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This non-sweet matcha treat is one of our new favorite Kyoto snack souvenirs【Taste test】

Casey Baseel Oct 8, 2024
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Umami no Mi Gyokuro is waiting right outside the Shinkansen gate at Kyoto Station.

Half the fun of traveling in Japan is trying out special local foods, and half the fun of local foods is local snacks. And if you’re in Kyoto, you’ll probably feel like half the local snacks are matcha green tea sweets.

To be clear, this is not a complaint. Kyoto grows some of the best matcha in Japan, and matcha has proven itself to be a very tasty dessert flavor. So when we were passing through Kyoto Station recently and stumbled across Buburu, a shop run by Kyoto tea merchant and confectioner Gion Tsujiri, we figured it’d be a great place to pick up some matcha sweets to take home as souvenirs.

▼ Buburu

And yeah, Buburu has plenty of matcha sweets, but we ended up choosing something very different, Umami no Mi Gyokuro. Umami no Mi translates loosely to “seed of deliciousness,” and gyokuro is an especially prized variety of matcha in which the tea leaves are grown in the shade, giving them a richer flavor and deeper color than ordinary green tea.

After removing the container’s top there’s a secondary paper lid with a circular opening underneath, so that you can pour out the Umami no Mi one at a time if you want. Even before we’d shaken out a single piece, though, we could enjoy an enticingly strong matcha aroma rising up through the hole.

At a glance, Umami no Mi Gyokuro might look like little green tea cookies, but their flavor isn’t sweet at all, because these are actually made with kombu (dried kelp)!

Because of that, the first sensation you get is a sea-sharp salty flavor. After that the matcha notes start to make their presence felt, and even though the result is a combination of two strong flavors, neither one overpowers the other or saturates your taste buds. Umami no Mi also has a denser texture than the crumbly airiness we’d been expecting from their appearance, making for a very satisfying snack. As an added bonus, the fact that Umami no Mi Gyokuro is primarily made from kombu and matcha means it’s a low-calorie snack too, with the total count for the whole container being just 50 calories.

Add it all up, and Umami no Mi Gyokuro is a nice alternative to all the matcha sweets that Kyoto offers, a great souvenir pick for anyone whose snack tastes run more towards salty than sweet. It’s priced at 799 yen (US$5.70) and with Buburu being located just outside Kyoto Station’s Shinkanen Central Gate, it’s easy to pick up a pack as soon as you arrive in town or just before you leave, depending on your snacking ambitions.

Buburu exterior image: PR Times
All other photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]