A regional treat opens our eyes and mouths to a new dimension of baked goods.
Over the last few years, foodies from around the world have fallen in love with Japan’s fruit sandwiches, enchanted by the idea of swapping out savory fillings for sweet ones. However, putting pieces of fruit and cream between slices of bread causes one to eventually start asking questions on a conceptual level, to wonder at what point a sandwich ceases to become a sandwich and becomes a cake instead.
That’s something contemporary philosophers have yet to settle on a consensus regarding, but even as that debate continues, we’ve now discovered something that blurs the cake/sandwich line even further: Japan’s cake sandwiches.
▼ The castella sandwich (カステラサンド)
If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about these before, they’re not a Japanese bakery staple like melon bread or curry bread. Instead, they’re primarily a Niigata Prefecture thing, and even there they’re not always easy to find. As a matter of fact, our Japanese-language reporter Udonko, who’s a Niigata native, had never heard of the Castella Sandwich, as the cake sandwich is more properly called, until just a few days ago when she popped into The Niigata, a store in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood that stocks a rolling inventory of Niigata regional products.
Startled that she hadn’t been aware of the existence of cake sandwiches in Niigata until now, Udonko checked the package and saw that the Castella Sandwich is produced by Nakagawa Bakery. It’s unclear how long they’ve been baking cake sandwiches for, but the company itself has been around since 1952. However, the company is headquartered in the town of Sado, on Sadogashima Island, and this remote location has probably been a limiting factor for distribution for much of its history.
▼ Sado
And no, there’s no clever wordplay going on with the Castella Sandwich name, as it really and truly is two slices of bread with a slice of castella sponge cake in between.
Opening up the wrapper and going in for a closer look, Udonko was happy to see that this isn’t one of those paper-tiger sandwiches where the filling is much skimpier than it looks from the outside. The slice of castella goes all the way from one end of the sandwich to the other, and there are even layers of cream between it and each of the slices of bread.
Udonko expected the flavor to be sweet, and upon taking her first bite she immediately found out that it’s even sweeter than she’d initially imagined. The cake is rich and moist, and the combination of its soft, fluffy texture with a custard-like flavor is an extremely enjoyable combination.
Having experienced the revelation of cake sandwiches, Udonko found it even more regrettable that she’d never known that these things were available in her home prefecture. As if to drive home the point of how she could have been enjoying these treats for years, not long after stumbling across the Nakagawa Castella Sandwich Udonko was back in Niigata and doing a regular neighborhood supermarket run when she walked past the bread aisle and saw…
…another brand of Castella Sandwich!?!
▼ Though the label says “castilla” in Latin letters, カステラ is how “castella” is written in Japanese.
This Castella Sandwich is made by Yamazaki, one of Japan’s biggest bread makers with a highly developed nationwide distribution network. However, their Castella Sandwich appears to be a regional offering, with no mention of the product on the company’s website.
Obviously, Udonko needed to buy one for comparative taste-testing purposes.
In terms of appearance, it’s very similar to Nakagawa’s version and the baseline flavor is close too. If pressed for a difference between the two, though, Udonko would say that the texture of the bread Yamazaki uses is lighter and airier than Nagagawa’s, so much so that when eating the Yamazaki Castella Sandwich, the cake and bread have the exact same consistency.
Oh, and Castella Sandwiches are easy on the wallet, too. The Nakagawa version cost Udonko 346 yen (US$2.30), and the Yamazaki one was even cheaper, at just 149 yen.
So, is there anything not to love about these cake sandwiches, in Udonko’s opinion? Well, they’re both pretty high in calories. The Nakagawa Castella Sandwich has 667 calories, about as much as an entire restaurant-size beef bowl, and the Yamazaki one has 523, so these aren’t exactly diet-friendly snacks…but that’s probably to be expected with a concept like cake sandwiches.
The other issue, of course, is their limited availability, especially if you don’t happen to be in Niigata Prefecture or a specialty shop like the one in Ginza. That’s suddenly become much less of a problem, though, as just this week Nakagawa has decided to open an online store where you can buy Castella Sandwiches! They’re currently available only in a pack of 12 for 3,980 yen here, which means you’ll have to order a dozen at a time, but that sounds like a pretty sweet obligation to us.
Related: Nakagawa Bakery online shop, The Niigata
Photos ©SoraNews24
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