We try Mister Donut’s new collab with Kyoto matcha sweets specialist Gion Tsujiri 【Taste Test】

Are the new matcha and hojicha donuts as good as they sound?

There’s nothing we at SoraNews24 love more than a new donut flavor. Well, maybe a new chip flavor, or a new special curry, or…okay, let’s rephrase that. There’s nothing we love more than a new flavor of food, so when Mister Donut announced that they were releasing a new line of limited-time-only donuts that were made in collaboration with Kyoto Uji Matcha confectionary shop Gion Tsujiri, we just had to try them!

The line, called “Misdo meets Gion Tsujiri”, includes two donuts flavored with matcha and two donuts flavored with hojicha, also known as roasted green tea. Though we love matcha, we were most excited to try the hojicha donuts, since this is the first time that Gion Tsujiri has ever collaborated to release hojicha sweets. Our mouths were watering just at the very prospect of trying them!

So after stopping in at our local Mister Donut to pick up all four varieties, we started our donut taste test with the Uji Hojicha Mochifuwa Whip (210 yen/US$1.72).

This donut has Uji Hojicha mixed into its dough, which has a light and fluffy consistency when baked. A sandwich-type donut, the inside is filled with a hojicha flavored whip cream, a hojicha-flavored syrup, and chocolate chunks, so it promised to be chock-full of hojicha flavors.

And it was! It had the light, refreshing aroma unique to hojicha, which made us very happy. If you’re a fan of hojicha-flavored sweets, you will definitely not be disappointed with this donut!

The second hojicha donut is the Uji Hojicha Mochifuwa Warabimochi donut (210 yen). It also has Uji hojicha mixed into the dough.

However, this donut differs from the Mochifuwa Whip donut in that it has a filling of warabimochi, a type of jelly-like confection, and Hokkaido adzuki red beans. This donut offered a nice harmony between hojicha and Japanese ingredients.

It was delicious! It was full of sugary delightfulness that made us feel like we were eating a Japanese sweet. It also had a kind of luxuriousness to it, which was a pleasant surprise.

Now on to the matcha donuts! The two varieties are “raw pon-de-ring” donuts, which are made of small, soft, chewy, and fluffy pull-apart balls. Like the hojicha donuts, the matcha varieties have Uji matcha baked into them. We started with the Raw Pon-de-Uji Matcha (180 yen), which was a simple, satisfying donut that makes use of the sweetness and umami of Gion Tsujiri’s matcha.

It was coated in a glaze, so when we bit into it, it also had a nice crunch to it that added a great textural accent to the donut.

Last on the agenda was the Raw Pon-de-Uji Matcha Kuromitsu Kinako (220 yen), which uses the same donut recipe, but is coated in roasted soybean flour instead of glazed. It also has the unique advantage of being served with kuromitsu, Japanese brown sugar syrup. You can try the donut with or without the syrup, almost letting you have two donuts in one, which, in our eyes, is a distinct advantage.

When paired with kuromitsu and kinako, the fluffy, chewy texture of the pon-de-ring donut becomes more than a donut, elevating it to the level of a luxury Japanese sweet. However, the one disadvantage that poses is that the matcha becomes more of a background flavor to the more overpowering flavors of kinako and kuromitsu. If matcha is what you’re after, you may be better suited to trying the Raw Pon-de-Uji Matcha donut instead.

All in all, all four of the new “Misdo meets Gion Tsujiri” donuts were supremely tasty. In our humble opinion, each of the donuts had its own appeal, with a different array of flavors. Part of the fun was trying them all and seeing how they compare, so that’s what we recommend too!

If you want to buy one of each, they come in a set for 883 yen, together with an original paper shopping bag with the “Misdo meets Gion Tsujiri” logo on it. It’s for takeout only, but worth it if you want to try all four!

Naturally, these donuts are around in limited quantities and only for a limited time, so make sure to try them before they’re gone at the end of April. However, this is only the first wave of this new line (although this isn’t by any means the first time Mister Donut and Gion Tsujiri have worked together), so that means we have more delightful matcha flavors to look forward to in the future!

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