Autumn is the season for sweet potato in Japan. They’re a popular winter vegetable used in both sweet and savoury dishes in restaurants and cake shops, but simply grilling, peeling and eating them plain (yaki-imo) is one of the most basic and common ways to eat it. Street vendors set up outside independent grocery shops or pulling carts or driving trucks filled with grilled sweet potato are a frequent sight when visiting Japan.
Here we have Glico Pretz Osatsu, a seasonal edition for autumn.
These Sweet Potato Pretz consist of a biscuit made with sweet potato and covered with sugar crystals.
The smell of a fragrant sweetness is strong on opening the packaging. Upon tasting, though, it’s a savoury flavour that emerged ahead of the sweetness from the sugar crystals, before the earthy and floral flavours of sweet potato emerge in the body from the biscuit, recalling the comforting flavour of a yaki-imo on a cold autumn day. A pleasant molasses-like floral sweetness lingered on the palate.
Like a sweet potato, though, the sweetness is mellow – markedly so compared to their smell – and the slight savoury note takes these Pretz out of dessert territory. The biscuit is crisp, made all the more so by a hard sugar glaze beneath the sugar crystals. Together, these make for immensely moreish Pretz.
This Glico Pretz Osatsu contained 2 packs each with ~20 pieces. It was produced in Japan and purchased in Ōsaka, Japan in 2015.