Japanese Candy Review: Choco Zutsumi

Thursday, April 16, 2009 - by Linda

I love the way Japanese sweets combine the best of Western and Japanese cuisine. A Western dessert like ice cream with a Japanese flavor like green tea (or, be still my heart, black sesame) is one of the glories of world cultural interaction. And even something like a green tea Kit Kat is fun, if not the pinnacle of gourmet cuisine.

You can also do the combination the other way round – a traditional Japanese dessert made with a Western flavor – and that’s what we have here: Japanese mochi filled with Western chocolate ganache.

There’s probably no more traditional Japanese sweet than mochi, which is basically a filled dumpling with a sweet rice dough. You have to love a culture that’s developed a dumpling for dessert, but the problem for me is that the filling is usually red bean. And no matter how hard I try, I have been unable to develop a fondness for red bean.

So I had great hopes for a chocolate filled mochi, but unfortunately, although chocolate is probably my favorite food of all, this didn’t quite do it for me either. In fact, just like when I eat a traditional red bean mochi, I had the same urge to leave the filling and eat just the outside coating. Which is very, very nice – soft and silky and just a little chewy and stretchy, and the combination of mochi and chocolate works well.

The filling, though, is like eating a spoonful of cake frosting. Which is no surprise – that’s just what it is, assuming that it really is ganache or a close imitation – which is a combination of melted chocolate and cream that can be used as a cake filling or whipped into a fluffier consistency for frosting.

When I was younger I could eat cake frosting by the spoonful, but now it’s just too sweet and rich and makes me feel vaguely queasy, which is not the feeling I’m looking to get from a candy. But if you, dear reader, are the kind of person who takes the corner piece of cake to get the most possible frosting, you might not have the same problem, and I recommend that you give this a try. Me, I’m going to eat all the outsides off of these, and keep on trying with other flavors.

By the way, there’s a little transliteration inconsistency here – the box says “Choco Dutsumi” but J-list writes it “Choco Zutsumi.” You’ll only find it on their site if you search for the Z spelling. There are other flavors available as well, and they’re all called “choco” even when they don’t have chocolate in them, like the strawberry flavor, so you’ll find them all by searching that way.

Buy Choco-Zutsumi Online:

• at Jlist.com