Review: Satsumaimo-Aji Kit Kat (Sweet Potato)
Purchased: November, 2010
Best Before: May, 2011
Review: October, 2011
Another regional gift-box Kit Kat, this time local to the Kawagoe area (basically just north of Tokyo), Sweet Potato Kit Kat are sold in one of the lovely and ornate gift boxes, consisting of 12 smaller wrapped 2-finger-packs of Kit Kat. The thing is, sweet potato Kit Kats were _all_over_ my last trip to Tokyo. The Kit Kat gods had gotten together and decided that delicious sweet potato would be the flavour of autumn 2011, and so regular packages of Sweet Potato Kit Kats, as well as Sweet Potato Kit Kat Bar’s were everywhere on my trip. I got sick of Sweet Potato Kit Kats in all of the various formats, and I’m not particularly interested in trying them again. I guess we’ll see whether or not they’re better than my memory of them…!
Packaging: Lovely, descriptive of the contents, dignified with its purple flower design overlaid with sepia images and beige accents. It’s the most traditional, maybe even stodgy packaging I’ve tried yet… but I really like it. Even the inner packaging is nice and ornate. I think someone would be happy to get this as a gift.
Scent: I can’t say for sure that, if I had simply smelled this not knowing what it was that I would guess “sweet potato”. Admittedly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of sweet potatoes so maybe there’s some sort of nostalgic air to the scent of this candy which, to me, smells a big like super-sweet play-doh. It’s not appeitizing.
Taste: I guess they take the sweetness of their sweet potatoes seriously in Japan, because this is an incredibly sweet Kit Kat for a vegetable (tuber) I think of as sort of mild and starchy. The sweetness actually tastes a little syrupy at points too, it’s just way, way over the top.
This is a white chocolate Kit Kat (with a yellowish tinge, in homage to the flavour) and those all tend to be pretty sweet, but this one’s up there with the sweetest I’ve had.
There is that flavour that I think is responsible for the play-doh smell, and it does have an earthiness to it that I guess could be sweet potato, but is actually closer to pancakes with syrup… and not in a good way.
Verdict: I fully accept that I might be a little too hard on the Sweet Potato Kit Kat, but to me it doesn’t taste anything like its intended flavour, and what’s left just isn’t appealing. The over-sweetness, the play-doh, it’s just… not for me.
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