Kinjo Seika Neri Yokan — Pale Red Bean Jelly Bar, 130g

A pale, translucent block of sweetened bean paste with whole red beans set through it. You cut it into thin slices, the way you would quince paste, except it is a clean bean sweetness rather than fruit or caramel. Buy it if you want the milder-looking of our two red-bean bars; the dark one is the more obvious place to start.

On the pack: 煉ようかん (neri yokan). Yokan is the sweet itself: a block of sweetened bean paste set firm enough to slice; neri is the name for this agar-set style.

What you're getting

• You can see what is in it. The azuki (red beans) are left whole and suspended through a pale base, so they show up as dark flecks all the way along the bar, the same Hokkaido beans that go into the dark bar, where the dark paste hides how many there are.
• How it differs from the other two. Same maker, same 130 g, same beans. This one is built on white bean paste and the dark one on red, which changes the colour completely and the taste far less than the look suggests. The third bar swaps the beans for chestnut pieces.
• Agar, not gelatine. It sets with kanten, a jelly made from seaweed, which is what makes yokan firm enough to slice cleanly instead of wobbling.
• Slice it thin. It is a solid 130 g of sugar-set sweet, so cut a slice about the thickness of a coin, fold the wrapper back over the rest and come back to it.
• Allergens: none declared. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

Two things worth knowing before it arrives. If you go looking up what neri yokan means, you will read that it is the smooth, strained kind and that ogura is the one with whole beans. That is the usual convention across Japanese confectioners, and it is not how this maker uses it: both of its bars carry the same beans, and the paste is what changes. And the pale, faintly cloudy look is simply what a white-paste bar looks like, not a sign that anything is wrong with it. Like both 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.

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.