From fresh-baked melon bread to sausage sandwiches, there are now more reasons than ever to love 7-Eleven in Japan.

In every convenience store in Japan, you’ll find a bread aisle, stocked with individually wrapped sweet and savory baked goods trucked in from a central kitchen to each of the chain’s branches. That goes for 7-Eleven too, of course, but at some 7-Eleven locations you can also get various kinds of breads and pastries that they bake right there in the store.

Craving both bread and convenience, our Japanese-language reporter Mariko Ohanabatake made the way to 7-Eleven to try out as much of the 7 Cafe Bakery lineup (as the baked-in-store breads are called) as she could, and in the showcase near the register she found six different taste test subjects.

● Fluffy Melon Bread (160 yen [US$1.10])
● Chocolate Cookie (200 yen)
● Chocolate Croissant (210 yen)
● Crisp Croissant (190 yen)
● Sausage French Bread (250 yen)
● Buttery Financier (150 yen)

To Mariko’s pleasant surprise, the clerk didn’t just scoop her bread out of the case and into a shopping bag. Instead, each piece got one last individual stint in the 7-Eleven oven, with customized settings for each, to ensure it was finished to perfection before being given to the customer. This filled the convenience store with he enticing aroma of warm butter and chocolate, and that same scent greeted Mariko when she got back to the office and took the baked goods out of their bag to plate them,

Logically, Mariko chose to start her tasting with the Chocolate Cookie.

Honestly, she wasn’t all that impressed with how it looked, thinking it had a sort of “made by middle schoolers during home ec class” kind of visual vibe to it. The name, “Chocolate Cookie,” is also a little unusual, since the dough itself isn’t chocolate, and this is what we’d ordinarily call a chocolate chip cookie.

But Mariko would quickly eat her words, and her cookie. In contrast to its lackluster appearance, it tastes incredible. The dough is nice and sweet, and the pieces of chocolate inside are big enough that more so than chocolate chips, chocolate chunks is the proper description, Mariko feels. Between the chunks’ size and semi-melted state, chocolate was seeping throughout the inside of the cookie, making Mariko very happy.

▼ It’s also a really big cookie by Japanese standards.

Continuing with our policy of eating desserts first, it was now time for the Buttery Financier.

This was another hit, reminding Mariko of the sort of fancy treats that people will line up for from famous shops in luxury department food sections. It was a little lighter on the almond notes than such premium-priced varieties, but with 7-Eleven being upfront about its butteriness this wasn’t surprising or disappointing, and for its price of just 150 yen, this is one of the best financiers around. The texture in particular is just about perfect, fluffy and chewy on the inside with just a hint of crispness outside.

Speaking of exquisitely contrasting textures, those are part of the deal for the Fluffy Melon Bread too: pillowy soft at its center, but with a satisfying touch of crunch to its cookie crust.

The Crisp Croissant lives up to its name, and has a slight sweetness mixed in with its butter-forward flavor profile…

…and since adding chocolate is pretty much always a good idea, we’ve got no real complaints about the Chocolate Croissant either.

And last, the Sausage French Bread, with its crusty baguette-like bread would make a great lunch component, and also gives you a way to plausibly deny that you’re just stocking up on pastries when you hit up 7-Eleven.

With the 7 Cafe Bakery system still being pretty new, not every 7-Eleven branch us baking its own bread in-store, and not all of them that are have the same selection of items. For now, the 7-Eleven Japan website allows you to search by prefecture for locations offering 7 Cafe Bakery items here, and with how tasty they are, we wouldn’t be surprised to see that list grow very quickly.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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