Mikawaya Nanairo Kaisen Zoroe Seafood Crackers Assortment

Nanairo means seven colours, and the name is doing what Japanese product names often do — describing a variety rather than a literal palette.

Seven different seafood crackers go into this bag, drawn from the range Mikawaya Seika has built over more than a century of making ebi senbei in Aichi.

Ebi Mangetsu, the pale full-moon shrimp disc, is in there. So is Ikabon, the squid cracker with its sweet soy glaze.

The rest are the company’s own variations on the same idea.

What holds the assortment together is the sea itself.

The ingredient list reads like an inventory of a Japanese coastal pantry: shrimp, dried Antarctic krill, squid, dried squid, niboshi sardines, dried wakame, aosa seaweed, black sesame, seafood extract, katsuobushi, kombu, shiitake, fish sauce, and a little chilli.

Soy sauce, mirin, fermented seasoning and rice vinegar sit behind all of it.

This is not one flavour repeated seven times but a spread across the savoury spectrum — sweet-glazed, salt-forward, deeply umami, faintly hot — and working through the bag is the point.

The crackers are light and brittle, and the bag is resealable, which matters for a product meant to be picked at rather than finished.

Mikawaya positions it for both afternoon snacking and drinking, and it works better with beer or sake than almost anything else in the company’s range.

One detail worth knowing: the niboshi sardines are coarsely ground whole rather than filleted, to keep their flavour intact, so the occasional hard fragment of bone or a tiny eye can appear.

Mikawaya says so on the package.

About this item
Item Name : Nanairo Kaisen Zoroe
Brand : Mikawaya Seika
Item Form : Starch Cracker
Number of Items : 125g (Pack of 1)