07.05.08
Morinaga’s Kurogoma Caramel
AhHA! Morinaga does makes a fourth caramel! I stand vindicated when, long ago, I was at my Favorite Asian Grocery store and saw a yellow box, a green box, a brown box and a black box. HA! Also, it’s nice to know that I’m not losing my mind because the black boxed caramels disappeared from the stores after that very first day.
They hadn’t disappeared from J-List though, although it took me quite a while to figure out if they were a new flavor or a reimaging of the brown box. See, brown and black don’t transcribe all that well when you are sizing for internet friendliness and I don’t read Japanese so I couldn’t tell Kurogoma from Kokuto right off. I had to spend about 10 minutes comparing and contrasting Japanese squiggle guy letters to figure out if there was a difference. There was, I had these ordered up and they arrived with the giant Christmas Badmovie J-List gifting.
So. Caramel. Morinaga has visited the JSFR with Green Tea caramel (of Course green tea), Milk caramel, which are your basic Kraft caramel sort of caramels, and Kokuto caramel. I have no idea what a kokuto is but it’s dark and deliciously molassesy. Now meet Black Sesame (heh! I cheat. I looked up kurogoma pocky to figure out what the word meant).
The first interesting thing about Morinaga’s black sesame caramels is the cool little slidey box. The other boxes I snagged were much bigger than this one and opened up like a regular sort of box with the top tuck flap deelie and all. These have a neat little sliding drawer. You may notice that the caramels inside differ from the other three as well being wrapped in foil rather than packaged in little wrappers. I reviewed the other Morinaga caramels back in ’05 so it may be a repackaging or it may be the elusive black sesame special wrapping. I can’t say until I go back and buy some of the other caramels again. Strictly for science, of course. The last thing I took note of was that these caramels are slightly smaller than their cousins of ’05. Whereas the green tea, milk and kokuto caramels were slightly bigger than your standard Kraft caramel, black sesame is slightly smaller.
It’s also gray.
It’s a darker gray than brain matter gray or concrete gray so that’s a plus. It is, however, about the same color gray as an art eraser so when I grab one of these to munch on the first thing that springs to mind is “Eraser!” and not delicious caramel. Hrrrrm. I am both amused and disturbed at the same time.
They do possess the sesame though. It has a peanut buttery taste with just a slight darkness and titch of other nutty which I’ve come to like in a good sesame. Plus pea points for a delicious sesame taste. The texture is a little off for a caramel though. I ran a side by side taste test of the sesame caramel and a standard Kraft caramel and the Kraft caramel is slightly denser and holds up a bit better when nommed on. I wonder if the sesame somehow disturbs the carameling integrity of a candy, sort of like if you eat anything while chewing gum the gum starts to break up. I don’t think I’ll dock any pea points because Kurogoma caramels are certainly still hugging the caramel line rather than being more taffy like. They just aren’t as solid as their other cousins.
Discounting the green tea caramel, which wasn’t all that, the two other caramels got a 4.5 pea rating. Kurogoma is good but I think the other two were just slightly better. And not eraser gray. So while I may give Kurogoma caramel a
Rating of 4 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas, it’s really more like a 4.2 or 4.3 pea rating. Indeed, these are a really tasty sesame caramel.
