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10 awesome ice creams available from convenience stores in Japan

The country may not be especially well known for its confection and frozen treats, but you’d better believe that Japan loves its ice cream. Whatever the season, there are hundreds of varieties to choose from, and chain stores like Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s attract enormous lines on a daily basis, constantly whipping up new flavours to appeal to the Japanese palate.

Today, we’d like to take you on a tour of the konbini aisu, or convenience store-bought ice cream, of Japan. They may not be quite as sophisticated as your top-of-the-range Häagen-Dazs offerings, but boy are they tasty, and since they’re available for just a couple of hundred yen each you can afford to treat yourself pretty much every day this summer. We hope you’re hungry!

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Lotteria to offer bizarre milkshake flavor based on horror flick The Ring

Apparently, if you could taste fear, it would taste like cool lemonade.

Starting July 27, Japanese burger chain Lotteria will offer a limited-time lemonade shake flavor themed after classic Japanese horror icon Sadako – the unmistakable and absolutely horrifying long-haired ghost girl from The Ring.

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Can you bring yourself to eat the art on these awesome anime cakes?

A quick glance at the name of Japanese cake maker Priroll should tell you that they specialize in roll cakes. What might not be so readily apparent is that the “Pri” stands for “printing.” Customers can include a photo when ordering, which Priroll will then reproduce on the side of one of its desserts, making it a great choice for birthdays, graduations, or other celebrations.

Being able to reproduce any image on this sweet, spongy canvas, though, means that the folks at Priroll aren’t limited to using just photographs, though. If you want, they can also whip you up an anime cake.

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We brave the Tokyo heat to munch on these limited edition Krispy Kreme summer doughnuts

‘Tis the season of the “Summer Gentei” (“Summer Specialties”) in Japan; an exciting time of year where near every food vendor in the country offers up some sort of cold, frozen, or energy-packed  limited edition summer-themed menu. And even the foreign chains are getting into it, with Krispy Kreme Japan currently offering three new summer-only doughnuts and two summer-themed drinks. Because we love you, we went and stuffed our faces.

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How to eat lunch in Tokyo for less than 300 yen

For students and professionals just starting their careers in pricey Tokyo, finding ways to economize is a must. Unfortunately, the cost of housing in the city means a lot of young singles end up in pretty cramped living quarters. In my old apartment, the only refrigerator I could cram into the place was so small there wasn’t enough room to keep both my beer and my drinking water chilled. For the record, it takes about two months to get used to drinking lukewarm H2O.

This lack of space also makes it difficult to stock up on groceries to use in cooking your own lunch to bring to school or the office. As a result, many people buy bento, boxed lunches with rice and some sort of side dish. You can get passable bento at any convenience store, and in recent years even some full-fledged restaurants have started selling them on the sidewalks of business districts in the afternoons.

Bento tend to be somewhere in the range of 500-1,000 yen (US$5-10) though, so the cost really adds up if you’re buying one a day. Trying to cut our expenses even further, we sent our reporter out with 500 yen and a mission: go get lunch, and bring back change.

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Getting free ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s just became every Japanese citizen’s civic duty

Japan loves ice cream, so when Ben and Jerry’s started opening locations here in 2012, it was welcomed with open arms.

But the Vermont-based company didn’t just bring its assortment of tasty flavors with untranslatable pun-based names. It also brought its well-known commitment to social activism with it. In keeping with those values, Ben & Jerry’s Japan is offering free ice cream to encourage people to vote in the country’s upcoming election.

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Are blue foods as cool as the color implies? We try blue curry, ramen, and beer

Under normal circumstances, Japanese people have an open aversion to unnaturally colored foods, especially blue. This is true even of sports drinks and birthday cakes. Without even addressing the never-ending debates over artificial food colorings and health, something about the color blue appears unappetizing to their taste buds.

However, in the overwhelming heat of summer, the color blue also carries with it the connotation of something cool and calm. Could the implicative promise of a refreshing counter to the summer sun override this instinctual revulsion against imbibing something blue? After hearing about a certain Thai food restaurant that serves bright blue dishes, we decided to send one of our more adventurous culinary reporters to check it out.

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  • Jul 18, 2013

This ice cream’s special Okinawan ingredient will do more to keep away the heat

Regular readers may be aware that we’ve done a fair amount of reporting recently on the unrelenting heat here in Japan and on ways to battle the sweltering temperatures. Naturally, eating cold or frozen snacks is one way to cool down, but now major Japanese dairy manufacturer Morinaga Milk Industry Co., Ltd. has now come out with an ice cream with a special ingredient that does more than keep you cool. The secret is a special ingredient that, although commonly used in cooking, is not what you would typically expect to find in an ice cream!

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Love Nissin’s Chicken Ramen? The Yokohama Grand Intercontinental Hotel has a room just for you!

Teaming up in a collaborative effort for the first time, the Yokohama Grand Intercontinental Hotel and the nearby Nissin Cup Noodles Museum have created two Chicken Ramen-themed rooms for connoisseurs who just can’t get enough of those tantalizingly delicious instant noodles and their irritating lovable chicken mascot Hiyoko.

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This summer drink recipe is so easy even we were able to make it

After our extremely delicious hot steamed bun tip for keeping cool during the brutal Tokyo summer, we decided to follow up with an iced drink recipe to accompany those sweet, soft buns. We’re still talking about bread, right?

The only problem was we spent all day snacking on steamed buns and experimenting with other ways to keep cool and we had to hurry up and make something or risk missing happy hour. So we settled for the old standby of throwing a few things from the fridge together in a bowl. Would you believe it turned out great!

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Hot steamed buns are a great way to cool down in summer, says our slightly crazy Japanese reporter

I used to have a co-worker who, on the hottest of summer days, would drink a pint of hot water through a straw and claim it helped cool her down. Naturally, everyone thought she was insane or belonged to some weird religion, or both, and would try to avoid working a shift alone with her.

But it looks like her weird sect of Scientology or whatever it was may have been onto something, as our Japanese reporter swears by eating microwaved steam buns to cool off in the summer.

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In Thailand there is a chain of conveyor belt sushi and shabu shabu restaurants called Shabushi, operated by the company Oishi Group. Shabu-shabu is a Japanese dish similar to fondue, where vegetables and wafer-thin slices of meat are cooked in a pot of boiling broth at the table. One week ago, on July 4 at the Central World trade facility in Bangkok, Oishi Group held the opening ceremonies for their second annual Shabu Lympics, a shabu-shabu eating contest taking place at select branches of Shabushi nation-wide.

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Three nations come together in friendship to share their dumpling wrapping skills

The dumplings known in Japan as gyoza are typically filled with diced cabbage and pork. Most of the time they’re also packed with enough garlic to make them as dangerous a temptation for office workers on their lunch break as a frosty mid-day beer.

Even though China, Japan, and Korea all have distinct food cultures, being so close to one another on the map means that some things are bound to cross borders. Case in point: all three countries love gyoza, and rightly so!

But while they’re united in their love for the food is universal, it turns out each nation has its own unique way of wrapping them, as our Japanese correspondent living in Germany recently found out.

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How many RocketNews24 reporters does it take to eat one family’s worth of udon?

Although it’s often overshadowed by ramen and soba, udon is the final member of the triumvirate of Japanese noodles. With a spongy, absorbent texture, it allows diners to really enjoy the flavor of the broth or dipping sauce it’s served with. This airier structure also means you might need a larger serving to get as full as you would from a meal of ramen or soba, however.

With this in mind, and very little in his stomach, our reporter Mr. Sato headed to a branch of popular udon chain Marugame Seimen, where he fearlessly ordered the largest bowl of udon on the menu, the Family Udon.

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You call that sushi? Ukraine’s take on the Japanese classic

Whenever foods specific to a certain culture make appearances in foreign restaurants, something almost always gets altered along the way. For example, I’ve been living in Japan for years, and yet I still shake my head whenever I see an “American-style” pizza topped with eggplant, potato and mayonnaise. It’d be one thing if everyday consumers realized that the “Western” food they eat is actually unique to Japan, but as far as they are concerned, all of us Americans put taters and mayo on our pizzas!

But of course, Japan is in no way the only country to confuse traditional ingredients for those suited to their local tastes. Recently, one of our RocketNews24 correspondents, Natasha from Ukraine, wrote up a fine report on the sad state of sushi in her country. Here’s the gist of what she had to say.

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Business is booming for yakiniku restaurants, but are customers chemically dependent on meat?

Yakiniku (Korean barbecue) restaurants have been popular in Japan for a long time now. People around here can’t seem to get enough of managing their own grill and eating copious amounts of pure meat. However, in recent years Japan seems to really be getting into red meat what with romantic meat themed video games and classily stacked Quarter Pounders for a king’s ransom.

Particularly around the summer season Japanese people appear to be craving red meat extra hard. News Post Seven reports that of all types of restaurants in Japan, the yakiniku sector has grown a hearty 14 percent compared to the previous year. It was the only type to grow over 10 percent – an impressive feat in this sluggish economy. As a result we are seeing other restaurants and bars adopting charcoal grills to tap into this success.

To answer the million dollar question of why Korean barbecue is going so strong, News Post Seven‘s Tatsuya Matsura came up with an interesting theory. Let’s see if it holds water and maybe a little BBQ sauce too.

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Mysterious Twitterbot posts nothing but images of burnt food

A Japanese Twitter bot has surfaced on the microblogging service in recent months which has confused many a follower. Its sole purpose seems to be posting photos depicting food burnt to various degrees.

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Watch how to make one of Japan’s elite restaurant’s desserts

Located in the posh Roppongi area of Tokyo is RyuGin which was given a three star rating by Michelin earlier this year, and was ranked the 22nd best restaurant in the world by S.Pelligrino and Acqua Panna. Part of the reason for these accolades is the artistic vision of head chef Seiji Yamamoto who enjoys pushing the boundaries of Japanese cuisine.

One example is the dessert seen above, the Ichigo Ame 2011 -196℃ to 99℃. It consists of a strawberry sherbert forged at ultra-low temperatures encased in a strawberry candy coating and served with a hot strawberry sauce. Sounds fantastic doesn’t it?

Of course, going to one of the top restaurants in the world doesn’t come cheap, making the Ichigo Ame out of most of our price range. Luckily, RyuGin had uploaded a reference video to YouTube, so that we can all learn how to make it. Join us as we take you through the process to make this unbelievably sophisticated dessert.

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Don’t let Takeru Kobayashi’s slight build fool you. That guy vacuums up food faster than a Hoover. In his most recent feat of voracity, the Japanese competitive eater gobbled down a whopping 67 hot dogs in 10 minutes. The next closest contender only managed 34!

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Hands-free burger holder frees hands to put even more food in your mouth

A few days ago, we designed and field tested a shoulder-mounted, hands-free burger holding device that allowed our gluttonous Mr. Sato to eat one of his beloved burgers without missing a Tweet. Then he wondered if his free hands might allow him to indulge his other passion… Get your mind out of the gutter! We mean noodles!

Read on for the results of our experiment and instructions on how to try it yourself.

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