Always keen to cash in and come up with some new character-themed promotions, Japan’s 7-Eleven recently began selling blueberry and whipped cream-filled bread made to look like none other than Gomu Gomu no Mi Devil Fruit from the One Piece manga and anime.
We couldn’t resist finding out what the fruit that made Monkey D. Luffy the man he is tastes like, so when we spotted the new sweet bread at our local combini we grabbed one right away. Join us after the jump for our full taste test.
Hurrying back to the office with the bread, we grabbed a camera, plate (because we’re sophisticated like that!) and knife and sat down to inspect it, excited to try a little bit of the fruit that turned Luffy into a rubber human.
For those unfamiliar with the One Piece series, here’s a “typical” gomu gomu no mi devil fruit.
Image: fanpop
And here’s 7-Eleven’s effort out of its packaging.
As you can probably tell, it’s pretty much just their standard melonpan-style bread with a funky, twisting pattern on top and some pink food dye mixed in with the dough, but it’s actually pretty cool, even if it does sort of resemble an alien brain when you put it on a plate. The bread also smells much sweeter than most Japanese pastries, which made us wonder at first whether 7-Eleven had perhaps gone overboard with the sugar in its filling and produced something that tasted like bubblegum, which would be too much even for our most lead-bellied writers.
Eager to find out what was inside – and rather than showing you a bunch of photos with our teeth marks and saliva all over the bread – we grabbed a knife and set to dissecting it, drawing the blade between the two hemispheres. Oh, wait, it wasn’t a brain was it!?
After making the cut, we carefully pulled the bread open, worried that the blueberry jam and whipped cream filling might spill out before we had a chance to shove it into our faces. Sadly, that turned out to something we really needn’t have worried about…
▼ Huh. Not much gomu-gomu magic going on in there!
▼ They could at least get the machine to spread the filling out a bit more…
Having anticipated mouthfuls of sticky blueberry jam to ooze out of the bun, we felt quite cheated when we saw the paltry amount of filling 7-Eleven’s machine had spurted into its Gomu Gomu no Mi. But there again, at just 150 yen (US$1.50) we suppose we shouldn’t expect too much…
Reassembling the bread, we took a nice big bite to see how it stood up in the taste department.
Thankfully, 7-Eleven’s Gomu Gomu no Mi tastes a lot better than it looks. It’s fairly sweet, so we were actually quite glad there wasn’t any more blueberry jam inside than we found, and the bread itself was surprisingly moist. It wouldn’t have hurt to add a little bit more of that nice whipped cream, though.
Minor complaints aside, this turned out to be a pleasantly tasty, if admittedly kind of juvenile, mid-day snack, and it was definitely fun to eat something that looked so much like the fruit we’ve seen in one of our favourite anime series. Gomu Gomu no Mi bread certainly won’t appeal to those who have more refined tastes, and those from the US (who, if my American friends’ tastes are any indication, like their sweets sweet) might find it a little bit lacking, but provided you don’t mind looking a bit silly buying a dessert bread that’s probably meant for kids (hence the collectible stickers that come with them), we can definitely recommend picking one of these things up from your nearest 7-Eleven if you spot one.
Photos: RocketNews24
▼ Om.
