Yamazaki Picola Cookie Mitsu-Imo Sweet Potato

This is the autumn Picola, and it is the only one you can identify by looking at it.

Yamazaki Biscuits rolls a purple cookie base with a yellow line spiralling through it, so each stick carries the colours of a sweet potato — skin and flesh — wound together.

The Japanese name calls it irodori, the play of colour, and it is unusual for a supermarket biscuit to make the appearance the headline.

Mitsu-imo, honey potato, is what Japanese shoppers call anno-imo, and Yamazaki Biscuits specifies Tanegashima as the source — the island off southern Kyushu where the variety was developed and still commands a premium.

Roasted whole, anno-imo turns almost custardy and runs to around 40 percent sugar, which is why the name stuck.

Here it goes into the cream that coats the inner wall of the hollow roll, and the company’s own claim is that the result eats like a satsumaimo sweets, one of the baked sweet-potato desserts Japanese patisseries fill their cases with from September.

The cookie itself is a crepe roll rather than the standard Picola base, light enough to collapse at once with a dry sakusaku crispness, which keeps the whole thing from turning heavy under a rich cream.

Ten sticks in two sealed packs of five, at 117 kcal a pack. Sweet potato is autumn in Japan the way pumpkin is autumn elsewhere, and this is Picola’s entry in that annual rotation. A seasonal edition.

About this item
Item Name : Picola Custard Irodori no Mitsu-Imo
Brand : Yamazaki Biscuits
Item Form : Cookie
Allergens: Wheat, egg, milk, soybean
Number of Items : 5 Counts X 2 Packs (Box of 1)