Sakura season comes to the inside of Yamazaki’s Lunch Packs.
Yamazaki Baking’s Lunch Pack series of sandwich pockets is a Japanese convenience store staple, with year-round hits like peanut butter or egg salad always being a good choice for a quick, convenient bite to eat. But Japan loves special seasonal flavors, and with the cherry blossoms currently in bloom, you can now get sakura Lunch Pack sandwiches too!
The full flavor name of this limited-time treat is “Sakura An and Whipped Cream,” with an referring to the sweet bean paste used in traditional Japanese desserts. An sometimes gets translated as “sweet red bean paste,” since the beans used for it are red, but in the case of sakura an it’s cherry blossom-pink in color.
The packaging boasts that Lunch Pack’s sakura an is made with salt-preserved sakura tree leaves (yes, sakura leaves are edible) harvested on the Ito Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. It also has a cute illustration of the Lunch Pack mascot characters frolicking under a shower of cherry blossom petals.
However, from the outside the Sakura An and Whipped Cream itself looks just like any other of the sandwiches in the Lunch Pack series: a palm-sized pillow of crustless bread.
Despite being pre-packaged, Lunch Pack’s bread is always invitingly soft and tasty. However, whether for true beauty of sandwiches, there’s a compelling case to be made that it’s what’s on the inside that’s important, and in recent years there’s been a dip in consumer confidence that Japan’s sandwich makers are really giving us all that we’d expect in terms of fillings. So to see exactly what we’re going to be taste-testing, let’s grab a knife and cut one of the two sandwiches that comes in the pack open.
Huh…that’s not exactly confidence-inspiring, is it? Aside from not getting very close to the corners in total quantity, visually the filling seems to consist of significantly more mundane whipped cream than seasonal-special sakura an.
But to paraphrase the old saying, the proof of sweet bean paste is in the eating, so now that we’ve done all this pre-tasting analysis, it’s time to just grab a sakura Lunch Pack, bite into it, and see how it actually tastes…
…and it turns out that that little bit of sakura an goes a very long way, and the sakura Lunch Pack is really tasty! Granted, if you take just a tiny nibble and only bite off the corner, you’ll mainly be tasting bread with a bit of the whipped cream, since its airier consistency means it spreads out a little more inside the sandwich pocket than the denser sweet bean paste does. But even a moderately sized bite will still reach to the sakura an, and it’s flavorfully delicious. The salted sakura tree leaves really do a great job of adding a little spike of salty complexity to the flavor profile, making for an effective contrast with the sweetness of the bean paste and cream and making each of their individual charms more noticeable and enjoyable.
▼ A piece of salted sakura leaf, mixed in with the an.
The Sakura An and Whipped Cream punches above its weight class in terms of price, too. While exact prices vary by retailer, you can find it for around 120 yen (US$0.80), which is a great value, especially when you take into account that you get two sandwiches in each pack, making these sweets easy to share, or to double-up on if/when you find yourself craving another, which is pretty likely considering how good they taste.
Like the sakura themselves, the Sakura An and Whipped Cream Lunch Pack will only be available for a limited time, so grabbing a pack to take with you on your cherry blossom-viewing excursions is highly recommended.
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