Savoury Japan-style Cookies

These are from a local Singaporean patisserie, Flor Patisserie @ Takashimaya basement, but they seem to be rather influenced by the Japanese way of baking pastries and composing flavours. Today, we shall look at two of their more interesting cookie flavours.

Miso Cookies
Miso cookies.They came in a little gift packet with maybe 10 or so cookies in each.
The notable ingredients were white miso and black sesame. I thought it interesting that they didn't add any extra salt besides what was already in the miso. Even so, it tasted very savoury.

I thought there was a slight cheesy taste, although if you ate something with a lot of cheese immediately before, you may not think so. I figured it was the baked proteins or fermented taste in the miso, since these are the two common points that miso has with cheese. Otherwise, I couldn't taste anything else that I would associate with miso.

The sesame seeds contributed a mild toasted sesame seed flavour, which was significant since this was an overall subtly-flavoured cookie. 

I thought it was quite pleasant overall though, because most savoury cookies have really strong flavours, like the next one. Still, people may not want to pay so much for such a small packet of subtly-flavoured cookies with no strong differentiating factor besides containing miso. It cost about S$4-5 for one packet, if I'm not wrong.

Karai Cookies (literally "spicy cookies" in Japanese)
Karai cookies.Each packet of karai cookies came with more pieces than the miso cookies, but each piece felt smaller.
These contained a few notable ingredients - paprika, chilli, parmesan powder and almond powder.

It just tasted like spicy cheese biscuits though. Very tasty, but for some reason the overall taste wasn't as unique as the miso cookies. I guess it's because I've come across such a taste in many savoury Mediterranean breads and breadsticks before... so I guess the unique point is that the taste is packaged in something I can crunch this time. Still, I'm sure its similar to the taste of some of those pizza flavoured snacks, so it wasn't as unique as the name made it sound. 

Maybe they should have just called it pizza cookies... there, that doesn't sound too bad ne? In fact, because people know what pizzas are, and love them, they may be more willing to try it. And no worries about straying from the Japanese theme... firstly, it didn't seem very Japanese besides the name to begin with. And secondly, the Japanese do interesting stuff with the pizza flavour, like pizaman (or Pizza man, which is a Chinese-style steamed bun with pizza-like filling, namely cheese, tomato sauce and some meat).

Also, I couldn't taste the almond powder at all despite it being mentioned second on the ingredients list... makes me wonder what effect it had on the taste or texture. I remember that Gateau Festa Harada's Tigresse also used almond powder, although I thought it had more of an effect for that.

Granted, it was much more addictive than the miso cookies because it was overall packed with more taste... but I probably wouldn't pay so much for it either. 

~~~
Perhaps if these cookies came in a larger tin, with five times more cookies in each tin, I may pay $20 for it as a gift. But probably not in these small packets...

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