GariGari-kun's Food Flavors (of doom)

GariGari-kun is a brand of popsicles here in Japan. Or ice pop I guess I should say, as Popsicle is a brand name.You can walk into any conbini or super market and purchase yourself one of these for anywhere from 60 yen to 150 yen, depending on where you go. (Conbini products having a higher mark up and all.)

"Gari gari" is Japanese for crunchy. Add the "kun" honorific (reserved for boys), and the ice pop's name is "Crunchy-boy."

Hi there! I'm Crunchy-boy!

Anyhoo, as we all know, the people of Japan love kakigori. (Shaved ice or snow cones for those who don't speak Japanese.) Every summer, restaurants and food stalls at festivals do a roaring syrup covered ice bits trade. The idea behind Garigari-kun was to have a way to eat kakigori in one hand, not in the traditional cup with a straw.

The idea is a harder "ice candy" outside layer keeps the shape and protects the inside, which is the soft kakigori filling. Research on Google suggests that originally this idea, while wonderful in theory, didn't work so well in real life. However, they seemed to have got it right eventually, as Garigari-kun is the number 1 selling ice pop brand in Japan. Their standard flavor is ラムネ (ramune), or soda flavored. They also make many different flavors, as well as limited time seasonal releases, such as watermelon, peach, grape, etc.

But on to the real point of this post, Garigari-kun's "rich" limited flavors.
Somewhere along the line, someone at the company thought, "Hey! Let's make food flavors! Why not?"

Back in 2012, they had a corn soup flavored one. I did not try it, but on all accounts, it seemed to be disgusting. The company, not to be discouraged, especially because so many people bought it on it's weird factor despite the taste, every once in a while come out with a new flavor.

Deciding to be brave, and see what all this was about, I purchased the 2 flavors available to me at the time, "Cream Stew" and "Napolitan Pasta." Not about to do this alone, I recruited my friend Kako, her husband, and her 2 sons to help me.

Yum!

On the left is the Napolitan flavor. It's a tomato flavor ice shell around the soft pasta sauce tasting center. It also has tomato jellies in the center. On the right is the Stew flavor. It's white stew shell around a softer stew flavored center, with real potato chunks in it. Oh yes, potato chunks.

Do we really want to eat these?

First of all, we all agreed they were both disgusting! I think we ended up throwing half of them out because no one wanted to eat them.

I don't like it. Take it back!

That said, let's go over what they actually tasted like, other than nasty.
The stew flavor tasted like salty milk. Kako and her family thought it was better than the neopolitan flavor, (not good mind you, just, not as bad) but I couldn't agree. I ate one bite and thought I was going to be sick. The texture was horrible, though that could because it sat in my freezer for a month or 2 until I got everyone to try them. The potato chunks were cold and mushy and just plain disgusting. The whole thing was a mushy starchy disaster in my mouth.

Don't they seem impressed?

The neopolitan pasta flavor tasted like ketchup. It was frozen watered down ketchup. It was also rather salty, but the tomato jellies weren't bad. Once you got used to the flavor, it was a little easier to eat (for me, not for the rest,) and it had a strangely sweet after taste. I think I managed to eat half of it before I gave it up as a bad job.

In short, it was interesting to eat ONCE. Never again.

Never again!