Texture Tasting Set

Ask three Noda shops to bake a soy sauce cracker and you get three different things. Not different flavours — different resistance under the teeth. The hard-baked one from Hiraiya is the extreme: dense, slow, and best broken apart rather than bitten whole. Okawaya's sugar-glazed cracker sits at the other end, light enough to shatter. Fujii Honten's stands between them, the texture most Japanese people picture when they hear the word senbei. Eat them in that order and the differences become obvious. This is the set for anyone who wants to understand what varies between makers, rather than simply taste one.