Kayanoya’s Satoyama Cookies give you four flavors for a snack session unlike any other.

The other day, we found ourselves thinking “We want to eat some cookies.” In and of itself, that’s not at all an unusual condition for us to be in, but on this day we wanted specifically to eat some Kayanoya cookies.

Kayanoya is a company that was founded all the way back in 1893, and as you might expect from that, they make use of some characteristically Japanese ingredients in their cookies, such as matcha green tea and black sesame. Kayanoya isn’t a dedicated confectioner, though. They’re primarily a producer of dashi, Japanese soup stock, and yes, they have dashi cookies too!

▼ Some Kayanoya shops even have a counter where you can get cups of piping hot dashi soup (だしスープ).

The dashi cookies are part of the four-flavor Satoyama Cookie set. Satoyama is a Japanese word referring to farmlands adjacent to foothills and forests, and that retro rural community aesthetic is present on the box lid.

The 16 cookies inside are arranged neatly in their own little compartments, and we started our tasting with the matcha and black sesame cookies.

Fancy Japanese cookies tend to be crisp and a little crumbly in their texture, and that’s true of Kayanoya’s. Thankfully, they go easy on the sugar in the recipe, leaving the matcha and black sesame plenty of room to be the stars in their cookies’ flavor profiles, and they’re both delicious, in a sophisticated way.

Now, though, it was time for things to start getting unusual, and even before we got to the dashi cookie, we had a shichimi one to try.

Shichimi is a piquant allspice whose name translates literally to “seven flavors.” The exact mix of ingredients varies from maker to maker, but red chili powder is always present, and sesame and sansho, an aromatic type of Japanese pepper with bitter notes, are also regularly members of the shichimi team.

▼ Somewhat confusingly, Kayanoya’s shichimi cookies have black sesame sprinkled on top of them, while the black sesame cookies do not.

Since this is still a cookie, we wondered if Kayanoya would perhaps use just a touch of shichimi for a little spicy accent to an otherwise sweet flavor. But nope, just like with their matcha and black sesame cookies, the taste is crafted so that you really do taste shichimi more than anything else, and this is an honestly spicy cookie that little kids probably won’t enjoy, but adults with adventurous palates will.

And finally, we come to the dashi cookie.

Dashi is a bit of a catchall culinary term, and most commonly indicates a type of fish broth that makes heavy use of bonito stock. However, while Kayanoya does make fish-based dashi, for their dashi cookies they instead use their vegetable dashi, which is fish-free and instead made with onion, carrot, cabbage, celery, and garlic.

▼ This was reassuring, since we’ve had some bad experiences with fish-based desserts.

By this point, we knew that the primary flavor of the vegetable dashi cookie was going to be dashi, but which of those five veggies would come to the forefront? We got our answer immediately, as we took a bite and immediately had the sensation of onion firing up our taste receptors.

Now, “onion cookie” might sounds like a cruel prank you’d play on an unsuspecting person who’s craving something sweet, but since we knew ahead of time that it was going to taste like vegetable dashi, the flavor wasn’t bad at all. It actually reminded us of the consommé flavor that’s the standard for Japanese potato chips, except here the supporting flavor underneath it is the buttery baked cookie dough, not an oily fried chip.

With their combination of unique flavors and high quality, the Satoyama Cookie set (which is priced at 2,268 yen [US$15]) is proving to be a hit. It was actually all sold out when we first swung by a Kayanoya store to pick some up, but that was right before Mother’s Day so it was a prime gift-buying weekend, so they should be easier to find now.

Related: Kadonaya location list
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