Western pear hardly ever shows up in desserts in Japan, but does it work as a Frappuccino flavor?
We’re pretty sure we flipped the calendar page over to September a week or so ago, but maybe we just imagined it? The weather in the Tokyo area is still hot and humid enough to feel like summer, and just as confusingly, we hadn’t yet gotten word of a new seasonal Starbucks Japan Frappuccino for fall yet.
Sure, Starbucks has a new sweet potato dessert drink, but it’s a latte, not a Frappuccino. Just as we thought that maybe we were going to go without an autumnal version of the chain’s blended ice beverage, though, Starbucks suddenly announced it would be bringing out a new Western Pear Caramel Frappuccino. The surprise reveal came just two days before the drink’s on-sale date, meaning we’d have almost no time to prepare, but the taste buds and stomach of SoraNews24’s resident Frappuccino taste-testing master K. Masami are always on stand-by alert, and so she headed to her local branch to try the new Frappuccino as soon as she could.
You might be wondering why Starbucks goes to the trouble of specifying this is a “Western pear” Frappuccino. In Japanese, the standard word for pear is nashi, but that refers to the Asian pear, which in some ways is closer to an apple in terms of texture and moisture. Because nashi are much more common than Western pears, both at Japanese supermarkets and as a dessert flavor, if you’re talking about a pear of the kind more often seen in the west, the word to use is younashi, you being a prefix that means “Western.”
Meanwhile, caramel gets equal billing with the fruit because the Western Pear Caramel Frappuccino has a layer of it at the bottom. Specifically, this is what’s called nama (“raw”) caramel in Japanese, a creamier, richer version of caramel (sort of like the relationship between Japan’s nama chocolate and regular chocolate).
Something unique about the Western Pear Caramel Frappuccino is that the drink’s base is milk with pear mixed into it, and so unlike many other Starbucks drinks, you can’t substitute different types of non-standard milk. There are also pieces of pear at the bottom down by the caramel, and drizzled over the whipped cream swirl is a pear sauce made with produce grown in Yamanashi Prefecture.
When the server handed Masami her 700-yen (US$4.70) drink, she took one look at it and figured that the Western Pear Caramel Frappuccino would lean heavily towards the caramel side of its flavor balance. There’s a generous amount of nama caramel at the base of the glass, much thicker than the layer of pear sauce that had collected at the top.
And yet, Masami’s taste buds reported back from her first sip speaking almost exclusively of pair. There were immediate sensations of refreshing fruit and cream with a clean finish, but no caramel sensation.
Giving the cup’s contents a few light stirs brought pieces of juicy pear to the surface, and switching to a spoon Masami got to enjoy their surprisingly crisp texture. It was all delicious, but the caramel notes had yet to really show up to this otherwise very enjoyable party.
Finally, though, after thoroughly stirring everything up, the caramel flavor arrived. Even then, it was lighter than Masami had imagined it would be, but this turned out to be perfect, since it worked as an accompaniment to the pear flavor, letting this rarer, more unique taste come to the front while backing it up with just the right touch of a comfortingly familiar dessert element.
So in the end, even though Starbucks didn’t give us much of a heads-up that this autumn Frappuccino was on its way, we’re very happy it’s here.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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