Biei Komugi Kobo Bakery [Mimi's World Tour]

Bakery: Biei Komugi Kobo Bakery (美瑛小麦工房)
Address: 2 Chome-6-26 Omachi, Biei, Kamikawa District, Hokkaido
Website: n/a 
Style: Japanese 
Price: $$ 

Biei's Komugi Kobo Bakery was perhaps the one big miss of the trip. Yes, this may be partly my fault as I made an ill-informed decision; however, the bakery really does not have anything sweet, so it's difficult to say whether it even deserves a review of its own. I paid for it though, so away we go!

Actually, the latter is not entirely true! I stayed at the guesthouse down the street and for breakfast each guest was given a bag of these butter rolls (2 pack, 230 yen in store) along with some coffee or tea served with Biei milk - of course! The butter rolls resembled croissants in shape, but they were soft, resembling more hot dog buns in texture. Just very buttery. These were quite good and, for me, they have to be the highlight of this bakery. The one thing that did bug me (as with some Japanese baked goods I've encountered throughout my travels) was that they used salted butter and, especially in the case of the butter brushed on top of the bun, it was really salty and it didn't quite match the type of baked good.

Checking out the bakery itself, I was a little disappointed that they have four items for sale, none of which is really sweet: loaves of bread, those aforementioned butter rolls, red bean buns that looked more like manju, and... this. (230 yen) Now, the one big mistake I made was going to the local product store next door and seeing all these local berries (blueberries and haskap berries) for sale. It got me all excited, so much so that I saw this and thought: local blueberries! No, I didn't even think of reading the sign, where to my current dismay, I see the character for "bean" right there.... *weeps* I mean, you can get sweet treats with beans. This was not sweet at all. Zero. And the beans weren't prepared in the least. They were just beans, not only on the top but embedded into the completely bland dough as well, so picking them out was almost impossible. Even if I did happen to love my black beans, this was so flavourless. Should have taken the red bean bun...

Rating: *1/2