Nama chocolate: the soft squares, and why the recipe counts in bars

You had them in Japan, or somebody brought a box home: small dark squares, dusted in cocoa, kept in the fridge, soft enough to give way under your thumb. They were gone before anyone said what they were called. They were nama chocolate, 生チョコレート on the box.

Then you went looking for a nama choco recipe, and it asked for three bars of chocolate. Not 150 grams. Three bars. That isn't sloppy writing, it's how Japanese home recipes are written, and it's a clue to what the stuff is. Here's what nama chocolate actually is, how the people who make it write the method, and where to buy it in Australia if you would rather someone else did the work.

What nama chocolate actually is

It's ganache. The soft, dark, cream-and-chocolate centre you find inside a truffle, made in a tray and cut into squares instead of being rolled and coated. The shop that gave the style its name puts it exactly that way. Sils Maria, in Hiratsuka, an hour southwest of Tokyo, says a truffle is ganache with a shell around the outside, and that nama chocolate is the same soft interior with the shell deliberately left off.

That softness isn't a style choice, it's a requirement. In Japan a chocolate can't be sold as nama chocolate unless two things are true: at least a tenth of its weight is cream, and at least a tenth of its weight is water. Ordinary chocolate has almost no water in it. Put a tenth of the weight back as cream and it stops snapping and starts giving way under your thumb. ROYCE', the maker on Hokkaido, Japan's northern island, that most Australians have met, runs its own to roughly 17 or 18 per cent water.

The one it gets confused with is Meiji's Meltykiss, which is cocoa-dusted, soft, and sold in a winter box. It's a supermarket chocolate rather than a chocolatier's, and it doesn't meet the nama standard.

How Japan's chocolate makers write the recipe

Three of the big Japanese chocolate companies publish a nama chocolate recipe of their own: Meiji, Lotte and Morinaga. That matters, because it tells you what to buy. None asks for couverture or a cacao percentage. Each asks for its own supermarket eating bar.

And each one counts in bars. Meiji's calls for five bars of its milk chocolate, then puts 250 g in brackets after it. Lotte's asks for three bars of Ghana Milk, brackets 150 g. The bar is the unit a Japanese cook measures in, and the grams are the translation, not the other way round.

But the bar is not a fixed weight. Meiji's and Lotte's are 50 g each, which is where "three bars, 150 grams" comes from. Morinaga's recipe counts boxes of DARS instead, for a plain reason: it stopped making its 50 g bars, so it no longer has one to count. Read the brackets, not the bar.

The ratio is the other surprise. Ganache has a reputation for being equal parts chocolate and cream. Set the chocolate against the cream in each recipe and all three come out closer to two parts chocolate to one part cream. That is firmer and more chocolate-heavy than the word suggests, and it is what lets you cut it into squares and pick one up.

The method is short. Heat the cream to just under the boil, pour it over finely chopped chocolate, and leave it alone until the steam stops before you stir. Whisk it smooth, pour it into a lined tray, level it, and chill it until it sets. Turn it out, trim the edges with a warmed knife, cut, and dust cocoa over the top and the bottom through a tea strainer.

One detail worth copying. Meiji's recipe sets its tray in the freezer for an hour; Lotte and Morinaga use the fridge for the same hour. The freezer here is a setting step, not storage. Nama chocolate is a fresh-cream product, it lives in the fridge, and every one of those makers says so on the recipe itself, along with how long to give it.

Nama is a rule, not a translation

If you have looked this up, you have been told that nama means raw. That is the one sense it never carries here. Nothing in it is uncooked: the cream is heated and the chocolate is melted. The word "raw" is attached to it only because somebody once had to put an English word next to 生. Here that character is doing the job of the rule above: it tells a shopper the box holds something soft and chilled rather than something snappy.

The same character does a different job three doors down. On beer it means unpasteurised, and Japan's beer labelling code bars the word from any beer that has been heat-treated. On cream, 生クリーム, it means the cream holds nothing but milk fat. On caramel, 生キャラメル, it only describes a soft, creamy style: no labelling code covers caramel, so there is no rule to fail. Nama chocolate sits with the beer and the cream.

Where to get it in Australia

Everything below was checked in September 2026. Prices are a rough guide, not a quote.

• Melbourne

  Mamé Cocoa

  Makes nama chocolate here, in nine flavours from matcha and houjicha to yuzu, black sesame and Japanese whisky. Around thirty dollars a box, ordered online.

  mamecocoa.com

Japanese grocers carry the imported kind, in two forms. Ichiba Junction stocks a frozen nama chocolate cake, collection only because it can't survive a courier, with instructions to move it to the fridge the night before. The same shop carries a sakura-flavoured soft cream chocolate from Furuta on the ordinary shelf, for under ten dollars. Umall lists a plainer cocoa-dusted Japanese nama chocolate from Takaoka in the same bracket, though it has been out of stock lately.

The chilled ROYCE' box is the one with no ordinary route. ROYCE' does not count Australia among the countries it operates in, and it ships everything out of its Hokkaido factory refrigerated. Neither Ichiba Junction nor Umall carries it, and the listings that do turn up on Australian sites were already past the date printed on the box. If you want that particular box, somebody has to hand-carry it.

If you're making it, the bar is the easy part. Meiji's recipe names its own two bars, and we stock both: Meiji Milk Chocolate 50g for the standard version, and Meiji Black Chocolate 50g if you want it darker. The rest is cream and an hour.

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