Osaka Takoyaki Drops

Another delicious food drop review from J-List. While we didn't have a whole lot of success from the Sasebo Burger Drops, they were novel at the very least and a ton of fun to try. This particular drop attempts to imitate a difficult Japanese dish, takoyaki. I say difficult because from the item's description of a fried ball of octopus, tempura, pickled ginger, and onions all lavishly lashed with mayonnaise, (thanks, Wikipedia!) it brings many flavors and senses to the table- somewhat difficult to emulate within the course of a small hard candy, no?

In his book, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser describes attending a "tasting" in a food flavorist's chemistry lab and the dissociation of placing fragrance strips beneath his nose to smell a grilled hamburger, as fresh and fragrant as though it were being grilled next to him and opening his eyes to see nothing more than a small paper strip in front of him. Going into this, this was sort of what I expected to experience.

While I've never had takoyaki, I can imagine what they taste like, and this seems to be the borderline McTokyo version versus the standard street issue snack. It's not fishy, which was good because I wasn't sure my stomach could handle a fish-flavored candy, but it had a predominantly sweet, spicy flavor from the ginger, an aspect that I expected to be widely ignored. There wasn't too much more to speak of, and it lost that fried, oily flavor I thought would be most prominent. Not disgusting, but not what I expected.