Vifon Instant Rice Pancake Noodles Crab Flavour

Tagged: Seaweed, Seafood sticks, Seafood flavour

I'm gonna affectionately call this bowl "The Fishing Harbour". You'll see why.

Finally we get something more interesting looking out of the backlog, this is one of many oddball packets I bought a while ago to fuel my blog with. I've never heard of the brand and I've never had such wide and flat looking noodles before, so I was instantly excited when I pulled this one out blind.

At first glance I thought the included sachets were for flakes and flavouring powder as usual in other noodles, but actually one of them is for a seasoning oil that has little crispy bits in it (kinda like Lao Gan Ma, but this doesn't seem to be spicy) and the soup base sachet has both the powder and some dehydrated flakes in one. Also, the noodles come double-packaged in their own separate little plastic bag, I wonder why they couldn't just have it straight into the package like your standard noodle bricks. Very unusual indeed.

The instructions are straightforward, everything goes together into a bowl, add boiling water, then cover and wait. I'm at least glad of that. Nothing really to report at this stage other than my hunger.

Once I pulled back the cover from the bowl, a mist of steam and an enticing coastal waft are immediately presented to me. It reminded me of a trip while ago to a local fishing market, one which is massive and aimed at serving restaurants although they did have a small section us common folk could also shop at. The man serving us remarked how surprised he was at seemingly younger people happily shopping there as the ones he usually met turned their noses at the smell of fish. Having lived for a period of time in a fishing town myself, I felt right at home, and the initial smell of this bowl brought back that same comfort.

The rice pancake noodles are quite light and slippery compared to wheat ones, it took some doing to eat it with a fork as it kept wanting to slide off. I'm not sure I would've had more luck with different utensils. I didn't care much for the texture but the flavour was pretty good. That said, the flavour seemed to be mostly of the noodles themselves, and disappointingly not that much of crab at all. The broth had some vague, nondescript seafood-y taste to it, so it wasn't all bland, but definitely less than I expected. All in all it's not a bad noodle by itself but it definitely warrants additions.

And what better additions to this one than the tried and true seafood sticks (also known as imitation crab) and seaweed? I was prepared to make this bowl feel like I was drinking seawater fresh from the beach. The seaweed immediately overpowered the broth with a more salty flavour, which is why I always try these before putting anything else in. The seafood sticks tasted more like crab than anything else in the bowl. I also got a better taste of the flakes, which added pleasant onion-y and herb-y notes. Overall it feels like this is the right way to enjoy these noodles.

Meal Components

The Scientific Method

• Free the noodles and flavourings from their many plastic prisons.
• Drop everything into a bowl and add boiling water.
• Cover and wait.
• Once ready, take in the smell and reminisce about the availability of fresh seafood.
• Become slightly disillusioned with the meal in front of you and overcompensate with more sea-faring ingredients.
• Enjoy!

This isn't the best seafood noodles I've had but the novelty, to me, of rice pancake noodles made it pretty enjoyable and lightweight. It feels weird putting it this low on the ranking, I need to start finding worse stuff to pad the bottom of the list.