00:00:00 John Daub: Hello everybody, we're live here in Tokyo. This is the Only in Japan Go channel and today I thought I would do something different. This time looking at a Japanese food invention. Now the individually sliced processed cheeses in the United States were quite a big invention in the 1950s. I think they were invented in 1956 and that took a piece of cheese that had the ability to melt evenly in the oven and because cheese would separate but they found a way to do that in the United States in the 1950s. And when you bring that idea to Japan, yeah, they take the same thing but they do it with chocolate and I found a really unique invention. This is a food invention where you can roll the chocolate like you would cheese. I'm about to take you into the supermarket so let's go get a pack of it and we're gonna do some cooking today.

00:01:04 John Daub: Japanese cheese slice adventure. Okay. This is what I'm talking about. This is the Japanese cheese slices. It says here sliced nama chocolate (raw chocolate), five slices. It's about two dollars and fifty cents. Oh look! We also have cheese slices. Okay, let's get this one. Alright, so I'm gonna get this and I'll meet you in the kitchen. Strawberries, some fresh strawberries. I have some peanut butter. I also have some Hokkaido butter and I also bought this which is pretty cool. This is Philadelphia cream cheese. Now what they've done here is they've taken cheddar and in the single slice they put cream cheese in the middle of it. We're gonna open this up as a bonus. So got that on the side and I have some whipped cream. This is all Japanese stuff. So it's gonna be a lot of fun.

00:02:19 John Daub: Boom! Raw chocolate. So let's open this thing up and take a look and see what we got here. Alright. Oh on the back here, it also has directions. I got another pack here. Directions here. Take a look. It tells you that you can butter the bread, put on the chocolate cheese, put in the oven and then boom! You have something that's really delicious. So let's try that out. Yeah, this is gonna be interesting.

00:02:55 John Daub: Whoa! That is not normal looking cheese everybody. I think if I was going to look at this kind of cheese, I'd be like this does not look like it's any good. It looks like it has fungus or something on it with the cheese, but this is individually wrapped sliced chocolate. It is really... I've never bought this before in my life, but it's been around for a couple of years. It's just I don't know wrapping my head around the fact that this is actually chocolate and not cheese because I'm so used to working with cheese like this. Alright, let's try to unwrap this and then we're gonna make some stuff.

00:03:46 John Daub: They're doing construction next door, so I apologize for the drilling. Alright, here we go. So this cheese is actually chocolate. Wow. And the weird thing about it is that you can roll it. Actually, why don't I make a whipped cream roll and just try it like this?

00:04:38 John Daub: Oh, before I do that guys, there's so many things I want to show you. Check this out. This is Pasco bread. Alright, this is like the white bread that's processed, but it comes in a package like this and check it out. They have cut off the crust of all the bread. I thought this is pretty unique. I open it up to bread the one... it comes out just like this. It's really soft, fluffy and they cut the crust off. It's perfect square. It's pretty neat. Alright, so what I'm gonna do is melt one of these on top of this and then we're gonna try it. But first, I'm just curious to see how this tastes. So, I have this Japanese whipped cream here. This is Japanese whipped cream and what I'm going to do is just roll it up and try one of them just like a kid would do it.

00:05:40 John Daub: I'm gonna be honest with you. If I was like 5 years old, this is how it would be. Eat the chocolate so we're gonna eat the chocolate like we're five years old and then oh I'm doing it. I'm gonna just try it and see how this works. I'm just putting whipped cream. Alright I'm gonna do whipped cream with peanut butter and this is a European peanut butter I bought from Belgium I think this is pretty good stuff so I'm gonna try with the peanut butter. You can't do this with normal cheese you could only do this with like this kind of cheese. Alright here we go. This is weird this is just so weird. It's not cheese it's chocolate. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Okay now we're gonna put this whipped cream in the middle of it. Hold on a second. They put a little protector on here this is so weird. I'm sorry it's gonna be peanut chocolate this is like Reese's peanut butter cups with cream in the middle. Oh my gosh okay maybe that's too much. Alright now I'm gonna roll it up. This is crazy what am I doing you can't do this with normal chocolate. This is just a normal run-of-the-mill everyday slice of chocolate cheese from Bourbon. If you're joining us these are raw chocolate slices this is absolutely insane.

00:07:10 John Daub: So I've just basically rolled the chocolate in front of my camera just so you can see. Hot chocolate ones part of my cream and peanut butter and some chocolate and we're gonna try it out. I mean my expectations are pretty low which is good. Now five slices of these is about two dollars or $2.50 this is the Bourbon sliced nama chocolate. Alright, here we go. This is really weird. Okay, here we go. This is not bad. This is pretty good. It's got that slight peanut butter taste. It's not overpowering peanut butter taste. Because this is European peanut butter, so it tastes more like peanuts than the butter. But this is pretty incredible. The chocolate tastes like chocolate. And apparently, the way that they can make this chocolate rollable is that they add a little bit of gelatin into it. And a little bit of alcohol. And that gives it more palatability. Meaning that it can be rolled like this. Oh, wow. I'm going to save that for later because I don't want to ruin my appetite because we're going crazy with this stuff.

00:08:27 John Daub: Alright, let's check it out on the other side. Now, we're going to make a couple of sandwiches here just as an experiment. Now, I'm just going to do what the label says that I should do with this. If you look at the directions here, it says, just take a piece of bread, put it on there, put it in the toaster oven, toast it, and it should be really good. That's what it says. So, that's what I'm going to try to do right now. And we're going to try it like this. And then we're going to try a grilled chocolate sandwich. Like grilled cheese. Wow, this is weird, isn't it? I just can't wrap my head around it. This is chocolate, not cheese. This is crazy. Alright, all I'm going to do is just put it on a slice of every average day. This is an average everyday Japanese white bread with the crusts cut off. It fits perfectly. Look, of course it does in Japan. Look at that. Wow. Alright, we're going to put this in the toaster oven. This is bizarre. Plug this in. This is like another world. Okay, here we go. It's going into the oven. Alright, and while this is baking, we'll make some other stuff here.

00:10:20 John Daub: So what I'm going to do next is try to make a grilled chocolate sandwich. This is ridiculous. These are recipes for 12 year olds, okay? Because I think it's probably going to be a 12 year old who eats these sandwiches anyways. I don't think adults are going to eat this unless they secretly are putting it in their stash with a lot of other stuff. Here we go. So I've got these pieces of Hokkaido butter. Thank you, Eric. And thank you, Jim. I appreciate the super chats. I got this thing of Hokkaido butter. This cost me about $4 for that. And so I put it onto the bread already. And I'm going to make a grilled chocolate sandwich. In order to do that... Where's that chocolate slice? Okay. So I'm going to put in here some bananas. This is like going to be crazy. Oh my word. What am I doing? I never cook. It's weird chocolate making me cook. Thanks Photo Luke and Cheryl. Aloha. All right. Now we're going to get another slice of this bizarre Japanese chocolate and put it on there. We're putting this on top of the bananas. All right. No peanut butter this time. Do you think I should put some strawberries on there? What do you think? These are strawberries from Kumamoto. They smell so good. You know what? Let's put one strawberry in here just to see how it goes. Wash the strawberry. I'm going to cut the strawberry. They're doing construction next door so I apologize for the drilling. We're just going to put it on half of this. And then we're going to put it like this. And you know what? Let's go crazy. Let's put another slice on top of that. We're going to put another slice of chocolate on top of the strawberries. Are you ready for this? Boom. This is getting weird. And it's getting heavy. All right. That's done. I'm going to get a fry pan right now.

00:13:23 John Daub: The other one's done. And we're going to put this on the fry pan. We're going to put this on the fry pan and make some grilled chocolate sandwiches. But first... Wait. The insanity. It's done. Gimbal, go up. There we go. Here we go. Whoa. We got some bubble action going on here. This is pretty cool. Hot, hot, hot. Whoa. I don't know if this looks gross or good. I can't decide if this looks really delicious or really disgusting. I'm going to let it cool a little bit because I've burnt my mouth on takoyaki before in the past. On the other side, you can see that the bread was in there just for a couple of minutes, but the bread is sort of golden on there. But it's not overly burned. I didn't want to burn the chocolate. But it's amazing how quickly the chocolate melted and, you know, it smells like a brownie. I have to be perfectly honest with you. It smells exactly like a brownie would. It's disgustingly delicious, according to Dean, and I think that's a really good way to put it. Salty. I don't think that's the right way to put it, but it does smell really good, like a brownie. All right. Let's give this a try.

00:14:47 John Daub: And while I'm going to try this, I have a grilled chocolate sandwich cooking on the fry pan right here. So I got to keep my eye on that. All right. Here we go. This is melted, sliced chocolate on a piece of Japanese toast. It's weird. It's very weird. You know, I'm satisfied. It's exactly what I think you would think it would taste like. But you know, the great thing about this is that the chocolate is even. You know, if you try to cut the chocolate if you cut it yourself, it would melt unevenly all over it. If you had chocolate chips, it might melt evenly, but it would be too thick. This is just the right amount of chocolate for a piece of toast. And I think this is really ingenious. Look at that. It's beautiful. And it's disgustingly beautiful. That's the best way to put it. Not bad at all.

00:16:10 John Daub: All right. I got a spatula here. You can see the strawberry sticking out of it. So we have the Hokkaido butter on it. It's melting a little bit underneath it. And you can see the chocolate sticking out of there. And this, once again, for those who are joining us, this is the Bourbon sliced nama chocolate, which looks like cheese slices. It's bizarre. And I'm trying to do this in a couple of ways, just to see how you can eat this. I'm thinking like a five-year-old would eat this. I think that's the best way to approach this. Here's a close-up of the chocolate melted on a piece of Japanese bread. It's pretty, it's disgustingly beautiful. Okay, it's just starting to get there. And this is what it looks like the Bourbon sliced nama chocolate or sliced raw chocolate. And it does look good. I've never seen this in any other country. This is something I think that's definitely only in Japan. Here we go. We're gonna turn it. Oh look. That's weirdly cool. It was a good turn. Oh, yes. Look at the chocolate just melting. No, this is gonna be awesome. Oh, what an amazing choice. Look at that. The chocolate is just starting to melt. Oh, it's gonna overflow and hit the fry pan. All right, I turn the heat off. We're gonna do a controlled burn right now turn the heat off and we're gonna let it just sort of simmer down. I got to grab a plate because I have a feeling this is gonna be really hot. Keep watching that. Okay. All right. I got a plate here. I'm just gonna put on the cutting board. I think whoa. Look at this. I put a couple of Kumamoto strawberries in there. If I was gonna make this as a grilled cheese those strawberries would be a tomato. The chocolate would be cheese and the bananas would be like slices of onion or something. And now I believe we're pretty close to done here. Okay, these are sautéed strawberries. There's still a couple inside there though what a mess. Jennifer would do a better job with this I think. Whoa. Want you just to let this absorb for a second. Okay? This is not a very good grilled chocolate sandwich, but on the other hand, it's totally cool, because I've never seen anything like this. And if you see here the chocolate has sort of melted and then kind of hardened because of the grilling on the fry pan and that bite's gonna be probably the best. Oh my word this is insanity. I never thought that cooking with sliced chocolate could be so much fun and that's what this is here. Alright let's try this thing oh it's too hot I gotta wait for a second you know what just put it in here. This is called cheating that's not too bad.

00:19:55 John Daub: If I was gonna take a thumbnail this would be a disaster. Mmm well construction is getting closer. My whole apartment building is under construction this month. I'm moving to a new apartment next week so it's my last chance in this apartment. So we're gonna give this grilled chocolate sandwich a bite and it's gonna probably become a disaster because basically it looks like a disaster on this cutting board but you know what disasters are what make YouTube so much fun. If everything went perfectly that would be a disaster in itself so you can't have things go perfectly on YouTube. Alright here we go. Oh chocolate grilled cheese minus the cheese sandwich and the tomatoes which are now strawberries. Here we go this is good this is really good. Hey Kraft why didn't you think of this Kraft why did you let this Japanese company come and take your thunder and they started making these slices. I'm very disappointed in Kraft because this is really really good. I don't have to say anything I could just show you this and you know exactly what it is it's insanity.

00:22:26 John Daub: I hope you enjoyed that Japanese food inventions. I have to tell you something. The walls may be coming down on me and crashing all around but I got chocolate slices and that's all I need for a very happy happy residency here. Sorry about that. I am moving to a new apartment. Little channel update. Definitely subscribe and hit the like button right now if you enjoyed this kind of a live stream because I'm gonna do some more of these from the supermarket finding weird stuff and trying them live with you. But I'm gonna move into a new apartment. That means new opportunities, new things to introduce to you, new ways to see Japan and Tokyo. I'm moving more central. I've been living outside of the city center for 13 years in the same apartment and it's gonna be neat to be living closer to the center where they don't have construction.

00:23:26 John Daub: I also have in my apartment on the other side, you see these two boxes? We're gonna open these up tomorrow and inside these boxes is something so bizarre and so weird. It's going to change the way you see Japan. It's something that I ordered on Amazon and I guarantee you it's going to be an amazing episode. So I'm gonna do this tomorrow morning. Yeah, got it from Amazon Japan and I think you're gonna be surprised. It's one of those things that I always wanted to buy and I never bought it because like I said this is so stupid and at the same time, it's so perfect for the Only in Japan Go channel because I would never introduce this on a channel where I spend a lot of time. But with this channel in the live stream, we can unbox this very weird thing and have some fun with it. So definitely subscribe and hit the notifications. I'm going to be doing this tomorrow morning, which is evening New York time and yeah, that's all I have for you. I just wanted to have some chocolate, some rolled chocolate sandwiches with you. It doesn't look good, the aftermath, but the taste, oh baby, it was amazing. I still got one left and, you know, it's amazing what you can do with these things.

00:24:43 John Daub: Anybody want to see me eat, roll it in a banana? I have some banana left. Let me roll this slice into a banana, and then we can end this. Do they have these in your country? Leave me a comment below. Have you ever seen anything so weird like this before? I have never, ever seen anything like this before. Leave me a comment. The most creative comment will get pinned to the top. Check it out. You can't do this with normal chocolate. This is what makes it so awesome. Just check it out. Imagine if you have like a five-year-old kid that won't eat anything. They'll eat this. Oh, yeah. Check it out. Oh, my. Look at that. It's like a banana burrito, but it's made from chocolate. And it doesn't really melt in your hands. Look. That's pretty cool. I know this is not healthy, but it's not about health. It's about fun. There's no other way to talk about it. This is purely about having fun. All right. So this is the banana. This is the chocolate roll. We're going to try this. This is the final chocolate. I hope you enjoy. Wait. Should I add some cream on there? Okay. Hold on. Where did the cream go? Because everything is better when you put cream on it. Oh, yeah. So here we go. Pure insanity on a live stream. This is live. Why am I doing this? I'm satisfied. I am 100% satisfied right now. This was the weirdest and yet coolest food experience that I've had in a long time. And that's saying a lot because as you know, I've had some very weird food experiences.

00:26:32 John Daub: So, Bourbon, sliced nama chocolate, five slices for $2. I like you. I think you have a place on the shelf of every family, especially if they're kids, because it's just too much fun. And it makes cooking fun and opens up the possibility in the kitchen to do so many other things that you probably wouldn't have thought of with chocolate. But now you can because it's just flexible. It's pliable. And it's absolutely and 100% not healthy. Yeah. But it's not about that. It's about having the fun. There's the link if you want to see more from this company. They make my favorite chocolate Japanese cookies. And I dig them. I dig them a lot. There you go. Chocolate adventure from only in Japan. Hit the subscribe button. If you'd like to see more videos like this where we're trying stuff from the supermarket minus the drilling of the construction next door, leave me a comment. I'd like to hear from you. See everybody. Have a good day. Enjoy your chocolate. I sure am over here. And enjoy my chocolate. Yum yum. Mmm. Bye bye.