Taste-testing our newest find at Japan’s specialty grocer that always lures us in with free coffee.

Japan’s specialty grocer chain Kaldi is most famous for its coffee, handing out free cups of the freshy brewed stuff at the entrance to their stores. It’s a pretty obvious strategy to get people to come in and browse, but it’s not a tactic we’ve got any complaints about, since we almost always find something that catches our eye and makes our stomach growl, with this being the most recent example.

The most important parts of the Japanese text on the front of that package are チョコ, “chocolate,” and 餅, “mochi,” but the whole thing translates to Delicious Chocolate Kirimochi to Bake.” Kirimochi, meaning “sliced mochi,” is a kind of mochi in which the sticky rice cake is cut into strips and dried, which you then heat up before eating.

Ordinarily, kirimochi is made just from glutinous rice flour, and on its own it isn’t a dessert. But with chocolate added, we were intrigued as to the potential wonders of this treat, and so we picked up a pack for 448 yen (US$3).

Inside were three slices of chocolate kirimochi. To clarify, these aren’t rice cakes wrapped around a chocolate filling. The chocolate is kneaded into the dough while the rice cakes are being formed, making for a truly chocolate-infused variety of mochi.

Because kirimochi is dried, you can’t eat these straight out of the bag. Instead, the directions say to warm them up in the microwave (30 seconds at 1,000 watts for one slice, 50 seconds for two, or one minute for all three), or to briefly bake them in an oven. Being the fancy types we are, we opted to bake ours, following the package’s instructions of letting the kirimochi slices bake in a 1,300-watt toaster oven for two minutes before turning them over and letting them cook another two minutes on their opposite side.

Optimally, the directions say you want to get the mochi just a tiny bit browned, which will enhance its aroma. However, with the chocolate mochi already being brown to start with, the browning process was hard to gauge. What we can say for sure, though, is that after four minutes the room smelled great, with a toasty chocolate aroma emanating from the oven.

It’s normal for mochi to plump as it heats up, and this chocolate version is no exception. The uneven way in which the shape of the slices warp mean they might lose a few points in the presentation department if you’re serving them to a guest, but you have to ask yourself, if you give someone chocolate mochi, and they grumble about how it looks, is that really the kind of person you want in your house/sharing your desserts?

Besides which, any appearance shortcomings the chocolate mochi might have had when we pulled it out of the oven were quickly forgiven as we pulled a slice apart and reveled in the enticingly gooey stretchiness.

Taking a bite, we were surprised, though, that while this treat looks and smells incredibly chocolatey, it’s actually not all that sweet. Yes, there’s a definite chocolate presence within the flavor profile, but this eats more like mochi with a chocolate touch than it does chocolate with a mochi texture.

That’s not a bad thing, though, especially if you’re in the mood for a dessert that’s satisfyingly substantial-feeling without being cloying. And if you really do want to sweeten things up…

…the packaging suggests sprucing up your chocolate kirimochi with things like whipped cream and sweet syrups, sauces, or powdery condiments like kinoko (roasted soybean powder). Best of all, with three slices per bag, you can try out chocolate kirimochi multiple ways and find which one you like best, then apply that to all of the next bag you get.

Related: Kaldi location finder
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