Bourbon Roanne Gaufrette Wafer Cookies Vanilla Family Pack

A gaufrette is a waffle rolled thin.

The name comes from the French gaufre, and what distinguishes it from an ordinary wafer is the grid pressed into the surface by the iron — a fine honeycomb that you can see and feel before you bite.

Bourbon bakes its Roanne wafers this way, thin and pale gold, then sandwiches two of them around vanilla cream.

The texture is the reason the product exists: a clean saku snap on contact, then a soft collapse as the wafer dissolves.

Japanese packaging describes it as crisp then melting, and both halves of that are accurate.

The vanilla is the other half of the case.

Bourbon builds the cream on real vanilla beans rather than flavouring alone, along with sweetened condensed skimmed milk and whole milk powder, which gives it a warm dairy roundness instead of the thin, perfumed sweetness that cheap vanilla wafers tend toward.

It is rich without being heavy — the wafer is mostly air, so the cream does the work and then gets out of the way.

Vanilla sits in an unusual position in Japanese confectionery: it is treated as a proper flavour in its own right rather than as a default, and a product that names it on the front is expected to deliver.

This is the 16-piece family bag, and Bourbon has packed it as eight sealed packets of two.

That matters more than it sounds.

Gaufrette absorbs humidity faster than almost any other biscuit format, and Japanese summers are unkind to it — opening one packet at a time means the other fourteen stay crisp.

At 73 kcal a packet, it is also a conveniently portioned thing to keep in a desk drawer.

Coffee or black tea; the vanilla is sweet enough that unsweetened is the better choice.

About this item
Item Name : Roanne Vanilla Family Pack
Brand : Bourbon
Item Form : Wheat Cracker
Number of Items : 16 Counts (Pack of 1)