Osatsu where art thou
Every so often in between eating potato chips that taste more like the rancid scabs of a balrog than whatever is depicted on the packaging photo or jam made entirely from pickled seahorse gills, I find a snack in this country which I herald as a a true saviour of the Japanese culinary tradition.
As I have said before in my diary archives, traditional Japanese cakes and sweet items almost always involve “anko” in some way (usually as a filling), anko being red azuki beans that have been crushed and mixed with a copious amount of sugar. This total lack of imagination can be breathtaking at times, where a famous anko-filled regional sweet differs only from the next region’s anko-filled regional sweet in the way that one is triangular and one is circular, with both containing exactly the same ingredients. This makes trying new traditional sweets in Japan an exhilaratingly dull experience.
Chief Sweet Maker: What you working on? It had better be bean-related. Plucky Young Sweet Maker Intern: Actually I was trying to process milk to make it richer and thicker, I think I’ll call it “cream” - I think it will make a good filling for cakes. Chief Sweet Maker: THOUGHTCRIME IS DEATH. THOUGHTCRIME IS DEATH!!!11
However, there are some regions that break this mould and use a different filling for their regional sweets, and that filling is satsumaimo - the Japanese sweet potato. Whilst I’m not sure why Japan has such a hard-on for starchy, dry fillings which turns dessert time into an exciting game of chance as you see how many you can eat before your body starts to implode from dehydration, this is at least a welcome diversion from the endless mountains of anko-based traditional sweet goods that all taste exactly alike.
Satsumaimo are fairly elongated, and have a tough layer of purple skin covering the outside, giving them the appearance of a dry ogre turd. Inside, they are a striking yellow-orange when cooked. They are traditionally eaten much like we in the west would eat a jacket potato - baked in foil and split in half, although in mashed form they make their way into all sorts of pastries and sweet goods. The taste is a kind of charming, mildly nutty sweetness with a slight hint of salt and on a cold day the smell of a freshly baked sweet potato is incredibly inviting. This is not just any old food - its an institution, the license of which has to be handled carefully for a smooth transition to processed snack food product. Thusly the subject of today’s review are baked satsumaimo flavour potato chips named “Osatsu Snack”. And Jesus Tap-dancing Christ on a Bicycle, they’ve done a rather good job.
Everything about this product is almost perfect. The classy, matt-finish packaging, the appetising photo of a freshly split-open sweet potato. The total lack of any retardedly garish and/or blatantly youth-targeted design. These are snacks for the connoisseur, for the gentleman who will eat these whilst polishing his 1968 Shelby GT and smoking cigars made of the finest baby seal.
There is one unfortunate attribute however, that prevents this product being of a kind of cosmically amazing food-of-foods, the kind that we would send into space to one day get picked up and eaten by an alien civilisation, who would then drop to their knees and claw desperately at their chests in despair at the fact that they have never in their billions of years of evolution produced something this tasty, and promptly build thousands of monuments dedicated to it and commit mass suicide. And that unfortunate attribute is: In a few weeks, I won’t be able to buy this in any shop, anywhere in Japan.
This snack, like myriad others in this country has the word “gentei” printed proudly in the top corner, which means “limited (edition)”, usually dependent on the season, and in Osatsu Snack’s case they are available only in Autumn and Winter. Manufacturers dictate, according to archaic cultural trends, when a product is to be sold and when it is to be ceremoniously culled from the market without any warning apart from the innate knowledge ingrained in all Japanese people from birth that, for example, Satsumaimo is something most commonly eaten in the colder seasons, and that to eat one in summer would be a cultural faux pas equal to that in England of chanting the popular football song “You’re Shiiiiit And You Know You Are (repeat)” at the top of your voice to the players at a game of chess.
I’m not really sure what happens in the off peak season, although I have several hypothesises. I imagine members of the manufacturer’s Inner Party in summer lazing by a pool, sipping cocaine-laced strawberry daiquiris and grabbing handfuls of osatsu snacks from a huge never-ending sack which sits by their sun lounger, giving a hearty “HAHAHA FOOLS!” as they stuff the chips into their mouths and stomp on the face of a small peasant boy whom they are also using as an ashtray. All this happening whilst I have to make do with some poor substitute snack, probably made out of sand.
Appearance
These look like graceful little yellow petals. Opening a packet gives off a kind of brilliant, warm glow, like if a stupid intern Oompa Loompa accidentally put all the golden tickets into a single chocolate bar, or if you broke the seal on the Ark of the Covenant and quietly slipped out the back door. Each little petal has a subtle hatched texture and is curved eeeeeeeever so slightly. Beautiful. Add this to my comments on the high quality of the packaging and you have a top class product. 5/5
Taste/Smell Stemming from the fact that real satsumaimo has been used in the ingredients for these chips, these taste and smell remarkably like satsumaimo. But BETTER. Sweet yet salty, with a buttery aftertaste - and at the same time extremely light. Not entirely savoury, not entirely sweet, these chips flirt with the very boundaries of genre classification, with a taste that delights the senses in ways only hours and hours of oral sex can hope to compete with. But these come in a PACKET. 5/5
Fear Factor There is no fear involved in consuming pure beauty. 0/5
Health Implications Not great, as these are chips after all, but I’m willing to overlook however unhealthy these may be to quell the raging insanity that might break out if I wasn’t allowed to eat them. 2/5
Final Rating: 5/5. I really love these. To yongfook.com readers in Japan who HAVEN’T tried these I suggest you go out right now and look for a pack seeing as they will be disappearing from our shelves soon and not eating these whilst you had the chance would be one of the world’s greatest regrets, such as The Phantom Menace, or not asking out Nadia Shihab when you were in Year 6 at middle school. In fact these are so good that I plead to the manufacturers - what do I have to do to get these a few months from now? I’ll do anything. I’ll love Big Brother. I’ll twiddle his moustache seductively and sing him a lullaby. I’ll give him hand relief. Just let me eat these glorious things forever.
PS. So you can Witness The Awesome Power Of These Fully Functioning Battle snacks, I’ve purchased a new digital camera, a Canon 300D Digital SLR. In layman’s terms, from now on photos should look a lot prettier.
