For being the obvious cereal obsessor that I am, my tongue is pretty poorly travelled. As much as I’d love to keep up with each continent’s new and exciting cereals—you should see the kriller stuff those penguins are spooning out—it’s hard enough to follow American cereal discourse without drowning in a review backlog of brightly colored bags (that feel more like bricks).
Sure, I’ve dabbled here and there, but there are always other international oddities that slip under my radar. Luckily, I can now put a few more stamps in my cereal passport, thanks to Empty Bowl listener Nina B. in Okayama, Japan. Because of her kindness as a penPAL, I can now expand my region-locked palate.
And for being just three ambassadors to a whole country’s crunch culture, these Japanese cereals form an inspiring continuum of flavors. We have a never-before-tasted idea like tea cereal, a charming reinterpretation of a round bakery classic, and a bread cereal that’s aptly the polar opposite of America’s resident loaflets.
Without further ado, let’s let the Land of the Rising Sun illuminate this microcosmic balanced breakfast.
Kellogg’s Brown Rice Roasted Tea Flakes Review
Now, I’ve chosen to start with this one because I need to lay out my bias immediately. I am not a tea person, at all. In the never-ending silent war between hot bean and hot leaf, for me it’s either Joe or it’s a no go.
So while I’m a vocal and vigorous advocate for coffee-flavored cereals, I’m approaching Kellogg’s of Japan’s unique Brown Rice Roasted Tea Flakes with a steep degree of suspicion.
Far from the sweet matcha you might imagine in a hypothetical American tea cereal, these Roasted Tea Flakes are flavored with Höjicha tea—a green tea roasted over charcoal, rather than steamed. This gives the Tea Flakes a distinct smoky & oaky fore-taste, which transitions with PowerPointian grace into a relatively mellow, though no less shocking to an American palate, herbal tea body.
This sensation isn’t particularly sweet nor tart, but it contrasts nicely with the brown rice flakes themselves, which provide a rich earthen base and woodsy sweetness to round out this cereal’s diverse cast of tastes. Forget the shallow rice flour of Cinnamon Toast Crunch & Co., which seem bland by design to prop up sheer cinnamon sugariness. Tea Flakes are a full-bodied, almost barrel-aged experience.
Though I’m inclined to drink coffee and tea alike unsweetened, I think milk is very helpful here for creamily corralling Tea Flakes’ many piecemeal nuances into a smoother segue for all senses (touch them! they’re like tree bark!)
Its many layers are better suited for long, pensive and patient breakfasts, rather than saccharine Saturday morning scarf downs, so even though the tea flavor still grows a little bit unpleasant to me after eating too many spoonfuls, your experience may happily vary according to your drink preferences. Also note that I’m cursed with the cilantro-soap gene, so I may have been mis-wired when it comes to tea, too.
Now if only they came with little freeze-dried crumpets.
The Bottom Line: 5 taste bud carnivals out of 10 (add 2–3 if you actually like tea)
Donut Mart Cereal Review
Absolute. Chew-nits.
Those were the only words I could muster after the genuine gulp of air I gasped in upon seeing the vast geometry of Donut Mart Cereal. Seriously, the audacity of these things! Big enough to rescue men overboard, powerful enough to make Master Chief reload, and thick enough to be classified as a compressed bazooka, Donut Mart Cereal is huge. Huger than any cereal I’ve eaten in my entire life, in fact.
Yet size isn’t everything in the donut cereal multiverse. America, a dead ringer choice for the country whose glazed rings may knock you dead, birthed one of 2019’s best cereals in donut form. So do Donut Mart’s gaping portals stack up?
Oh, yes.
What Donut Mart Cereal lacks in Alpine quantities of powdered sugar, they make up for with a soft, biscuity crunch and a charming whipped doughiness. Imagine a Nilla Wafer, sent through a butter churn and looped with grace. They’re so interesting in both taste and texture that Donut Mart Cereal pieces, when eaten dry, feel more like an artisan Nabisco cracker–cookie hybrid than a true cereal.
But this changes in milk (or a latte, as is suggested). These tender rings fare pretty well against milk’s soggening forces, and their sort of sweet & sour cream glaze (not that kind of sweet & sour) leaves behind an endmilk that smacks delightfully of diluted condensed milk.
Out of all these Japanese cereals, Donut Mart is clearly the universally agreeable choice. From the shock & awe of its presentation to the unmatched bakery authenticity of its doughnutty profile, this one’s worth importing by the dozen.
The Bottom Line: 9 Krispy Kaiju out of 10
Nissin Bread Cereal Review – Apple Cinnamon & Raisin
Heyyyy…remember that thing I said about crumpet cereal? Well Nissin Bread Cereal is somewhere between that, a croissant and a crouton.
Forget everything you know about bread-shaped cereals. Comparing the likes of Apple Cinnamon and French Toast Crunches to this Nissin Bread Cereal is like putting sugar-spiced Wonder Bread next to, well, the same flavor profile on real French bread, which Nissin’s cereal quite literally mimics in shape and crunchy density.
But boy, eating Nissin Bread Cereal as an American is also sort of like handing a Rosemary & Olive Oil Triscuit to a 12th century peasant. This stuff is explosively floral, tongue-twistingly spiced, and so concentrated with dried apple flavor that it puckers one’s very capillaries.
Apple Cinnamon & Raisin specifically is a relatively new flavor for Nissin Bread Cereal, which also comes in French Toast, Strawberry & Mango (which is one primordial soup of a cereal, not three).
American cereals just don’t go that far with their integration of flavors, which explains why my mouth was left exhausted and outperformed by AC&R Nissin Bread Cereal’s full parade of potpourri. Between the borderline ancient grain base, unsweetened raisins, tart fruit and generous spice, eating Nissin Bread Cereal dry is like eating raw stuffing mix. Tasty? Perhaps if you’re alternating gulps of vegetable stock, but milk is more valuable here than ever before.
Of course, milk allows in the unappealing intrusive thought of chunky stuffing slough, but it also tempers all of the above elements to turn Nissin Bread Cereal into an abstract kind of oatmeal, wherein each component can intensely stand alone, though all contribute to a single endmilk that’s comforting and homely.
Nissin Bread Cereal is a complicated beast. Though this stuff introduces a deeper plane of flavorful experience, I simply feel like I haven’t discovered the right way to eat it yet. Should I sauté it? Crumble it into a pie crust? Or maybe crush and mash it all up into bake-able power bars?
In short, while I recommend trying all three of these Japanese cereals for their novelty, I’d say pick Nissin Bread Cereal if you like an immersive experience, Tea Flakes if you prefer herbal remedies for boredom, or Donut Mart if you don’t care too much for details and just want something innocently enjoyable.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to detox with a few buckets of Cap’n Crunch dust.
The Bottom Line: 6 transcendent Triscuitian trysts out of 10