Senbei

Senbei (煎餅) is Japan’s savory rice cracker, made from uruchimai, ordinary non-glutinous rice, rather than the sticky mochigome rice used for arare and okaki. That rice choice is what gives senbei its flat, crunchy texture rather than the puffier bite of its glutinous-rice cousins. Senbei traces back to a wheat-based Chinese snack imported during the Tang dynasty, but the savory, rice-based cracker most people mean by the word today took shape during the Edo period, closely associated with the post town of Sōka on the Nikkō Kaidō highway, where it became a specialty sold to travelers. Soy sauce (shōyu) flavoring eventually overtook plain salt as the standard, and shōyu senbei remains the most common style sold today.