not so much though. However, I wonder if that is for the better, since cheese powder is generally quite bad. It made me crave pizza, enough said.

Next, the Corn Potage, or Corn Soup Umai-bou.

The smell is not as prominent as the pizza, but it does have a hint of sweet corn. This trend continues when I took a bite. It’s nice, but a bit bland compared to the amazingness of the pizza.

And finally, Natto Umai-bou.

Yes, natto. Those fermented soja beans that look as good as they taste, which is absolutely horrid. I didn’t know this was natto flavour when I ate it, so for the longest time I was questioning what kind of flavour it even was. But suffice it to say, it was salty and weird.

8 Corn Cobs out of 10 for the Pizza | 7 for the Corn Potage | 1 for the Natto

Potato Fry

The smell when I opened this dagashi was simply amazing. Potato fry perfectly describes both the smell and the taste. They resemble thicker, two-layered potato crisps that are formed like less dense Pringles. The crunch is great, as is the flavour. It really gives a freshly fried vibe, for better or for worse.

The four discs contained in the package were not nearly enough to satisfy me. I wish they had sent me a family sized pack. The anime showed off a hot variant as well, which I would love to try.

7 Potatoes out of 8

Kinakobo

Kinakobo are very traditional dagashi, made from roasted soybean flour stuck together with a syrup. But unless they made a mistake, they did not use a sugary syrup for mine, as they tasted just like flour.

Bland flour, which is not a great experience if you ask me. Maybe, just maybe, it would be better with a sauce, but as that point it would just be a bland carrier for said sauce, kind of like a cracker.

5 Unsalted Crackers out of 12

Namaiki Beer

I was quite interested in this dagashi, as it promises to look just like a glass of beer. However, as I am unable to read Japanese, I used both of the tablets with the water required for one. This resulted in a whole load of foam in a suddenly way too small glass! I didn’t even get to take any pictures of the foam, as I had to run for paper towels.

Anyways, after the foam-pocalypse calmed down I was able to get a few sips. The taste was fruity and a little sweet, with a small amount of fizz left over from the dissolving tablets. It was quite pleasant, but it lacked the wow factor, even with the double dose increasing the flavour.

7 Average Chocolate Bars out of 11

Morocco Fruits Yogurt

 Fruit? Yogurt? Sounds far too healthy. Isn’t dagashi all about candy? As it turns out, yes it is. The small cup of yogurt was very sweet, and it even had particles inside that felt like sugar grains. The fruits, however, were strangely absent. Overall it was pretty nice, but not as healthy as the name suggests.

6 Yogurt Ice Cream Scoops out of 15

Coffee Milk Candy

These bad boys are amazing. A hard candy ball, kinda like those sour fruit balls, but coffee flavoured. I’m not even a coffee lover, but these were great from start to finish. No core or anything fancy, just the same awesome flavour throughout. Didn’t really have a Japanese feel to it though, but it appeared in the anime, so it’s all fair.

2 Lattés out of 3

Butamen

Next up is Butamen. As it was a while since I saw the episode these featured in, I was expecting something sweet that resembled cup ramen. Instead I was greeted by actual ramen.

Which is fine, I enjoy ramen, but it’s nothing special. The portion was enough for a quick snack, and the taste was adequate. But I gotta ask, who would go to a dagashi store and buy something they need a kettle to prepare?

8 College Students Living Off of Ramen out of 13

Kuru Kuru Bou Jelly

Kuru Kuru Bou Jelly is an oddly shaped stick, filled to the brim with jelly. I’m not a fan of jelly at the best of times, and this certainly did not convert me. Getting it out was fairly easy, as sucking seemed to do the job quite well. The flavour was quite bland, and gave no real hint at to what it’s supposed to taste like. At least it wasn’t sweeter than a sugar cube, which is what I originally feared. I tried chilling it afterwards and that did improve it slightly, but only slightly.

1 Gelatinous Cube out of 4

Fue Ramune

Fue Ramune is quite interesting, as it’s a piece of dagashi that’s also a toy. Too bad it’s the most annoying toy you could ever think of. Who thought that a high pitched whistle would be awesome in the hands of a child? WHO?

It also comes with probably the worst piece of plastic someone has called a toy that I’ve ever seen. Taste wise it’s very bland as well, with only slight hints of that lemon ramune flavour. It’s not worth it for the dagashi alone. Unless you like annoying people, that is.

4 Empty Ramune Bottles out of 9

Cocoa Cigarette

I was expecting something resembling a cigarette, with chocolate instead of tobacco. The packaging surely does look like a small cigarette pack. But no, instead this dagashi takes the shape of powder pressed into sticks. Very meh tasting ones at that, with barely any hint of cocoa, and a bit sour. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t very good either.

3 Fake Chocolate Bars out of 5

Puchipuchi Uranai Choco

What will my fortune be, dear chocolate? If only it was that simple. Instead, this dagashi has you popping chocolate out of its package to reveal your fortune, rated from an X to a double circle. Mine was utter garbage, promising me to be great at sports and a total lack of love. The chocolate itself didn’t help either, as it had a hard sugar coating that was hiding some of the worst chocolate I’ve ever had.

2 Empty KitKat Wrappers out of 7

Bin Ramune

Dagashi in the shape of a bottle, with powder that promises to taste like soda inside? Sounds interesting. They even give you a straw to suck it out, although I may have stuck it in the wrong side. I blame the cute bunny on the front of the package!

At any rate, the powder did not live up to the hype, especially when the anime uses it for a drug gag. It was fairly bland, although still nicer than the whistle dagashi, but it did not remind me of soda in any way. The wafer they used to construct the bottle isn’t much better, as it’s really cheaply made.

3 Ice Cream Cones out of 6

Kozakura Mochi

Mochi, a true Japanese classic. This variety is, as I understand it, small cubes with a sort of sugar coating. This coating helps both with the flavour and with preventing the normally sticky mochi from sticking to the packaging. This particular package contains 3 different flavours, which I am going to call green, yellow, and red instead of their actual flavour, because Japanese text.

The combination of the hard outer shell and the soft mochi inside is very nice, providing a crunch into chewy goodness. They were all mildly sweet, but not overly so. The greens tasted a bit like green apple, which wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true. The yellows were definitely fruitier, but nothing clear taste wise. Banana maybe? Who knows. Finally, the redshirts were just plain boring.

9 Mochi Cubes out of 14

That’s it for part one of this tasty review of the Dagashi Kashi sampler from Jbox.com. Read Dagashi part two here, where I talk about, amongst others, Sakura Daikon, Bontan Ame, Cabbage-taro, and Choco Baby. You can also read Dagashi part three here! If you want to get your own sampler you can right over here: J-List.

Disclaimer: For the J-List Links, Yatta-Tachi may get a small commission.