March 26, 2006
Day of snacking
Pucca Chocolate, University Potato Flavor
Way too much snacking today. We ran by the Tan-A market because Oz wouldn't listen to me when I said that all the Pocky was stale. (They have a habit there of marking out the sell-by dates on food items whose sell-by date has long gone.) Stale Pocky is not worth the trip, but he bought some anyway and I picked up these Pucca biscuits, some matcha (green tea) Melty Kiss, and Matcha Softo (chewy green tea candy).
What, you may ask, are university potatoes? I had the same question, because I'd never heard of them, and google replied with sort of an answer and a recipe. University potatoes are fried sweet potatoes with a sweet glaze and black sesame seed sprinkled on. These sweet potatoes are really yams, and not exactly what are generally sold in U.S. grocery stores under the name of sweet potatoes. (Sweet potatoes in name only! Tubers: By their true name you shall know them! Death to the yam hegemony! Some sweet potatoes are more equal than others!)
The Pucca biscuit version of the university potato does have a nice, mild sweet potato flavor, but that's it. The "chocolate" filling is white chocolate cream with sweet potato powder mixed in and the pretzel outside doesn't have much flavor. The black sesame flecks in the pretzel have no flavor whatsoever. This absence of flavor (anti-flavor?) is characteristic of Pucca biscuits. Once I had some black sesame flavor Pucca and I swear the only way you'd know you were eating them was from the texture.
Matcha Melty Kiss, on the other hand, are very tasty. The combination of the bitter cocoa outside melting away to the bitter green tea inside works surprisingly well. Also, the reason why they're so melty is the super-high fat content. Mmm.
Other snacks consumed today include Sugar Cane Lime cookies, dim sum treats, and Pocky (not stale).
I feel a little bit ill.
329 words | March 26, 2006 09:19 PM | Kitchen