Otaru is a charming port city located on Hokkaido, which is the second largest island in Japan located on the northern most end of the country. It’s known for it’s glassworks, fresh seafood, sake distilleries, and winter lantern festival. Never heard of it? Don’t worry. I hadn’t either until I found out the Noordam would be paying a visit during it’s circumnavigation of Japan.
While I can’t say Otaru was on my radar, Hokkaido dairy products certainly were.
Hokkaido milk is considered the best of the best. It has a smooth vanilla flavor and natural creaminess that makes for epic ice cream, cheeses, and other various milk-based treats. In fact, I did a deep dive into what makes Hokkaido dairy exceptional, and you can read about it HERE!
Otaru isn’t chocked full of “must-see!” sites, but it does has a robust dessert scene featuring unique products made with Hokkaido dairy. Obviously a food crawl was in order..
LeTAO has been serving up French confectionaries made with top quality ingredients from Hokkaido since 1998. This humble Otaru-based bakery became so popular that it has expanded across the country, and even across the world with locations in Australia, the USA, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore.
There are six different LeTAOs in Otaru. One is dedicated to chocolates, one to cheese danishes, and one has a trendy courtyard cafe. They all have various packaged treats for sale, and most of them have the item I was keen to try: their double fromage cake.
Pro Tip: They all also give out free samples…
This isn’t just any cheesecake. It’s a multi-layered “fromage” extravaganza with a layer of sponge cake topped with a layer of baked cheesecake topped with a smooth mascarpone mousse. Sprinkled cake crumbs tie it all together. The baked cheesecake layer has a rich, sophisticated dairy flavor, and the no-bake mascarpone mousse is beautifully light with a silky as oppose to creamy texture. Each bite is surprisingly light, and I’ve never tasted a cheesecake like it.
I must admit, I prefer cheesecake that’s thick and creamy over light and fluffy. But I thoroughly enjoyed the double fromage cake from LeTAO, and it’s a can’t miss on any Otaru dessert crawl.
Cost: ¥465/$3.30USD.
Learn about the history of cheesecake HERE!
The Otaru dessert crawl continued with a stop at the Rokkatei Otaru Canal Store. Like LeTAO, Rokkatei has an impressive amount of packaged sweets for sale that people were piling into baskets. We headed upstairs to the cafe to snag a cream puff and “yukkikon cheese.”
Note that I actually meant to go next door to Kitatkaro, a spot with apparently amazing cream puffs. However, somewhere I went wrong and we ended up at Rokkatei instead.
The cream puff was light, fluffy, and filled to the brim with a just-thick-enough cream. Finding the right words to describe the cream is no easy task, and I’ve settled on “pure.” It had a natural, slightly sweet milk flavor that tasted like it came from happy cows. No additives. No chemicals. Just really darn good milk as the base.
While I enjoyed the cream puff, the yukkikon cheese was mind blowing. It consisted of two chocolate biscuits fills with baked cheesecake. The baked cheesecake was thick, rich, and creamy with a surprising slightly sweet, slightly sour flavor that was a total delight.
The cream puff was ¥122/$.86USD and the yukkikon cheese was ¥280/$1.97USD. Not to shabby if you ask me!
No Otaru dessert crawl is complete without Hokkaido soft serve. Hokkaido soft serve is much thicker and creamier than soft serve you’ll get elsewhere in the world. Good luck walking 5 feet without seeing someone noshing on a towering cone when wandering around Otaru! We pulled into Ryugetsu Co. to snag a couple. While I admittedly wasn’t wowed by the flavor, the texture was uniquely luxurious with a velvety quality.
Surely it wasn’t the best Hokkaido ice cream in Otaru, but it was certainly frugal. The serving size was massive for a very reasonable ¥350/$2.11USD.
Plus, it was under $5USD per person.
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