Kinjo Seika Ogura Yokan — Red Bean Jelly Bar, 130g

A dense, sliceable block of sweetened bean paste with whole red beans set through it. The nearest Australian thing is quince paste, the same firmness, the same slice-it-thin sweetness, except this tastes of red bean rather than of fruit or caramel, and it is eaten on its own rather than next to cheese. It sets with agar, a seaweed jelly, so there is no gelatine in it.

On the pack: 小倉ようかん (ogura yōkan). Yokan is the sweet itself; ogura is the style that leaves the beans whole instead of straining them smooth.

What you're getting

• Slice it. Don't bite it. It is 130 g of something very sweet and solid, and one bar is easily two or three sittings rather than one: cut a thin slice across it, fold the wrapper back over the rest, and come back to it later.
• Whole beans, not just paste. The azuki (red beans) are left in rather than strained out, and they are Hokkaido-grown, the pack says so on the front. You can see them through the wrapper before you open it, and you get them in the slice.
• Agar, not gelatine. It is set with kanten, a jelly made from seaweed, which is what makes yokan firm enough to slice cleanly instead of wobbling.
• The honest bit: it is sweeter than it looks. This is a sugar-set sweet and does not pretend otherwise, the sugar can carry further than the bean does. If you like your desserts restrained, cut the slice thinner than you think you need.
• How it differs from the other two. Same maker, same 130 g bar, three ways. This is the dark one. The pale bar has the same beans on a white bean paste base, which changes the colour far more than it changes the taste. The third has chestnut pieces instead. That is the whole choice.
• Allergens: none declared. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

Two things worth knowing before it arrives. It is a plain matte brown block and it is supposed to look like that: yokan has none of the colour of a Western jelly sweet, and that flatness is not the sign of a poor one. And 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 exactly what makes it a sensible first yokan rather than an expensive guess.

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.