Kinjo Seika Kuri Yokan — Chestnut Jelly Bar, 130g

A sliceable block of sweetened bean paste with small pieces of chestnut set through it: you cut it into thin slices, the way you would quince paste. The chestnut is gentle: a background sweetness rather than a roasted-chestnut hit. So it suits you if you want the quietest of our three yokan bars, and not if you want something that tastes emphatically of chestnut.

On the pack: 栗ようかん (kuri yōkan). Kuri is chestnut; yokan is the sweet itself, a block of sweetened bean paste set with agar, a jelly made from seaweed.

What you're getting

• The honest bit first: the chestnut is subtle. The pieces are small, and you may well have to go looking for the flavour. It is a background note rather than the point of the bar. Buy it for a gentler, lighter yokan rather than for a chestnut dessert.
• How it differs from the other two. Same maker, same 130 g bar, three ways. The other two are both red-bean bars, one dark, one pale, and what separates them is the paste they are built on rather than the beans. This is the odd one out: chestnut pieces instead of whole beans, and a quieter flavour. They are easy to mix up on a shelf, and people do.
• Agar, not gelatine. Like the rest of the line it sets with kanten, a jelly made from seaweed, which is what lets you cut a clean slice instead of a wobble.
• Slice it thin. It is a solid 130 g of sugar-set sweet. A bar might be one sitting or three, start with a thin slice and find out which you are.
• Allergens: contains chestnut. Japan's chart has no chestnut category, so it sits in the pack's ingredient list rather than its allergen box. Australia's chart has no chestnut category either, so it cannot appear in an allergen box here. Check the ingredients, not the chart; ours is the fuller list.

Two things worth knowing before it arrives. It is a plain, understated-looking block rather than a bright one, and that is not the sign of a poor one. And like its siblings this is the everyday end of the category in Japan: the big unfussy bar off a supermarket shelf rather than something from a gift counter, which is what makes it a sensible way to find out whether you like yokan at all.

If you met something like this in Japan and never learned its name, our guide what was that Japanese sweet? names the whole family. Yokan is the one built to keep, which is why it travels, and why it is the one we can put on a shelf here.