RJIE: Potato Chips 1: Unagi Kabayaki flavour, Pejoy, Sakuraya tea

After we went to Lash Cafe, we went to Sunnybank and hit up the market to buy random snack foods. This is one of the many snack foods I purchased that day, I spent almost $15 on random chips, drinks and desserts. With me were VGirl and JGirl, VGirl picked us up from Lash Cafe and JGirl came along for the ride.

I allowed VGirl and JGirl to pick the snacks I was going to test. VGirl had terrible opinions, its like since she became a vegetarian she has no idea what tasty food tastes like, or what fake tasty food tends to taste like. The vague criteria for my final choice of random Asian snack were, something amusing, something that catches your eye and a vague idea of what it should taste like.

I'll write up the others as I consume them but from that day I had green tea pejoy, some herbal tea with grass jelly, the unagi kabayaki flavoured potato chips as well as my Sakuraya drink Florida Citrus from the world tea series. I won't talk about the tea cause it was terrible, however there's still like a can of peach juice drink, some random snacks and a rice seasoning mix to go.

My sister picked this snack because we had previously found Green Tea Pocky at this store and she had been searching for it ever since. We found out the green tea Pejoy had expired after we started eating. It had expired back in April 2012, despite this we soldiered on. Its from from Glico the same brand that does Pocky, despite this I haven't been able to find much on the internet about Pejoy, at least on the English side. I wonder if this is like man Pocky vs normal pocky, man Pocky being made of dark chocolate and having a slightly bitter taste.

Green Tea Pejoy

Eh it was alright, there was a weird cheesecakey flavour to the coating that I'm not sure whether its normal or from the fact that it expired almost four months ago. The biscuit was still crisp though. Not sure if I'd buy it again.

Delicious herbal tea and grass jelly

Good ol' herbal tea with grass jelly. This is just the original flavour, you can also find a honey and lychee flavoured version. I always remember having this drink when I was younger, and it was super tasty. Its a dark drink with a slightly sweet taste, sweet for Asian palates, probably a bit bland for Western. It has a distinct flavour from the addition of the grass jelly, which is quite odd because grass jelly doesn't really taste like anything. I always find the jelly settles far too easily to the bottom and the can feels super heavy. You can find them for about 70-90c a can but if you buy them from the fridge its like $1.20 a can! I would buy cans and cans of this stuff!

Looks gross

And so does this jelly

The unagi kabayaki chips were the surprise hit. We picked this based on the fact that it looked super fancy and was a rather unusual flavour compared to Western potato chips. On close inspection we found other Japanese flavours such as a takoyaki, okomiyaki and maybe a sukiyaki? I might be making the last one up. Anyway, the kicker for this dish was also the fact that the potato chips came with a flavour sachet of the unagi kabayaki chips.

Air and unagi kabayaki chips

JGirl reassured me that kabayaki is always delicious and I really have to agree with her. Kabayaki is a style of Japanese cooking where a fish, typically an eel, is split into two along the spine, deboned, gutted, threaded onto skewers and then dunked in a sweet soy sauce before being grilled over a charcoal fire. Its also the style of eel that sits on top of unagidon from memory. Oh god, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

What did they taste like? Freaking delicious. The flavour reminded me a lot of the old Lays Texas honey BBQ chips they used to have here in Australia, before Lays left the country, a very smoky, salty, slightly sweet and fishy taste though. I guess that was the eel element. However, the potato chips aren't the best I've ever had, they were crunchy but they had this weird almost slightly stale/ exposed air texture of chips you've forgotten about in your cupboard. They just didn't have that same crunch as Western chips. That being said, I would buy this again, its a pity it was almost 3.50 for 50g of the stuff ):