Japan is a no-brainer when it comes to having amazing food and Hokkaido is no different. Here’s my countdown of the best food to eat in Japan’s northern most island!
#8 Beer
With Sapporo being in Hokkaido, of course, we had to have Sapporo beer! Hokkaido summers are warm and humid so nothing beats a light, crispy, hoppy beer served ice cold in a frosty mug. Check out the Sapporo Beer Festival at Odori Park between July and August to try out different Japanese beers!
Next up– Soft serve ice cream– or soft cream as they call it– can be found everywhere in Hokkaido so a few items on this list are the best flavors I’ve had.
#7 Rainbow Soft Serve
It’s a seven-layered ice cream with grape, strawberry, melon, matcha, vanilla, chocolate, and lavender. And you can tell they put thought into which flavors are next to each other because they pair really well together as you eat your way down. Yummm! You can find this kind of ice cream at Otaru, a harbor city that’s a 30-minute drive from Sapporo.
#6 Lavender Soft Serve
I’ve had a few lavender flavored ice creams but none like the one I had in Hokkaido. It had the perfect balance of vanilla and lavender swirled into a creamy soft serve inside a crunchy waffle cone. It was so good! This lavender ice cream was made fresh at Farm Tomita.
#5 Melon Soft Serve
There are different variations of melon desserts at Tomita Melon House and my favorite was the melon soft serve. It’s milky, sweet, with a flavor that you’d think was artificial because the melon flavor was so strong. Nope. You’re wrong. Their melons actually taste do like that! Which brings us to the next item on the list–
#4 Fresh Melon
I’ve heard of Yubari melons before and found out Yubari is a town where the famous melons are grown. Now I know why these melons are so iconic because they are so fresh, so juicy and so sweet they taste like melon candy! So now I know that melon Hi-Chews aren’t an exaggerated melon flavor because their melons taste just like it!
#3 Miso Ramen
Not quite a summery dish, but it’s never too hot to eat it! There’s ramen all over Japan and Hokkaido is known for having miso in its broth. And this one here was the best miso ramen I’ve ever had. The broth was rich but not too heavy. The noodles were toothsome and the meat was buttery. Everything else from the egg, to the bamboo shoot, was amazing. You can find miso ramen everywhere but you can get it best at a ramen street in Sapporo called Ganso Sapporo Ramen Street.
#2 Uni
Uni is a sea urchin. It’s a little hard to describe the umami flavor it has but it tastes like an ocean bursting in your mouth. It’s not fishy but it’s kind of nutty. But it’s creamy, soft, and sweet, almost like a custard. Some of the best sea urchins in the world are actually caught in Hokkaido. So if you’ve never had uni before, Hokkaido is the perfect place to eat it for the first time!
#1 Raw White Corn
The simplest of them all, raw white corn. I know that sounds weird but the corn is so good, it doesn’t need to be cooked. Like that’s how good it is. It’s juicy, crunchy, milky, and sweet. And it really shows the craft and quality Japan puts into their produce.
And that’s the list! I hope this inspires you to travel to Hokkaido because the beer alone inspired me to travel there. I had no idea there was all this amazing food which was even more reason to go! I also had so much fun creating this video with a voice over! I just bought a microphone so that the quality of the audio is much better than my past videos. Yay for audio!
Stay tuned for my next post, “The Perfect 3-Day Itinerary For A Fun & Relaxing Summer in Hokkaido!”
Talk to you soon!
Jojo ?
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