Umai Vegetable Salad

This is my first foray into the world of savoury Japanese snacks. I have been wanting to branch out more but for some reason I always end up buying sweet snacks, I guess it comes down to my very sweet tooth.

My sister-in-law bought a few of these as part of a bag of goodies she gave us, so I am forcing myself to somewhat gingerly try this flavour - Vegetable Salad.

Now, in Japanese, "umai" means something is very good, so when a food manufacturer uses it of course they are big-noting their products to mean very tasty.

The manufacturer Yaokin, has a very simple website, and they have a product catalogue you can download.

The snack in question is a long puffy savoury tube, abit like a cheezel but longer. Like one mega cheezel, I guess. The name of the flavour - vegetable salad - is a bit confusing to me really. It's either a vegetable, or a salad, unless it's a salad of vegetables...I guess?

Anyway, taking the tube out of the wrapper, it appears to be a long, orange tube of puffiness with green specks all over it. It's quite oily (the oil leaked onto the paper below), and it smells like my husband's dirty socks. No, really. It's quite gross.

Biting down into the tube, it has the same texture as a cheezel, puffy, but easy to bite through. There is some spice in there. It's not too hot, just enough to give flavour. There is alot of flavour sprinkled on the outside, it comes off on my hands.

I can taste some garlic, corn, and tomato. A look at the wrapper reveals potatoes, corn, garlic, cabbage, paprika, parsley. Paprika would have been used to give it the colour, and parsley the green specks.

In all, it's not bad, but it's not umai either. I can't say that I'm really a fan. Though these seem to be geared more towards the younger set, and at 10 or 15 yen each you can't really expect much more than that.

You can check out other reviews of Umai at Japanese Snack Reviews.