Simply Asia "sesame teriyaki"

Brand: Simply Asia
Flavour: sesame teriyaki
Format: cardboard box
Packets: three
Identifiables: loose noodles, sauce, sesame seeds
Sodium: 2.55 grams

(This is actually from 2008 December 06.)

Here's yet another field review, though this time it's not at a ramen restaurant but instead my parents' home in Louisiana. The story is simple; I was there to visit them, the subject of lunch came up, and Sarah – a friend of the family who lives with them – suggested these noodles that my father had purchased on sale. We had great fun reviewing them together. Thanks for the assist, Sarah!

The box helpfully lists the included packets as containing "Authentic Asian Noodles", "Simply Asia Sauce", and "Toasted Sesame Seed Topping". I always worry when any descriptor which sounds perfectly legitimate on its own has the word "topping" added to it. It's like pasteurised process cheese food. "Pasteurised" I can understand, "process" is innocuous enough, "cheese" should be hopefully obvious, but "food"? Do we really need reminding? Is it so distant from what we'd normally think of as food that we have to be told it is, in fact, edible? In that case, yes. Fortunately, inspection of the sesame seeds revealed that they were perfectly normal, and the the spurious label of "topping" was purely for the sake of adding a word.

This noodle, it turned out, was a cold style. We boiled the noodles in a pot according to the directions, rinsed them in a strainer under cold water, then returned them to the pot and added sauce. Only after portioning the resulting mass into two bowls did we add the sesame seed "topping". (In other words, don't let that sodium number frighten you; that's for three servings, and I only ate half that.) Consider this in the ratings; the only factor that makes this less a pain in the butt than the infamous five-packet Indomie "Mi goreng BBQ Chicken" is that it has only three packets and they're pinked appropriately, even if the sesame seeds did stick to the inside of their packet due to static electricity. Coutnering that is the fact that I absolutely had to get a strainer out. No quick-and-cheap straining of the noodles through chopsticks here.

How's the dish taste? Well, the noodle texture is a bit firm but slippery, meaning that eating with lacquered chopsticks can be a real challenge. The sauce is a bit too sweet for my taste, which makes me wonder if that's going to be a disappointing pattern for the Simply Asia brand. The flavour was reasonably decent aside from that, but definitely aimed more for a side dish than a main course, hence the low overall ranking.

Ah well. The visit was pleasant, regardless.

Numbers: packaging 3, preparation 1, heat 1, flavour 3, overall 2
Music: I, Monster - Neveroddoreven - Some Thing's Coming