I stared at a box with Coffee Butter written on it in the cold basement of Life Supermarket in Oshiage, Tokyo, Japan. I stood there for a while, touching the box, examining and putting it back.
What is coffee butter? Should I get it? Does it mean we should get a loaf of bread as well? Why none else is getting it? Maybe Fafa can try first? What if it’s terrible? How much is it?
I checked the price and thought it was acceptable. So I grabbed it and ran back to Fafa to show him. He shook his head but put it into our basket. Little did he know that he would be the guinea pig to try the coffee butter.
My initial plan was to try it during the trip, as Australian Immigration has a strict dairy product rule. And I didn’t want them to throw both 300-yen coffee butter along with my working visa into the bin. But we didn’t try it then because we kept forgetting to buy bread on the way to the hotel, even though we always stopped for Choya and midnight snacks from the same store every night.
I swear I didn’t remember packing it, but when we reached home on January 2nd, there was the coffee butter ━ sandwiched between black sesame-flavoured pocky and a box of sakura tea.
The following day I spread the coffee butter onto a slice of store-bought white bread.
It tasted… okay?? I didn’t know what I expected from coffee butter, but that wasn’t it.
Aside from the coffee colour match, the flavour was pretty mellow. It took my brain a few seconds to taste the coffee on the butter, but it tasted so much better when I toasted the bread. The weirdest combination I dared to try was combining the coffee butter toast with chilli scrambled eggs. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. My favourite was still the coffee-butter toast with coffee on the side.
It took us almost three months to finish that one package of coffee butter; by then, I had developed a taste for it. So, the following year when we were in Japan, I tried to find it in the same supermarket’s freezing basement. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t find it.
I tried to find the coffee butter pack in a few more places from Lawson to Depachika ━ and also had no luck.
I wonder whether it was an unsuccessful new product launch and was no longer on the market? Or do the Japanese love it so much, and it has been sold out? or was it a part of Japanese food culture fad that comes and goes like those weird flavours of Kit Kats.
Lastly, I wonder if it’s truly geared more towards curious tourists, such as myself.
Now, tell me, how about you ━ would you give coffee butter a try?
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