Japan now has special matcha green tea cookies you’re supposed to eat for breakfast【Taste test】

Does Morning Ma’am make for a good morning?

Japanese confectioner Fujiya’s Country Ma’am bite-sized cookies are some of our favorite sweet snacks, and we’d happily eat them all day long. Of course, though, cookies aren’t breakfast food…or are they?

We found ourselves questioning whether it’s OK to start your day with a bag of cookies after a recent shopping run at our local convenience store, where we saw something called Morning Ma’am on offer. At first we thought they might be some kind of knock-off with a similar but legally distinct name, but looking at the package we could see that these are indeed officially made by Fujiya, and they’re billed as “a new bite-sized breakfast.”

So what’s the basis for Morning Ma’am’s claim that these cookies are a sensible breakfast? Two things that differentiate them from regular Country Ma’am cookies: Morning Ma’am doesn’t have the Country’s Ma’am’s customary chocolate chips, and the breakfast cookies instead boast extra dietary fiber, making them a more nutritious option. Each bag of Morning Ma’am cookies is only about 225 calories, too, comparable to the calorie count for a bowl of white rice.

Morning Ma’am comes in three flavors, vanilla, matcha green tea, and strawberry, all priced at 140 yen (US$0.88). We started our taste test with vanilla, which is also the standard flavor of Country Ma’am.

Visually, they look a little more granular than regular Country Ma’am, but as we popped one into our mouth, we found that Morning Ma’am’s texture is pretty much exactly the same as Country Ma’am’s, only minus the chocolate chips, in that ideal not too crisp, not too mushy medium. No chocolate chips obviously meant less sweetness, but what’s here is still tasty, and actually feels like a classy cookie with its less overtly sugary taste.

Classier still is the matcha Morning Ma’am, with surprisingly deep and delicious green tea notes.

Fujiya is quick to point out the convenience and edible-on-the-go nature of Morning Ma’am, but for those who want to spruce it up, the company offers several suggestions. One of them, eating Morning Ma’am with milk, might sound like a no-brainer, but Japan doesn’t really have a sweets tradition of dunking cookies in milk, so for the local market it’s a fresh concept. Plus rather than dipping your Morning Ma’am into a glass of milk, Fujiya recommends using Morning Ma’am as a cereal substitute, putting your cookies in a bowl, pouring the milk over them, and eating them with a spoon.

We decided to take their advice, and we were glad we did. The combination tasted great, adding a creaminess that seemed to enhance the cookie dough’s sweet notes.

Fujiya has even bolder ideas, too, and looking through the Morning Ma’am website we found a suggestion to try…

…matcha Morning Ma’am cookies topped with spinach and cheese!?!

Yeah, we were pretty shocked at first. Then we got to thinking, though, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea? After all, if Morning Ma’am is supposed to be more like a cereal-y grain than a dessert, and tea is a beverage that can be paired with sweet or savory foods, there’s a chance that the cookies, spinach, and cheese could all go together very nicely.

We started by placing the spinach on top of the cookies…

…and then the cheese on top of the spinach.

Since all of the ingredients are OK to eat as-is, we didn’t necessarily have to cook this concoction, but we figured it’d taste better heated up, so we popped it in the microwave for a bit.

As we opened up the microwave door, an intensely strong matcha aroma came drifting out.

We took a bite, and it wasn’t nearly as bizarre-tasting as we’d braced ourselves for. We wouldn’t say that the matcha, spinach, and cheese blended together in seamless harmony, but they weren’t squabbling with each other either. To our surprise, even after adding the spinach and cheese, the matcha flavor is still what comes trough most strongly on the palate, with the cheese imparting a bit of saltiness that helps draw out more of the cookies’ sweetness by contrast, and the spinach contributing complexity to the texture but without affecting the flavor very much.

In addition to the obviously interested demographics of unabashedly incorrigible cookie fans, Fujiya is pitching Morning Ma’am to busy businesspeople and students who might not have time for a full sit-down breakfast, and also recommending it as a mid-day snack that’s a healthier alternative to regular cookies or straight-up candy. We’re looking forward to trying the strawberry flavor when we get a chance, and if it’s as good as the vanilla and matcha ones, that’ll give us three breakfast options the next time we oversleep and need a breakfast that’s ready to eat ASAP.

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Insert images: SoraNews24, Fujiya
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