It’s only natural to want to shake your pippi.

Hot off the huge success of their Udonuts, donuts made from leftover udon noodles, restaurant chain Marugame Seimen announced that a new product would be hitting stores this month. This was great news to our reporter P.K. Sanjun, who got an invitation to a pre-tasting and wondered whether it would be something cool for summer or more of their great piping hot dishes.

▼ Marugame Seimen

The name, however, did little to clarify things for him. All he could do was stare at the promotional poster and try to comprehend what “Marugame Shake Pippi” was supposed to be. Since a good chunk of his accumulated knowledge deals with Pokémon, he could only assume this had something to do with Clefairy, who’s called “Pippi” in Japanese.

The information Marugame sent him made no mention of a collaboration with Pokémon, though. So he was left without a clue until he arrived at the tasting, where a table was set up with what looked like sacks of French fries and different seasonings.

He was then given a bag that read, “We went and fried some udon: Marugame Shake Pippi.”

This shed a lot of light on the matter. Much like with their Udonuts, it appeared that Marugame was taking some of their excess noodles and deep frying them, much like one would with French fries.

▼ Here are some udon noodles as they’re normally eaten as a frame of reference.

The “Shake” part of the name made sense too, since these are like shaker fries where you add in either consommé, salty seaweed, or sugar butter seasonings and shake the bag to spread it around.

P.K. tried some salty seaweed Shake Pippi and enjoyed their light mouthfeel with a crispy texture. Since they’re made of noodles, they don’t have that easily identifiable flavor of fried corn or potato snacks, and felt a little alien at first. However, the fact that they were very freshly made and used very delicious seasonings more than made up for that and made these a very delightful dessert.

It was so good it almost made P.K. forget what he came here to learn: What does “Pippi” mean?

According to a Marugame rep, “pippi” means “udon” in the dialect of Kagawa Prefecture (the part of Japan most famous for udon) and is often used when talking to children, like: “Make sure you eat all your pippi!” It seems that they’re targeting children with this snack in particular and are keeping prices low at 190 yen (US$1.30) a bag, so kids can enjoy it more easily.

Having enjoyed this new food and learned what “pippi” means, P.K. felt very satisfied with his trip to Marugame Seimen, and you can too since Marugame Shake Pippi is on sale nationwide as of 24 June.

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