Sun Hee Topokki Cheesy & Spicy

Tagged: Sun Hee, Cheese flavour, Sausage, Crispy salad

I like being a purveyor of instant meals beyond noodles. They're the most iconic, most abundant and the pioneers of an industry, sure, but variety is the seasoning packet of life.

These caught my eye in the shop because at a glance I thought these were snack bowls, not instant meals. In my mind, "rice cakes" immediately conjure the idea of the crispy agglomerated disks you get that are sometimes flavoured like Marmite. I guess that's on me, since these clearly say Korean rice cakes. I had the options of both a generic "hot" flavour, and a cheesy and spicy one. Of course I'm going to go with the one that sounds the most like a culinary abomination.

Opening up the cup revealed two sealed bags, one with the aforementioned cylindrical rice cakes, desiccated and with a desiccant sachet imploring you not to eat it, and the amusingly labelled cheese flavour packet.

E CHEESE PLUS sounds like something I would have installed on a 386 DOS computer as part of a utility suite.

The instructions say to empty all the contents (sans the desiccant, I hope) into the cup and fill it up with ambient temperature water up to the fill line, then to microwave for two minutes and stand with the lid on for one minute. I wonder if they wrote it this way assuming more people having these would have microwaves rather than electric kettles. Pouring boiling water instead would probably yield the same results, but I decided to follow their guide. On that note, I should mention how the "fill line", which seems to be vaguely moulded into the plastic cup, is not only incredibly faint to see, it also gets covered up by the dry contents with how much lower it is compared to the usual noodle pot.

Once prepared, the rice cakes have a strong visual resemblance to penne pasta, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I took a few bites before augmenting the dish with anything else, and the most prominent word I'd use to describe it is "chewy". Like, unbelievably chewy. Usually with instant noodles you at least get a bit of flavour out of the noodles beyond what the seasoning added is, but these were just... chewy. An empty vessel for the flavour powder. Not that that is necessary a bad thing, but it definitely makes it stand out less.

I rounded out a meal from this by adding some dried sausages courtesy of this weekend's dehydrator run (probably another thing that should be featured in this blog, we go through homemade jerky like data centres go through water), and some leftover pre-washed supermarket greens. The sauce was reasonably cheesy in a way that snacks an unhealthy shade of orange are, and the spiciness, well, it waved hi to me from across the street.

Meal Components

The Scientific Method

• Open up cup, take out packaged contents.
• Empty contents back into cup, make sure to fish out silica gel packet.
• Hunt for the fill line and pour water up to it.
• Microwave for 2 minutes.
• Stir, close lid and wait 1 minute.
• Add extraneous components.
• Enjoy!

I didn't hate this at all, but it's good that we're getting some slightly more disappointing entries to balance out the bottom end of the scientific ranking.