Greetings my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy and Welcome to beautiful Japan. So I arrived yesterday and I woke up really really early this morning because My circadian rhythms are all out of whack. And so I walked over to the convenience store and picked up a bunch of stuff So I could do a little taste test for you. So I stopped at 7-Eleven and Lawson did a little taste test comparison. Convenience stores or Conbinis as they're known here in Japan, are amazing places chocked full of some of the typical things that you would find in a convenience store in the U.S. Meaning drinks and candies, but in Japan they go a little bit further. A lot further actually There's tons and tons of food there. Prepared items, deli items, cooked items that you just need to microwave and warm up. They have microwaves there You can warm them up and then just take it home. Conbinis are a wonderful place to do work as well They have copy machines. You can often pay some of your bills there. It's just a little hub that's always buzzin. It's always open. It's always dependable and the food is pretty stinkin good. They're one of the things I really miss most about Japan. So I watched Micah Chen's video on Japanese Conbinis and there are a couple things I had never tasted before so I picked up those things as well. I will put as always a link down below to his original video. So shout out to Mikey All righty. Let's go ahead and taste this I'm starving. So let's start off with something hot This is a bottle of royal milk tea, but it's in a hot cooler rather than a cold cooler. I've never seen one of those before until I lived here and all of the drinks are hot. Actually, they're more like warm, but it's nice to get a hot drink if you want one. So this is just the milk tea. I need a little bit of caffeine. Here we go. Cheers. Kanpai! Yeah, that's pretty good Mmm, the milk tastes a little bit like dry reconstituted milk, but it's sweet the taste of black tea. It tastes a little bit like Earl Grey pretty concentrated tea flavor And yeah a nice little way to get a shot of caffeine in the morning. It's not the real deal but you know, it comes in a bottle on the go not bad. Okay. So what do I taste first? Let's start off with something hot. So this is a bowl of soup. Look at that It's got little meatballs in it. And this was 369 Yen and has some napa cabbage in it a couple meatballs Carrots spinach Already let's give our soup a taste. Itadakimasu! Mmm, that's actually really good. Hmm Nice little broth sweetened with all that napa cabbage in there. There's a little bit of burdock root in there for a little crunch That's so nice and then it doesn't just taste like instant broth powder either It's sweet and salty but not overly salty and it doesn't taste artificial. Let's try some meatball in there Mmm That's a chicken meatball. That's tender not overly chewy. This is great. I can't tell you how many times I would love to wake up to something like this. Warm soothing not overly filled with grease and heaviness. Oh, I love that. Just a really simple vegetable broth-y soup Love that. Can I just say that cabbage is a very underrated vegetable. I love it. Granted, sometimes when you cook it, and then you close it and you open the container it can smell like farts. Let's be real. (laughs) Cabbage is so delicious. It lends such a natural sweetness to so many dishes. It's inexpensive, it can be crunchy when it's raw, soft and tender when it's cooked or of course, it can be somewhere in between. I love cabbage. By the way I was heating up some water at the sink and got my shirt all wet. So Ignore that or just watch it dry. Okay? Okay, so I got to nikuman These are little pork buns and I got these from 7-Eleven. They have them in little steam cases right next to the register Nikuman a very similar to Chinese bao's these are steamed and filled with pork filling But I got one that was a little bit unusual one that never seen before. Let me show you so here they are This bright orange one is a pizza. Look right there. It just says, burned right on Pizza. And this one is the regular Nikuman. See? So I said earlier that convenience stores in Japan are very different than the ones that you find in the US with one exception. If you visit Hawaii you will go and find lovely convenience stores that are quite similar to Japanese Conbinis in the sense of the food selection. You'll find lots of bentos and prepared foods and you'll also find little buns like these nikumans But I don't know if you'll find a pizza one. This is the original nikuman and let's open it up That's what looks inside pretty typical. I just wanted to taste this So I'd have like a little point of reference already itadakimasu! Mmm That's good pork is chewy nice little texture in there I taste a lot of black pepper a little bit of garlic The bun is soft slightly sweet Great little ham snack. Alrighty, now let's compare that to the pizza version. So here's the pizza And let's open that one up Wow So the bun is a very different color it's kind of orange there's the cheese and some sauce I don't see any meat Not my favorite it tastes kinda like pizza it tastes more like spaghetti sauce little bit of basil a little bit of garlic I kind of processed tomato flavor with a little bit of cheese not stretchy cheese Just kind of cheese and then you've got the nikuman Bread on the outside similar fluffy yet sticky texture But yeah, it really doesn't work for me. I think of crispness when I think of pizza and thinness or stretchiness and none of those textures are happening for me. Some of the flavors are But yeah, I much much much prefer the traditional pork meat one. Pizza I think would be OK for novelty sake or if it's something that you're used to eating but in my mind when I think of Bao or steamed bread I don't think a pizza and for me, it doesn't really work But if you're into pizza It might be worth trying. Mikey did this cool thing that I'd never seen before. You take an ice cup if you can get these individual servings of ice Comes a little straw and you take fizzy water And you combine it with this little sweet frozen thing. He did his with grape (budō) flavor. I'm doing mine with Mikan and these are little frozen treats. Aren't they cute? Stinking adorable. And Mikan, of course are little tangerines You can eat them just out of the package if you don't want to touch them, but I'm gonna just go ahead and try it. They're delicious. Mmm! I thought that might be filled with something but they're not They're just kind of like icy sherbet spheres that tastes a little bit like Tang and a little bit like Sunny D. They're great. So, fun little frozen treats. Oh my gosh, brilliant! So stinking cute look at that. It's like a new boba drink. Very conveniently, it comes with a mini straw. It extends, so smart and it bends. Let's give it a swizzle. Hmm, right now it just tastes like cold fizzy water but I think as these melt I'll get myself a nice refreshing drink Got two egg salad sandwiches one from 7-eleven and one from Lawson. I lived in Japan for a couple of years and never once did I ever eat an egg salad sandwich. Ever. So this is going to be my first time. This is 211 Yen very very reasonable in price and this one from 7-Eleven was 120 Yen. Again, both very reasonable very very different shape. White bread, white bread, yellow eggs. Beautiful. Since I have the 7-eleven one open, let's go ahead and taste this one first. This is I'm a kind of a hot dog bun. Here we go. Itadakimasu! Delicious. Super fluffy full of mayonnaise. If you don't like egg salad, just give the egg salad another shot. Especially if you go to Japan, it's super rich. It's delicious. It's fluffy. It's really really stinking delicious. When I was kid, egg salad sandwiches were my favorite and Japan does not disappoint. They make beautiful egg salad sandwiches. I think part of what makes it so good is that it's texture just so fluffy and homogeneous. You don't have big chunks of rubbery egg in there and the yolk is so yellow and just rich and just lovely. Delicious. The bread is equally soft, so it's just a really wonderful pairing when you bite into it. It doesn't move. This doesn't goosh all over the place because the bread is so tender and soft like that a lot Let's try the Lawson version This is the version that I'm familiar with when I think of Exile, so just you just pull this tab right here Two beautiful triangles I have to say the 7-Eleven was very generous with its filling. For all of you toddlers and kids that don't like crust coming to Japan, they cut the crusts off for you. Isn't that lovely? Alright, here we go. So delicious, the filling is very very similar; sweet, eggy, fluffy, bread this slightly chewy. Great. Oh yeah. Now it's tasting orange-y. Very light though. I like it. Really refreshing cuz you've added all that fizzy water. Of course, icy icy cold. This sandwich is de-li-cious. All about the tender textures here. You've got the chewy bread, but the filling is so fluffy and soft and sweet. Delicious. New favorite snack at Lawson- egg salad sandwich. So let's do something hot next. Let's taste these. And Lawson carries these and these are Karaage-Kun. Kun is kind of a diminutive, it's this term of endearment and Karaage of course, is fried chicken, which they do beautifully here in Japan. And so these are two versions. This regular and this is the red which is a little bit spicy. Here's the red And here is the regular. Now these don't look like karaage that I've ever seen before. Karaage usually have little bumps all over it and they're lumpy and Deep-fried and all these crevasses. These look more like chicken nuggets. In each box, there are five. So let's chase the regular first for a little frame of reference. Oh. Hmm. That's not like any karaage I've ever had. It's actually much more like a mincemeat or like a chopped up chicken meat and then breaded on the outside and deep-fried. Much juicier than a US chicken nugget. It's okay. Let's compare that with the red version. All right, here we go Hmm I like that better. Good too, it's juicy. It is like kind of like minced meat more like a meat bomb. Ooh Yeah, there's a little bit of heat. Not too much, just a little bit, but definitely like the red better than the regular. Would I get them again? Probably not. I much prefer Regular old karaage than karaage-kun. And this is a Yasai juice. It's a vegetable juice and it comes a little juice box. This is 100 Yen, about a dollar and it too has one of these extendable straws. Look, see? Short straw, long straw, bendy straw. And put it in here. Now this might be- take some getting used to it tastes a little bit like tomato soup. It tastes a lot like tomato soup actually It's definitely more savoury than sweet, but I like it. If you like Bloody Marys, if you like tomato juice then you'll like this. Gives you a little extra pep, and if you're not feeling like something sweet, there you go. Have a Yasai juice. Mm-hmm. So when I think of conbinis, I think of onigiri. So I have an onigiri here and this is kind of like an onigiri, but it's more like a maki sushi. So let me show you the onigiri first because this is what I almost always get when I go to a convenience store. In fact, I got one last night when I came into Japan. So this one is my favorite flavor and it's the tuna- mayo and let me show you how to open this beautiful thing. And they give you of course directions on how to do this Or you can just follow the numbers. Number one you pull this tab right here, Then you pull this apart, So satisfying. Now the reason for all of this packaging is because you want your nori to be crispy. And this plastic separates that so then you pull this off and now your nori is meeting your rice. See? Before, they were separated. And now they're meeting their friends. You haven't gotten your hands dirty at all, Your nori is crispy. It's a beautiful thing. There you can see the tuna happiness happening right there. Hmm It's so good If you've never had an onigiri before, I have a very old video on how to make them yourself. My kids love these, we make them all the time as a quick and fast little dinner or snack. Just take a little bit of mayo can of tuna mix it all together Make your rice put the filling inside and then wrap it in the nori. The nori is crisp and gives it this great seaweed flavor The rice is plain just a little bit of salt and then you've got the creamy delicious tuna fish in the middle. So good. I'm gonna eat this whole thing but I've got so many other things to eat. I can't. This is my favorite. Love it They come in lots of other flavors, too. I also like the kombu or the seaweed flavor as well But tuna mayo is my absolute favorite. Okay. Now let me show you the Natto Maki sushi and this too has a fun way of opening it so, Number one you open it right here pull this Again, the nori is separated from the rice by plastic so it doesn't get soggy. Then you open this up And This is full of natto, which is fermented soybeans. Delicious. Often eaten for breakfast. You roll your rice down to the end and then Pull it and you rotate it and now your nori is around your rice. Beautiful. [CRUNCH] Delicious. Salty, sweet, sticky, natto-y. Rice is perfectly done, Crispy. Nori on the outside. Scrump-tious! Next I'm going to eat a yakisoba sandwich, This is a sandwich filled with yakisoba. Yakisoba, of course is Fried- pan-fried noodles that have a kind of five-spice soy saucey sauce on top, but this is in a sandwich form. I've never had a yakisoba pan before I've seen them before but I've never ever actually got one. This reminds me a lot of my cameroonian omelette spaghetti sandwich If you haven't seen that video, I'll put a link that that one down below. But yeah carb on carb, here we go. It's delicious. The bread is so soft and the noodles are soft but so well seasoned that it's a perfect little filling for a sandwich. You've got five-spice. You've got soy, you've got sweetness- a little bit of kind of seaweed flavors in there. It's pretty stinkin delicious Lots of carbs, but yeah actually quite tasty. And that was a whopping 139 Yen. Let's try another drink. I've got a little Cafe latte here comes with a little straw and this is a cold coffee. with milk. So this too has an extendable straw and we're just gonna poke it through the top just like boba. Oh yeah, that's yummy a little bit sweet coffee, And very very milky Mmm, this is a bacon pan. This is a piece of bread with a slice of bacon on it. Never had one of these before. Slip this out. Very soft white bread looks like a hotdog bun almost, with a piece of bacon. Hmm. There's cheese in there? That's not that great. The bread is very soft it tastes like a milk bread Tastes like there's a little bit of mayo in there Mm-hmm It's injected with some mayo. Which gives it a really kind of greasy feel to it. This, I don't like. The bacon tastes more hammy than smokey. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of this one at all. Ew bacon pan, not so much. Now I want to show you a dessert. That's really popular here in Japan, and it's called purin. I got this particular one made by Glico for a reason and again, it's for its packaging. So this is very similar to flan but it has a really fun way of getting it out of the package. And you would think automatically, "Oh I should just eat it with a spoon like this." No, this is what you do: You flip it over. And then, you've got this little stick right here and you snap it. Did you see that? So that releases the vacuum and the pudding just falls right out. So this is very similar to a flan there's a little bit of caramel sauce on top and you just cut it and You give it a taste. Here we go. Mmm Very smooooth, Eggy custard. With a sweet kind of caramel on top. It's pretty good. It tastes a little bit like condensed milk for me. This is all about texture. Super smooooooth, gelatinous texture. Mm-hmm. If you've ever had a Chinese egg custard before, very very similar to that texture. Less eggy though and more kind of vanilla and caramel, but classic Japanese sweet. Look at that jiggle. I've never seen this flavor of mochi before so I got it So these are frozen mochis and this is milk tea flavor, and I also want to show you this packaging. These mochis are filled with ice cream. So, peel it back. So typically, these would be a little bit firmer but because they've been sitting in the refrigerator they're not as hard. Mmm. Oh that's nice. The ice cream is soft and so it's really fluffy but the flavor is like Earl Grey tea. Really nice the outside of course is mochi, which is a rice cake that's stretchy and chewy and tender. Mmm fills your mouth with like a fluffy sweet to creamy foam. Super fun. Like that. So here's another Mikey Chen recommendation and it's a Michelin rated instant ramen noodle and I'm gonna taste this. I got this at 7-Eleven and I also picked up an egg that's already been cooked. And this is an onsen tamago. So it's an egg that's been soft-boiled And this was 70 Yen, and I can't wait to taste this because Mikey was going crazy about this. I'm like, "Okay." Open this up, Add the onions, and look at this meat. Wow, interesting. Add my bamboo shoot. Add my oil. Oh, there's no powder. This is cool. They're all liquids. Okay a soup base. Close that up I'm gonna go ahead and peel my egg while I'm waiting. So when you go to the conbini they have hot water behind the counter as well so you can walk away with a bowl of hot ramen too. So, lets peel the egg. Cut my egg in half- it's beautiful look at that color. Drop that in there, it's smells really good. These noodles look lovely, too. The texture of the noodles is phenomenal nice and chewy and firm without really tasting instant. Hmm the broth this tastes more like a shoyu based broth. It's got a nice weight to it it's a little bit Enriched with that oil that we added so you've got this really kind of silky mouthfeel Now let's try that piece of meat that was floating around in here. There we go. Hmmm that's not bad. It's rehydrated. So it doesn't taste quite like fresh slice of pork belly, but how could it? It's been dehydrated? Let's try the egg. Very nice. The white's kind of got a slightly rubbery texture, but it's salted. Mm-hmm now quite sure how they do it, but they cure the egg somehow so the egg has some saltiness to it. But yeah, Pretty stinking good ramen noodle right there instantly. Here's another bread That's a classic and this is a melon pan and this has a very unique shape. So it's got sugar on the outside and this very traditional kind of grid pattern on it There you go. So it's almost got like a cookie crust on the outside and that's how it's made You make the dough and then it's kind of cookie dough that's rolled out is placed on top and scored with this pattern Let's give this a taste. Mm mm-hmm. Lightly sweetened bread. Not bad. And I found this at Lawson and this is a cupke and they were selling these for 250 Yen. Just like a little cupcakey. So it's like a mousse, but they've got cake inside. It's like tiramisu. The inside has got some coffee soaked cake in the middle. Oh all around it's like whipped cream. Mousse Delicious. Hmmm. This is my favorite yogurt. This is made by Morinaga. And this is aloe yogurt- has pieces of aloe in it. You probably could find it in a Japanese supermarket But around where I live I never seem to find it. There's chunks of aloe in it. Look at that. Alright, let's give this a go. It's so good. The aloe Is succulent. It's got a little bit of bite slightly gelatinous, but definitely vegetal and The yogurt is sweetened, but not overly so. So so good. Has a slight taste of grape. Kinda has a little bit of Concord grape. Absolutely delicious. Refreshing. Light. Great way to finish my conbini gluttony. So there you have it. My little conbini taste test. That was both Lawson and 7-Eleven. Amazing, amazing places- conbinis. If you ever go to Japan, definitely check them out. And yeah, I hope you guys enjoy that one. I hope you guys learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow me on social media. Like this video. Subscribe and I shall see you in the next one. Toodle-loo! Take care! Byeeeee~! It's a baby Kewpie Mayo~
