Ashita no Curry wants to time-warp you to the curry of tomorrow.

If you’ve got a batch of freshly made curry, you might think you’ve got one of the world’s greatest causes for joy sitting in your kitchen, and you’d be right. However, things could be even more joyous in the near future, because a lot of Japanese curry fans will tell you that it tastes even better when it’s a day old.

Similar to how some home chefs feel about spaghetti sauce, many people in Japan think that curry roux takes on deeper, more satisfying flavors after the cooking process finishes, reaching the zenith of its deliciousness on Day 2. This does, though, present a difficult question: Does the extra happiness that comes from the enhanced flavor of Day 2 curry offset the heartbreak of not being able to eat all the curry right away on Day 1?

To solve this dilemma, we could take a page from investment experts and try to adapt their concepts of the time-value of money to derive some sort of equation for the time-deliciousness of curry. Or we could somehow try to bend the flow of time and try to eat the curry of tomorrow today, which is exactly the offer made by Japanese instant curry brand Ashita no Curry (“The Curry of Tomorrow”).

▼ あしたのカレー = Ashita no Curry

Pictured on the front of the box is Monko Ichijo, a local celebrity chef and cooking instructor from Niigata Prefecture who’s particularly renowned for her curry expertise, and even serves as an advisor for popular curry rice restaurant chain Go! Go! Curry.

Ashita no Curry promises to give you the flavor of tomorrow’s curry, today. Priced at 398 yen (US$2.70), the instant curry pouch can be prepared either by heating it in a pot of boiling water for five to seven minutes, or by emptying the pouch’s contents into a microwave-safe dish and heating it for two minutes at 500 watts.

Of course, the only way to really judge Ashita no Curry’s time-traveling abilities would be to taste-test it against an actual pot of day-old curry, so we also purchased a pack of Vermont Curry, one of Japan’s favorite roux blocks.

Ashita no Curry is labeled as being “medium spicy,” and to keep the comparison as direct as possible, we used the same spiciness of Vermont. Also, since Ashita no Curry has potatoes, carrots, and pork in its pouch in addition to the roux, we added the same ingredients to the pot of Vermont we cooked. After our Vermont was done, we waited a day, prepared the Ashita no Curry, and poured them both over rice to find out how they tasted.

▼ Left: Ashita no Curry
Right: Day-old Vermont Curry

Taste-testing duties went to our Japanese-language reporter Udonko, but even before the first bite, she was already impressed by Ashita no Curry’s visual appeal. With instant curries, oftentimes the toppings are only small pieces of meat or vegetables, sometimes such thin slivers that they melt away into the roux as it heats. Ashita no Curry, though, has large slices of potato, carrot, and pork, hand-cut to help give them a home-cooked feel and texture.

And how does Ashita no Curry taste?

Fantastic! As promised, the roux has a deep, rich quality, but with smooth transitions through its flavor profile. The spiciness builds gradually without overpowering the other seasonings and sensations. It embodies exactly what curry fans say they love about second-day curry, to an even more advanced degree than the actual day-old Vermont Curry Udonko was taste-testing it against.

▼ The second-day Vermont Curry was great too, but couldn’t match the depth of flavor of the first-day Ashita no Curry.

Though we hadn’t heard about it until recently, it turns out that Ashita no Curry has been on the market for a while now, but can be pretty hard to find, as it doesn’t have nationwide distribution in grocery stores. If you’re looking to snag a pack and zoom ahead to eating tomorrow’s curry right now, though, it can be purchased through Amazon Japan here.

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