This doesn’t count as Japanese food (cocoa from Ghana and the Ivory Coast/probably imported from somewhere in Europe) and there’s nothing mysterious about the fact that it’s vegan (after all, at 99% cocoa, there’s not much room left on the ingredients list to squeeze in any animal products), so the main reason I’m featuring it here is because of where I bought it.
Yamaya is a mostly nationwide chain of – ahem – liquor stores (we Brits call them off licences, but I’m assuming that would be a confusing term for many readers of this blog) which also handles a very respectable selection of imported foods. These include many of the things that I used to crave when I first came to Japan, namely, crisps (potato chips!), biscuits (cookies!), gerkhins (pickles!), cheese (er, cheese!), cereal (well, you get the idea), pasta, and so on and so forth.
Apart from treating myself to novelties like this chocolate, the main reason I go to Yamaya these days is because they have an extensive and reasonably priced selection of beans, from more common-or-garden varieties such as kidney beans and chick peas to slightly more ‘maniac’ (as they say in Japan) ones such as cannellini and borlotti. These come in both cans and – a new development as far as I was aware – cartons, and Yamaya also sells baked beans. The latter are, it has to be said, not quite as good as the original-and-best Heinz (often available in Costco), but a pretty respectable substitute nonetheless. I assume there are some excellent beers and wines at Yamaya, too, but as I approach my tenth year as a teetotaler, that’s about half of the shop that I no longer browse.
Before I forget, the chocolate itself was more palatable and less bitter than I expected – oddly addictive, in fact – with a very respectable 10% fibre and 9.5% protein, compared to a slightly less respectable 45% fat, 28% of which is saturated. I’m probably going to sound thoroughly ignorant here, but the mystery to me is, if it’s mostly made of cocoa, why doesn’t it just collapse into a dusty pile of powder…?
