Hi-Chew – Strawberry Daifuku

It’s not too often that Hi-Chew does non-fruit based flavours, but they do tend to do some fruit adjacent flavoured ones like sodas, and today’s flavour which is technically fruit adjacent. Maybe it’s a cultural thing based on my personal experience, but the varieties and seasonal flavours in Japan tend to mostly be just different variants of fruits, or adding things like little sugar crystals. Ultimately it’s still largely fruity. The most non-fruit flavours I’ve seen are actually the flavours they bring over to the west. Maybe westerners don’t like their fruits as much.

Daifuku is a classic treat in Japan, and is what I would describe as a mochi with sweet filling, generally red bean. A strawberry daifuku takes it a step further and plants an entire strawberry in the center of it all. It truly is something to try if you ever get the chance.

If you handed this to me, I’d be able to quickly tell you its strawberry. The smell is no different from the regular strawberry ones. It’s not until I unwrap it that it’s obviously not just strawberry. Visually though, you might assume it’s chocolate, since strawberry and chocolate is the most common combination. But you would be wrong in this case – it’s red bean paste to simulate the flavour of a strawberry daifuku, which is a strawberry wrapped in red bean paste, and then in a mochi.

The flavour feels like they took the standard strawberry flavour, rolled it out into a thin layer and used it to wrap around the brown center. The strawberry portion has that classic Hi-Chew creamy, berry, floral flavour. The brown center layer is a pretty noticeable sweet, earthy flavour that you expect from red bean paste. It tastes like a sweeter variety of red bean paste, where it might remind you of either a lotus paste or red bean paste snack. Sometimes the two are hard to tell apart if it’s sweet enough, but that slightly earth flavour of the red bean comes through here. Just slightly.

The texture is…well Hi-Chew. Truly one of the best in my life time, and this is unchanged from that. Perhaps a bit of a self-own here but I would say this you are unlikely to find a better texture out there, at least with our current understanding of culinary technology. Who knows, maybe down the road some genius scientist finds a way to commercialize an even better texture, which I don’t doubt the possibility of. For the time being though, if you want a nice chewy taffy like texture that’s as satisfying as bubble gum but also edible, this is it.

So what’s the verdict here? It’s good and worth a try, but I suspect most people won’t even notice that this isn’t strawberry. Based on that I would say get this if it’s not too much more expensive than the normal strawberry if you want to try something different. Otherwise stick with the strawberry.