Pokémon Slowpoke Powdered Rice Topping tastes like liquid for noodles【Taste test】

Honorary Pokémon governor of Udon Prefecture has a treat that might be even tastier than his tail.

As Pokémon fans know, Slowpoke isn’t just one of the most friendly and laid-back Pocket Monsters, but also one of the most delicious. That might sound pretty morbid, but this is actually a case of a benign delicacy, as it’s specifically Slowpoke’s tail that’s supposed to taste good, and it can be broken off without pain to the creature and grows back.

There’s another connection between Slowpoke and food, though. In Japanese-language versions of Pokémon anime and video and card games, Slowpoke is called “Yadon,” which sounds a lot like “udon,” the wheat noodles loved across Japan but especially in Kagawa Prefecture. As a matter of fact, udon plays such a large role in Kagawa food culture that the place is sometimes referred to as “Udon Prefecture,” which led to a brief early-April renaming as “Yadon Prefecture” with Slowpoke introduced as its new governor. While the Pokémon holds no official political power, Slowpoke has continued to serve as a goodwill tourism ambassador for Kagawa, which brings us today’s taste-test of Yadon Furikake, or Slowpoke Powdered Rice Topping.

▼ Slowpoke poses proudly in front of the Seto Ohashi Bridge which connects Japan’s main island of Honshu with Shikoku, the island which Kagawa makes up the northeast corner of.

Furikake is a powdered rice condiment that comes in all sorts of different varieties, and Slowpoke furikake itself would have caught our eyes. This furikake grabs our attention in two different ways, though, because in addition to the Pokémon connection, its flavor is…udon broth?!?

▼ Udon broth flavor (うどんのダシ味) says the text inside the package’s Poké Ball graphic.

Yep, this is a powdered topping for rice that promises to taste like the liquid component of a bowl of noodles.

Looking at the bottle we’d pulled out of the box, we weren’t sure how they were going achieve that, but we dished up a bowl of rice and gave it a few generous shakes of Slowpoke Furikake.

Then we grabbed our chopsticks, took a bite, and…

…hold on, this stuff really does taste like udon broth! And we mean seriously so!

So how’d they pull this off? Well, udon broth is primarily a mixture of soy sauce and fish stock, and the ingredient list for Slowpoke Furikake includes both soy sauce and iriko, dried sardine, from Kagawa’s Ibuki Island.

Going in for a closer look at the ingredients we also spotted negi (green onion) and tenkasu (tempura flakes), both of which are popular, almost ever-present additions to udon broth, further contributing to resemblance in the flavor department. And just like how tenkasu starts crunchy but becomes softer the longer you leave it sitting in the broth, so too do the tempura flakes in the Slowpoke furikake become moister and softer as they soak up steam rising from the rice.

Maybe the biggest surprise, though, is that what the soy sauce and powdered fish stock we mentioned earlier are added to are dried mashed potato bits. A scoop of mashed potatoes plopped into a bowl of udon broth sounds like the sort of thing you’d find on the menu in a very non-authentic overseas Japanese restaurant, but as a furikake it works amazingly well. The Slowpoke furikake is full of actual flavor without going heavy on the saltiness, so much so that it almost felt strange that we were chewing on rice instead of noodles as our taste buds lit up.

▼ The furikake even comes with a little letter thanking you for your interest in udon, Kagawa, and/or Slowpoke.

We got our 300-mililiter (10.1-ounce) bottle of Slowpoke udon broth-flavor furikake for 648 yen (US$4.30), and in addition to being available in Kagawa Prefecture souvenir shops, it can be ordered online here.

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