From the folks who brought you Tamagogani and Yaki Aji comes, Kozakanani! They’re dried, sugared and looking you straight in the eye from their dissected sockets. Yes, Kozakanani is a melange of dried and candied marine life preserved for your eating pleasure!
Delivered to your mouth in Takuma Shokuhin’s uninspiring but promissory packaging, Kozakanani will party on your taste buds all. Night. Long!
Ok, not really. But I was looking for the thrill of a near death experience when I brought yet another Shokuhin product into my home.
I love fish and oceania critters in their many, varied and sometimes frightening forms. Kozakanani had not one sea treat, but three. That’s a bargain to me!
Sardines, flatfish and shrimp compose the mixture offered up in this snack. Dried whole and then, no doubt, boiled in sugar, salt, seaweed, red pepper and MSG. The ingredient list states that sesame seed is the fourth additive but I see only one lonely sesame seed at the bottom of the bag. What a rip.
These guys are sad on the plate. Once again I must turn away as their lifeless, dried eyes beg for an answer as to why they were given such an ignominious fate. Hey, don’t look at me fishies, blame Shokuhin; they happen to like drying up and sweetening your ilk.
Picking up a scant handful, I’m reminded of another snack: Maze Maze Ichiban. Maze Maze Ichiban is a cracker nut mix with the same sugared flatfish included in Kozakanani. It’s de-lish-us.
Moment of truth! Do or die! No pain no gain! And so forth and so on. It’s after the first bite and I’m not dead! Nah, these aren’t so bad. The initial impression is SUGAR followed by, crunchy, then, fish? and ending with bitter!
Taking a sample of each individual critter yields that the sardines are the culprit for the bitter aftertaste, although they don’t deliver a strong fish impression. The dried shrimp are very fishy and have a strong flavor. The flatfish are milder than the shrimp but stronger in flavor than the sardines.
I’m not too terribly impressed with kozakanani, nor am I disappointed. It’s a snack that would do well as an additive in something like okonomiyaki, yaki soba, or a dull cracker mix. I could also see myself resignedly and mindlessly chowing down on these if there wasn’t anything left to snack on the house. It feels like one of those snacks.
There are other, more flavorful and imaginative sugared fish snack mixes out there (Tom Yum Goon mix) but this is a good sampling of what dried fishies taste like when they’re relatively unseasoned.
This snack is an improvement over Shokuhin’s previous snacks I’ve reviewed. However, Shokuhin still hasn’t redeemed itself enough that I don’t scoff at the notion that everything they make isn’t all suck.
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Giving Kozakanani an overall:
