Fujibambi Brown Sugar Donut Sticks Gift Box

Kumamoto has one sweet that everyone leaves with, and this is it.

Fujibambi’s Kokuto Donut Bou is a stick of fried dough glazed in Okinawan brown sugar, and it exists because a company in trouble was told to invent something that had never existed before.

Fujibambi started in Himeji in 1948 making karinto, the old-fashioned fried sugar sticks that Japanese confectionery has been turning out for centuries, and moved production to Kumamoto in 1960 because that was where karinto sold best.

Then the factory burned down.

In the aftermath, the man who would later run the company was in hospital with a broken leg when the founder handed him an assignment: make a sweet nobody has made before.

Japan was in the middle of an American donut boom at the time, and the answer he arrived at was to put the two together.

Karinto and donuts share most of their ingredients. Donuts are round, but there is no law saying they have to be.

And the factory was already full of brown sugar for the karinto line.

Kokuto Donut Bou launched in 1987 as a donut in the shape of a karinto stick, and went on to take honours at Japan’s national confectionery exposition.

What Fujibambi makes now is still built on the same three things: kokuto from Okinawa, the unrefined brown sugar that keeps the molasses in rather than stripping it out, 100% domestically grown wheat flour, and a vegetable oil developed in-house.

The result is a short, dense stick with a crisp outside and a soft, cake-like crumb, sweet but not sharply so — the molasses gives it a rounded, almost caramel depth that white sugar cannot reach.

Each stick is individually wrapped, which is what makes the boxed format work as a gift: it travels well, keeps at room temperature, and can be handed around one piece at a time.

Good with green tea, and very good with black coffee.

About this item
Item Name : Brown Sugar Donut Sticks Gift Box
Brand : Fujibambi
Item Form : Cake
Number of Items : 20, 40, 60 and 90 Counts (Box of 1)