About food in Japan

Seicomart, local convenience store chain in Hokkaido

When you travel in Japan, probably you will find that Seven-Eleven and Lawson are two dominant players as a convenience store in many places of Japan. However in Hokkaido, a local chain disturbs these two giants making such situation in their land.

Seicomart is local convenience chain born in Sapporo in early 70’s when even major convenience stores had not demonstrate strong presence yet. We can say that Seicomart is one of the oldest convenience stores in Japan. Seicomart has over 1000 units in Hokkaido and cover almost 100% area in the north-most big island. When you travel in Hokkaido, surely you find the orange logo with crane around train stations or roadside.

As one of the unique points, Seicomart provides at its units products offering as “HOT CHEF.” It is a series of hot cooked food for take-away. The product line-up covers from katsu-don (tonkatsu, fried pork on rice), onigiri (rice ball), fried potato etc, which will be suitable for lunch or snack before or after dinner. As you may know, Hokkaido is the north-most land of Japan. In Winter in some places of Hokkaido, the temperature goes down to around 10 degree BELOW ZERO. In such severe weather, hot food served as “HOT CHEF” is really appreciated among local people. Even in summer, HOT CHEF series products will help you with taking energy to survive in heating climate.  

One cold evening on April, we tried fried chicken from HOT CHEF corner.

 

 

Chicken pieces were flavored well with blended spices like ones at KFC. The taste is much better than what we expect for food at convenience stores. We enjoyed a good evening at a hotel room with a canned beer and HOT CHEF fried chicken.

 

Seicomart offers original brand products in addition to HOT CHEF. They include tea and other soft drink.

 

Also it focus on introducing imported good quality of wine bottles at reasonable cost!!

 

Seicomart also provides  even "croissant" as a HOT CHEF product, which is made from igredients imported from France and baked at the location. That will be appreciated not only by local people but also by international tourists.

 

 

 Don’t forget an option of HOT CHEF for quick lunch or refreshment during your trip in Hokkaido!!  

  

Our blog series Hokkaido will continue a bit more to talk about some interesting spots at Chitose Airport. 

 

Shop name: Seicomart (convenience chain)

Official website: http://www.seicomart.co.jp/english/our_network.html

 

 

 

Omiyage sweets in Hokkaido

On our last post under current series “Hokkaido”, we introduced one of the most popular Omiyage (お土産, souvenir gift), Shiroi Koibito (白い恋人). Following it, today we introduce other three interesting Omiyage products found in Hokkaido. 

In Hokkaido, we can find many attractive Omiyage products every souvenir shop, supermarket, department store etc. They are just only a tiny part of them though.

The first one is “Oranda Senbei” (オランダせんべい) which is a local specialty of Nemuro city(根室).

 

 

The word “Oranda” represents “The Netherlands” in Japanese and Senbei means “cracker.” So Oranda Senbei is “Dutch cracker”. It reminds some of you especially those in Europe “waffle” known in the Netherlands’ neighbor Belgium by it. Yes, it is!!

Actually Oranda senbei is considered coming from the Netherlands via Nagasaki, South part in Japan, where international trading was allowed only at its post in Edo period. It’s really amazing that the specialty in a country in Europe had traveled far away to this land of truly Far East, one of the north-most places, Nemuro in Hokkaido. It may take long time but the style remains very similar with the original waffle.

As for the taste, it is rather sweet as cracker. The texture is a bit soft and the taste is better when it is a bit heated. The taste is not so strong and it is also well matched with fruits jam or honey maybe.

We found the sweets shop which has produced Oranda Senbei exclusively for over 40 years. Only a few shops still produce and sell this interesting product but others already stopped or had gone unfortunately.

Shop name: Hashiya Kashiten (端谷菓子店)
Address: 2-11 Chishima-cho, Nemuro-city, Hokkaido
Website (only in Japanese): http://olandasenbei.com

 

The second interesting Omiyage product is called “Yama Oyaji”.
This is sweet cracker with the icon of a bear holding salmon. The product name Yama Oyaji (Mountain daddy) comes from a bear in this region which walked around freely in mountains. Yama Oyaji is produced by a local sweets producer, Senshuan, who was founded almost a century ago based in Sapporo. It is one of many products made with Hokkaido’s local ingredients by Senshuan.

 

The taste of Yama Oyaji cracker is rather simple like homemade cookies and is pure made from milk, butter and flour. It is appreciated by many from kids to elder generations and Yama Oyaji has known widely as a souvenir sweets of Hokkaido for long years. However in the era of 21st century, more and more other attractive sweets like Shiroi Koibito, or Rokkatei butter sand, were launched after Yama Oyaji. Now we have less chance to find the sweets cracker which is sold only in limited locations.

 

 

 

Shop Senshuan units are mainly located in Sapporo city including one in Chitose Airport and several are across Hokkaido.

Senshuan (Flagship store)
Address: Nishi 3chome 17, Minami 3Jyo, Chuo-ku, Sapporo-city
Website (Japanese only): http://senshuan.co.jp

 

The last one is a new type of Omiyage sweets which we found in many souvenir shops in Hokkaido. 

Hokkaido matrioshka; as we told on our post of Hokkaido introduction, in some parts of Hokkaido, Russian territory is close and less than 50km distance. Respecting and demonstrating friendship to the neighbor country, a sweets box is produced as “Hokkaido Matrioshka”.

The cute package obviously attracts Japanese girls and ladies travelers. Five pieces of small cakes are in a box and those 5 matrioshka dolls hold each different local specialty of Hokkaido. 

They are Crock tower in Sapporo, lily of the valley flower, bear (here again like Yama Oyaji), salmon and snowman in my box. Much more variations of Hokkaido specialty such as corn, potato are available and they are different box by box!!

 

The egg-like shape cake has “sweet-berry honeysuckle” paste in the center and it is coated by white chocolate. Sweet-berry honeysuckle or Hascup(ハスカップ) in Japanese is also Hokkaido’s unique berry fruits like blue berry.

 

Hokkaido matrioshka is available major souvenir shops across Hokkaido.
Official site of the product maker, Hase Confectionary Company (in Japanese) : 
http://www.hase-seika.co.jp/blog/2010/03/post-11.html

We will continue Hokkaido series post and a few more posts will be uploaded.

 

Hokkaido Omiyage, Shiroi Kokobito (白い恋人)

As a part of our series of blog post “Hokkaido”, we are going to talk about omiyage (お土産, souvenir gift) sweets for a while. Hokkaido is one of the most popular travel destinations for people in Tokyo and other parts of Japan. Then at everywhere in Hokkaido, we can find huge selections of sweets or snacks to be purchased as “omiyage” (souvenir gift). Hokkaido is a land of agriculture and daily farms in addition to fishery industry. That helps Hokkaido with offering wide variety of souvenir products. Milk, cheese, potato, Yubari melon as our previous post, and other ingredients considered as local specialty of Hokkaido are often used and can be found in omiyage product line-up.

Among the huge collections, firstly we introduce one of the most popular Omiyage sweets, Shiroi Koibito (白い恋人), along with its rival, “Rokkatei products” we introduced on our blog in the past.

Shiroi Koibito is biscuit-sand with a piece of white chocolate, a kind of cookies called “langue de chat” in Europe. The rich creamy white chocolate is an icon of daily products from Hokkaido, which attracts us so much!! Once you take a piece of Shiroi Koibito, you will understand why it is so popular. It will be available at major souvenir shops in tourist spots across Hokkaido and some variation in size are offered from 9 to 54 pieces per package depending on your needs and demand.

  

 

Most people or at lease those in East Japan can recognize Shiroi Koibito with this package. On this trip we came to know about the mountain depicted on the package for the first time.

 

This mountain covered with snow is the one called “Mt. Rishiri” or “Rishiri Fuji” located in Rishiri island (利尻島) in Hokkaido. The 1721-meter height mountain has beautiful shape like Mt. Fuji. The island is about 25km away from Hokkaido main land. It takes less than an hour by air from Sapporo Chitose airport or less than 2 hours by ship from Wakkanai port. 

 

 

Luckly we could find the mountain from the main land of Hokkaido around Wakkanai, as the weather was very fine.

 

Does it look like the package?

 

 

The view of Mt. Rishiri reminds us Shiroi Koibito on the way of driving in Hokkaido.

It was nice to know deeper about the most popular souvenir sweets.

 

On the next post, we will introduce other Omiyage sweets in Hokkaido.