Japanese Snacks

In Japan, sweet and savory snack foods, called osaki, are teatime accompaniments, nibblers with cocktails, and snacks for after school or while watching television. Unlike American snacks, Japanese snacks tend to be healthier, because they are generally not fried, and are made from rice, soy, vegetables, seaweed, fruits, nuts, beans and seafood. Flavorings include soy sauce, wasabi, curry, green tea and shichimi (a chile-spice blend), as well as chocolate, vanilla and strawberry.

Rice-based snacks are plentiful. Onigiri is made from cooked rice formed into a triangle or oval, wrapped in nori (seaweed), and filled with umeboshi (pickled Japanese plum), salted salmon or other salty or sour fillings. Senbei, rice-based savory crackers flavored with salt, fish, lotus, kimchi, wasabi, curry or even chocolate, are often taken with green tea. Agemochi, pieces of deep-fried, puffed mochi (pounded glutinous rice cake), are lightly salted or seasoned with shichimi.

Rice and seafood also combine in many savory snacks, such as ajigonomi (spicy rice crackers with peanuts and tiny dried fish), arare (spicy bite-sized crackers flavored with soy sauce and wrapped with seaweed) and kakipea (little puffy rice crackers coated with soy sauce, sugar, flaked bonito, chile or wasabi).

Sweet snacks tend to be made with sweet and sticky (glutinous) rice, wheat flour, sweet bean (adjuki) paste, agar (seaweed jelly) or fruits. Uiro is a chewy, sweet, steamed cake made of rice flour and sugar, flavored with adzuki-bean paste, green tea, yuzu, strawberry or chestnut. Many glutinous rice balls, mochi and sweet buns have sweet red- or white-bean paste as a filling or wrapping. Botamochi are sweet rice balls coated with thick adzuki paste and/or soy flour. Manju is a type of mochi, flavored on the outside with green tea or orange cream with a filling of red-bean paste. Anpan is a sweet bun filled with red-bean paste. Dorayaki has red-bean paste sandwiched between two small pancakes.

Colorful agar-based snacks flavored with lychee, mango, yuzu, passion fruit, pineapple or peach are popular and have crossed over to the U.S. market. Yokan is a popular sweet, thick, jellied dessert made of agar, sugar and red-bean paste.

Japanese green-tea ice cream is also enjoyed by Westerners. Other popular frozen Japanese treats include kakigori (shaved ice shaped like a snow cone) drizzled with condensed milk and syrup flavored with strawberry, lemon, green tea, grape or melon, and yukimi daifuku, a ball of vanilla ice cream wrapped in a thin layer of mochi.

Susheela Raghavan is president of Taste of Malacca, Inc., a New Rochelle, NYbased supplier of innovative spice blendsIndian, Southeast Asian, Malaysian and from other parts of the worldfor retail, wholesale and foodservice. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected] or by visiting tasteofmalacca.com .