Two chews today, starting with Lotte’s salt caramel. The burnt-sugar scent of this alone is heavenly, and, as the dark brown colour promises, the flavour is rich and buttery rather than highly milky and sugary.
The salt filters through the other flavours and comes to the foreground slowly; it is very much in balance with the butter and brown sugar rather than being a strong additional flavour, so to me this is more like a caramel that happens to contain salt rather than a salt caramel, but of course that’s not a bad thing.
The texture is nicely chewy but soft enough that it doesn’t stick to the teeth, although the pieces are fairly small, meaning that it’s hard to get a satisfying chew out of just one, though two or three do the trick. Lotte also makes matcha caramel, as well as various flavours of gum.
Puccho Fresh Grape
These are supposed to contain real fruit and they do give off a delicious grape aroma but I’m not convinced by the flavour, and in fact if you check the side of the packet it says the fruit juice used in the filling comes from dates. Nevertheless, these are certainly full of flavour and do contain grape, as well as apple and lemon, juice so there is a genuine fruitiness to them, but also an artificially sugary taste.
The pale pale pink and deep purple colour-scheme is appealing and each sweet provides a good chewiness and juiciness. Each wrapper has a different cute cartoon on it too. Overall they’re very tasty, just don’t be fooled by the suggestion from the packaging that they’re bursting with authentic grape flavour. Puccho makes loads of other flavours, such as mikan and cola, and seasonal varieties are available throughout the year.
The Sweet Japan Blog 