Calbee Kataage Potato Chips Kansai Dashi Shoyu — 63g

Thick-cut potato chips, fried one kettle at a time at a low temperature so they come out hard rather than crisp: the same chip as our other two Calbee bags, under a completely different seasoning. This one is dashi: bonito and kelp behind soy sauce, with a sweetness you will notice. If you have had the salted or the black pepper bag and want the one that tastes least like an Australian chip, this is it.

It is a regional bag. Calbee sells it across Kansai and three prefectures on the Japan Sea coast, nine in all, and nowhere else in Japan. It had one brief national run earlier this year, and that is already over. Even the weight tells you which kind of bag you are holding: Calbee's national flavours come in 65 g bags, its regional ones in 63 g.

On the pack: 堅あげポテト 関西だししょうゆ (kata-age poteto kansai dashi shoyu). Worth checking against the bag you had, because English sellers can't agree what to call it, Kataage, Kata-Age, Hard-Cut, Crispy, and three different Calbee products share the name "Kansai Dashi Shoyu". Ours is the thick-cut one, 63 g.

What you're getting

• What the dashi actually tastes like: bonito and kelp stock carried on soy sauce, with a definite sweetness. Savoury and deep rather than sharp. Not the delicate thing the name suggests, expect it stronger and sweeter than "Kansai dashi" sounds, though a minority still find it light.
• Hard, and deliberately so: sliced thick and fried slowly, so it breaks with a crack rather than a snap. The bite is why the flavour lasts: it takes a while to chew, and the dashi keeps coming.
• People bring it home from trips: in the reviews it turns up again and again as something someone found while they were in Kansai, and took back for someone else.
• Not vegetarian: the seasoning carries chicken and pork extract, tucked inside the kelp extract where you would never look, on top of the fish and shellfish. A potato chip gives you no reason to expect any of that, so it is worth saying plainly.
• Allergens: contains milk, wheat, soy, fish (bonito) and mollusc (scallop). Japan's chart has no category for fish or mollusc, so the bonito and scallop sit in the pack's ingredient list rather than its allergen box, check the ingredients, not the chart; ours is the fuller list.
• It travels badly: a bag of thick chips crushes. Worth knowing before you order several.

A few things worth knowing. "Kansai" is the region around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. Calbee's own English page lists the nine prefectures it sells this in and never says what Kansai is. Dashi is the bonito-and-kelp stock most Japanese cooking starts with; here it is a powder on a chip rather than a broth. Kataage just means hard-fried and thick-cut. And take it slowly: this is hard enough that Calbee puts an age guide on the bag and warns you to chew well.