01.30.10
Yaki-Curry (Mojiko Limited) Food Drops
“Japanese Food Scientists are amazing, amazing people. They do amazingly disturbing work.”
-JSFR Guinea Pig
That quote is pretty much all one needs to know about food drops. Oh and perhaps this one about this particular food drop: “Curry…Candy…Wow!” You will have to imagine this said while amazement, awe, shock and stunned flitted across the face of a different Guinea Pig.
A lifetime ago, David the Muppet King showed up with a tin of Japanese candies which reminded me a whole lot of those bumpy, fruity filled candies like Brach’s makes. I can’t remember if there was indeed fruit in them, or even if they were fruit flavored but I do remember that they were kinda weird. Much later on, while perusing for buyables for this January’s J-List thing, I noticed the new fad seems to be these “food drops” (as made famous by Grave of the Fire Flies…which seems an awfully weird association to make considering the ending). They look enough like the weird candies of yore that I may have purchased a few (re: 12. Hey, they were on sale! Plus they came in so many strange flavors it was really hard to narrow it down to just 12). These Food Drops seemed the strangest of the bunch at the time so we picked them to try out first.
Yaki-Curry Mojiko style is (we looked it up) curried rice pan fried on an iron skillet as they do in Mojiko (a port in Japan as best as I can Google up). The Food Drop version of this tastes like a curried, pan fried rice dish that was magically made into a semi-sweet hard candy. It is weirdly savory and weirdly not as sweet as you would expect a piece of hard candy to be. It is also weirdly curry-y (?) and weirdly toasted rice-y and weirdly tasty. The longer we sucked on these the more we liked them. In fact, if you were to muse on what a curried rice dish hard candy would taste like, order up one of these. It will totally be everything you expect plus it’ll be rather tasty.
It is still rather weird and kind of futuristic to be sucking on a meal like hard candy. One of my other Guinea Pigs said, “OK, my stomach is confused. I taste curried rice but my stomach is wondering where the dish actually is.” All I can say to that is bravo, Japanese Mad Food Scientists, Bravo!
The only downsides are that the tin is really hard to open unless you have some sort of prying utensil with you. Even then it might take a little pry on the left side, a little pry on the right side, and maybe another left side hit before you can get into them. The drops are also pretty close to the same size as the opening so they come out with a bit of effort and some jiggery pokery. On the plus side, there is a nice packet of desiccant and plenty of powdery…sugar? to keep the candies nice and dry and not sticking to each other. Actually, there is quite a bit of dusty powder on these candies, watch for that.
On the whole, we were quite amazed by the taste and also amazed that the taste was as delicious as it was. How do they do that?
Rating of 4 Wasabi Peas out of a possible 5.
