Packets of curry you can store and eat at room temperature could be the answer to our prayers for portable, smell-safe curry.
Curry and rice is always a winning combination, but the road to victory can be a difficult one when you’re packing a lunch to take with when you’re heading out for the day. Curry rice might seem like it’d work great for a home-made bento boxed lunch, since it’s a dish you can eat out of a single container with just a spoon, but transporting curry comes with the risks of the roux, or its aroma, leaking out inside your bag, car, or elsewhere before you make it to lunchtime.
But it looks like we might have found a solution to this problem thanks to Miyajima Shoyu Co., a Tokyo-based maker of soy sauce and other condiments. Miyajima offers something they call the Hitokuchi Series, and it includes packets of ready-to-eat curry!
In addition to Hitokuchi Curry, there’s also Hitokuchi Stew and Hitokuchi Hayashi, packets of cream stew and hayashi rice sauce (similar to a tomato-based demi-glace sauce). For our taste test, we opted for a combo bundle with a total of 10 packets so that we could try all three.
▼ Hitokuchi Curry (yellow), Stew (white), and Hayashi (red)
The packets can be stored at room temperature and eaten without reheating, and they have a shelf life of over one year, so keeping a stock in your pantry, or carrying a few with you when travelling or camping, are viable options. The packets are easy to open without getting your hands messy, and the sufficiently thick consistency of the sauces means that they don’t come dribbling out and spilling in places you don’t want them to. That thickness also makes it easy to regulate the speed at which you squeeze them out, so there’s no worry of accidentally overflowing your plate or bento box because you put too much on your rice too quickly.
▼ Left to right: curry, stew, and hayashi
So how do they taste? Very nice, across the board. The curry is on the mild side, but Japanese curry is more about the overall combination of spices than just simple spiciness. Hitokuchi Curry fits with the familiar expectations for Japanese curry, and it’s a flavor that a wide range of people will be able to enjoy, and it was tasty even at room temperature.
The Hitokuchi Hayashi had a surprising amount of tomato tang to its flavor profile, but still balanced with enough sweetness to keep from feeling harsh, though it had the most impactful flavor of the three Hitokuchi siblings. Finally, the Hitokuchi Stew was satisfyingly creamy. We were a little worried about eating cream stew with rice, as it’s not a common combination in Japanese cooking, but it turned out that they can play nicely together, though we do have to admit that it felt a little unusual eating stew at room temperature since it’s usually served piping hot. But yeah, if the question is “Do they taste good?”, the Hitokuchi series goes three for three.
So as long as you’ve got a bento box of rice and a single Hitokuchi Curry packet, are you all set for lunch? Probably not. For one thing, each packet only contains 30 grams (about one ounce). Considering that Hitokuchi literally translates to “a single bite,” that modest quantity doesn’t mean that Hitokuchi Curry is falsely advertised, but it does mean that a single packet probably isn’t going to be enough for the amount of rice one would usually put in their bento. One packet is enough if you’re looking for a changeup in flavor as you finish off the last few mouthfuls of rice, but if you want enough curry to enjoy for the entire meal, you’re probably going to need three packets.
▼ This does, though, open up possibilities like the triple-temptation curry stew hayashi rice we made for ourselves.
On the other hand, one Hitokuchi packet is enough if you’re spreading it on some toast, which we can confirm is a tasty alternative.
The other thing to be aware of is that unlike some kinds of instant curry that toss in a few slices of vegetables or pieces of meat, the Hitokuchi series is strictly roux/sauce, so if there are any other toppings you want, you’re going to have to provide/procure them separately.
That said, in terms of what it promises to be, a mouthful of curry sauce in a packet, Hitokuchi Curry works very well. We found our curry/stew/hayashi bundle on Amazon Japan here for 1,340 yen, but if you’re all about the curry, a 10-pack of Hitokuchi Curry packets is also available here for 795 yen.
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