I already filmed a video review of the Twisted Noodles Shrimp Cup and Pack, and quite frankly, I thought both iterations were among the worst noodles I’ve ever had. So since I still had the Chicken flavors sitting around, in the interest of being thorough, I decided to review them in this form. In other words, I’m not wasting my precious time filming and editing another video about Twisted Noodles when I could be filming and editing something I actually care about instead. So this written review will have to do. Buckle up!
Read more: Review: Twisted Noodles Chicken Ramen – Cup & Pack VersionsI talked about this in the video, but these are made by a company called Albany Farms in South Dakota using their own locally-grown flour. But don’t let that fool you into thinking these are going to be some unexpected artisanal treat, because these may be the most hated instant noodles on the Internet. I went into the Shrimp Flavor review with an open mind, but I ended up agreeing with most other reviewers in thinking the noodles are bad (and weird) and the “shrimp” broths are flavorless salt bombs. Am I expecting these chicken flavors to be any different? Nope, not really.
If you must purchase these for yourself, I myself found these at my local Big Lots before it closed, but you can find these in a few grocery stores around the USA. The cup was $.49 and the pack was $.29, and the low price is about the only kind thing I can say about this brand.
Typing this all out is already taking far more of my time than these noodles deserve, so here’s the cup review first.
1200mg of sodium in this average-sized cup.
Inside, we’ve got a block of those weird chewy noodles, a barely-visible broth powder, and a sad assortment of veggies. The broth contains no real chicken, opting instead for an artificial chicken powder, plus the usual combo of salt, sugar, MSG, and unspecified “spices.” The vegetables are peas, carrots, green onions, and three (!) kernels of corn. I guess the most subsidized crop in the country is somehow scarce at the ol’ Twisted Noodles manufacturing facility. And yes, those little pale white balls you see are supposed to be peas.
Here’s what it looks like after cooking:
Noodles:
I opted for the microwave cooking method, and they came out the same as with the Shrimp cup. Strangely chewy with a feeling of them being woefully underdone, along with an off-putting buttery oily aftertaste. I can choke these down if I try hard enough, but I don’t really want to.
- 2/10
Spiciness:
Nothing spicy in this.
- 0/10
Overall:
I say this with faint praise: I think this is better than the Shrimp flavor. Don’t mistake that for me saying it’s good, because it’s not. But it is certainly more edible than its predecessor. The chicken broth doesn’t hit the right savory chicken notes that most real and many artificially-flavored chicken broths hit. It instead pushes forward with a very salty, oniony flavor to cover up the lack of chicken flavor. Even so, I wouldn’t have found the broth overly offensive were it not combined with these noodles. The chewiness and aftertaste from the noodles is distracting, and so what should be a safe if not mediocre broth execution gets taken down a few pegs. On the (slightly) plus side, the broth consistency is alright, a little more thick and rich than I expected, and the veggies hydrated well despite the sickly pale color on those peas. This would be a completely middle-of-the-road 5-out-of-10 chicken cup were it not for the noodles.
- 3/10
Moving on…
Now onto the pack version. With the Shrimp version, the noodles came out marginally better in the pack as compared to the cup, but the broth was way worse. That will probably be the case here, but we’ll see.
The sodium content in this pack is astounding. 2560mg. 111% of your daily allowance in this normal-sized pack of noodles. Insanity.
Check out those ingredients there. Looks like a bad copy-and-paste from something else, maybe an older iteration of this product perhaps. Either way, there’s no dried peas, corn, or carrots in this. It’s just a block of noodles and a soup base with artificial chicken flavoring and a shitload of salt.
If you watched the Shrimp review, I mentioned that when the pack noodles were boiling, there was an incredibly disgusting-looking discharge in the water and I wished I had had the presence of mind to take a video or picture of it. Well, this time around I was prepared. Feast your eyes on this atrocity:
That is a pool of brown oily discharge on top of the noodles there, and no, it’s not from the broth powder because the broth doesn’t go in until after the noodles boil. Absolutely stomach-churning.
Here’s the final result:
I’m not sure why there’s such a massive delta between the pack broth and the cup broth, but this is not an appealing-looking broth. Onto the scores.
Noodles:
Just like the other pack I reviewed, the pack noodles come out slightly better on the stovetop than the cup noodles do in the microwave. That’s not really a compliment though, because these noodles are still rough, overly chewy, have the same weird aftertaste, and that disgusting discharge of oily residue while they cook just looks awful.
- 2.5/10
Spiciness:
No spice here.
- 0/10
Overall:
As this review goes on, I’m running out of synonyms for “disgusting,” so I’ll keep this brief and simple: I find the broth disgusting. Even if I excuse the questionable noodle texture and flavor, the end result here is something that tastes like fried salt water. It’s so salty and oily that, for me, any hint of chicken flavor is obliterated. At least the “shrimp” flavor had the decency to hide a smidge of ginger and soy flavor behind the insane amount of salt and oil. This doesn’t even have that going for it. I don’t know how a manufacturer can screw up something as simple as chicken broth, but here we are. We have a perfect trifecta here of unhealthy sodium levels, bad noodle texture, and bad broth flavor. I wouldn’t recommend this to my worst enemy.
- 0/10
Special shout out to Mike’s Mighty Good Craft Ramen: your Chicken Cup is no longer the worst chicken ramen I’ve ever eaten! You may be spared from my next Bottom Ten list.
