It’s well-known that people in Japan are fond of green tea, especially the precious matcha green tea made from tea leaves grown in the shade. Matcha flavored Kit Kats have grown popular in Japan as well as overseas, and celebrity pastry chefs like Sadaharu Aoki have turned matcha confection making into an art. We’ve even tasted matcha-flavored ramen, so it’s not just sweets we’re talking about either.
Well, we recently found another fascinating matcha product that once again shows how much the Japanese love the green stuff…matcha green tea curry! What’s more, it’s instant curry that comes in a heatable pouch, so you can have it right at home in less than 10 minutes. A quick and easy, green-colored curry? Of course we had to try it ourselves!
▼ We found the matcha curry on sale for 308 yen (US$2.55) at KALDI, a grocery chain that specializes in coffee and imported foods and drinks. Needless to say, we quickly grabbed one to take home and try.
▼ The curry is apparently an original product developed by KALDI, and yes, it’s green. The curry even contains azuki red beans, an ingredient often used to make Japanese confections.
▼ The instructions on the back told us that we could either heat the bag of curry in boiling water for five to seven minutes or pour the curry into a bowl and heat it in the microwave for about two minutes. Now, that certainly sounds easy! Even this writer, who isn’t exactly skillful in the kitchen, shouldn’t be able to mess that up.
▼ We decided to heat the bag of matcha curry in boiling water…
▼…and waited for about six minutes. Okay, so it’s a longer wait than the three minutes for a cup of instant noodles, but hey, we’re not complaining if we can have decent curry by just sticking a bag in a pot of boiling water.
▼ Once the curry was all heated up, we scooped some rice onto our curry bowl.
▼ We cut open the bag and were ready to pour on the curry!
▼ We have to say we were quite excited at the sight of the green curry.
▼ The color and consistency of the curry didn’t look too different from the picture on the package, except that the red beans were a bit hard to see. The beans were in there, but just not readily visible.
▼ We added some powdered parmesan cheese for a bit of extra flavor.
▼ And now, we were all set to have our first taste of the matcha curry! Thankfully, the entire process didn’t take too long.
When we actually tasted the curry, we were instantly impressed by how flavorful it was. It was very mild and not spicy at all, but the curry was creamy and had a strength of flavor that we wouldn’t have expected from a prepackaged instant variety.
You couldn’t exactly taste the matcha per se, since matcha has a very delicate flavor, but whatever they did with the green tea apparently worked in our opinion, since the curry had a very satisfying and rich creaminess not unlike spinach curry, and we finished the entire serving without growing tired of the taste. According to the package, the main ingredients in the curry, other than the matcha and red beans, include sautéed onions, powdered coconut milk, ground chicken and chicken bouillon, and while KALDI has done an excellent job with these ingredients, if you’re preparing this at home, the curry perhaps can be made even more enjoyable by adding some solid ingredients, like larger chunks of chicken or potato.
All in all, we were more than happy with KALDI’s matcha curry. In fact, we might even go as far as to say it was one of the best instant curries we’d ever had. More than 300 yen for an instant curry may be a tad on the pricey side, but in our opinion, it was definitely worth it. We wouldn’t mind going back to KALDI to stock up on these, as they’ll certainly make for tasty emergency food. And now, we hope you’ll excuse us because writing all of this has made us hungry for curry again!
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