This is Wrong
Curry in a packet - who’d a thunk it.
Walking round any given Japanese city, you would be able to see a plethora of examples where Japan has culturally diluted a foreign food dish, to suit it’s own tastes. This is practiced in many countries and is a natural part of consumer society, such as Satay Pizza in Singapore or the McOZ burger in Australia (has a slice of beetroot in it and uses Australian beef). However, whereas other countries tend to improve original recipes or adapt them in ways that are both exotic and delicious, Japan has perfected the art of making them crap.
From seaweed on your spaghetti to mayonnaise on your pizza, Japanese chefs everywhere have cultivated an almost Zen-like talent for destroying foreign favourites just by adding one or two alien ingredients.
Curry is one of these foods. When I think of curry, I think of many things. For Indian curries I think tomato, I think spices, I think yoghurt. Asian curries - I think chilli, I think coconut milk. Japanese curry is almost exactly like these curries, except with all those distinctive ingredients taken out and replaced with an array of other, less sense-making ingredients, like grape juice and tomato ketchup. The end product is a typical Japanese curry (pictured left) - a thin, brown gravy in which you will find the odd cube of meat, potato or carrot.
‘Variety’ with Japanese curries comes in the form of what kind of deep-fried food product your curry is lovingly slopped over. For example, the most popular curry is arguably “Katsu Kare” which is a deep fried pork cutlet, half submerged in thin, brown curry and served with rice. Other types of curry can be created effortlessly by swapping this central item for something else, like fried chicken or fried fillet steak. It’s a boon for curry restaurants who because of this don’t really have to, you know, cook anything.
This is not to say Japanese curry isn’t nice, however. It has it’s own charm and appeal and whilst I wouldn’t choose it over a delicious Rendang or Vindaloo, Japanese curry does rank as one of the most instantly accessible foods to new foreigners or tourists over here, in that it doesn’t contain any raw flesh, insect larvae or chilled reproductive organs.
So anyway returning to the theme of culinary dumbing down. Curry is a bit of a gastronomic whipping-boy in Japan. It’s own phenomenal popularity means that it is almost intrusively ubiquitous - at any given supermarket there will be entire AISLES dedicated to all kinds of curry sauce mixes, dozens of different brands of curry stock cubes and ready-made curry sachets, each different in taste to each other by only the smallest degree possible, distinguishable by no human alive.
Ready-made packet curry is by far the lowest rung on this already rather stout and rickety ladder, but BUDGET ready-made curry is the source of my review today, which continuing the ladder analogy would be in a position some several feet underground, far beneath the lowest rung.
Ready-made packet curry is the ultimate bachelor food. The easy-tear packet opening, the simple boil-in-the-bag cooking instructions and the special foil material that doesn’t get hot in boiling water so you can handle it quite comfortably after removing it from the pan - all scream ‘RETARD CHOW’ as if through a jumbo-sized, brightly-coloured megaphone directly into your face. It has elevated the eating process into a kind of effortless task that even the most proudly bacheloresque of males would figure out how to accomplish in seconds, kind of like if you were to put handles on a doner kebab or had deep fryers that automatically coated food with BBQ sauce, saving valuable seconds.
The price range for this kind of curry is from about 100-yen to 300-yen, after which the difference in price between buying the packet curry and actually going out to a restaurant to eat curry becomes negligible. The curry in today’s review was 100-yen.
Packet curry rarely has much in it apart from sauce. Well, ALL Japanese curry rarely has much apart from sauce, but packet curry especially lacks ingredients other than ‘brown’, ‘msg’ and ‘water’ to a quite alarming degree. When I find a bit of meat in my packet curry, it’s like winning the lottery, although winning the lottery has slightly better odds than finding a piece of meat in any given packet of ready-made curry.
Looking alarmingly like what you might explode into a toilet bowl if you had dysentery from eating someone else’s shit for a week, I didn’t have particularly high expectations. I’d like to say that looks were deceiving but the hard truth is that this curry looked and tasted not unlike bum puke. Not that I have ever eaten shit, but I imagine that it would rank on a scale of unpleasantness similar to this poor excuse for real food.
However, you might like to know that it is possible to buy good packet curry. Indeed I have eaten many rather delicious brands of the stuff but bent with a kind of sick perversion to see just how low I could go, I purposefully chose the cheapest, most bland-looking curry for this review because lets face it, it just wouldn’t be yongfook.com if I actually enjoyed what I was eating.
On a scale of 1 to 5 I give this curry minus infinity kinity zinity.
I agree! So long as u don’t expect it to taste like “real” curry, it can b ok…I personally like Cocoichibanya’s Veggie jyuu-ban - actually has enough spice in it to warm the mouth a tad. But the packet stuff isn’t worth it for the price, since the half-passable stuff is barely cheaper than at a restaurant…even all the way up in the boonies of Hokkaido!
That packet is kinda misleading. I don’t remember seeing packet curry before now, so I don’t know how it compares to others. But this one claims to be good and the package looks nice. Minus infinity kinity zinity? It seems so unlike you to say that, in a funny way.