Today I’m going to continue through my backlog of A-Sha noodles by reviewing and walking you the contents of this BT21 Galaxy Variety Noodle Box. I wasn’t thrilled with the Street Style Variety box for multiple reasons, but this one might go a little better because there are some really interesting noodles in this box.
Read more: Review: A-Sha BT21 Galaxy Variety Noodle BoxThis box costs $24.99 direct from A-Sha’s website, which does have frequent discounts and sales you can take advantage of to get the price even lower. You can also get just a box of the Universtar Noodles with the Spicy Galaxy Sauce for $12.49, which means you miss out on the BT21 Sauce by buying that version. These have also been spotted in retail stores if you’d rather check your local Burlington or other places that stock A-Sha noodles.
So there’s a little overlap between the sauces in this box and the ones in the Street Style box review, but as you can see in that review, A-Sha’s QA screwed the pooch and didn’t give me any of the noodles that come with BT21 Sauce, only the Dream Team Scallion Sauce (which wasn’t very good IMO).
As you can see above, the box comes with 4 packs each of the BT21 Sauce “Universtar” noodles and the Galaxy Spicy Sauce “Universtar” noodles. And yes, they didn’t screw up this time and I did actually get 4 of each. Since the individual packs are identical, you can only tell which sauce is which by looking at the color-coding on the back of each pack, as shown below:
Purple for BT21 and red for Galaxy Spicy Sauce. Pretty straightforward.
Nutritional info and ingredients for both packs below:
I’m going to start this review with the BT21 sauce since I didn’t get to try that one in the Street Style box.
A-Sha describes BT21 Sauce as a “carefully sourced” soybean and sesame oil sauce with a fiery kick. The name “BT21” actually comes from a brand of animated characters created by the K-pop group BTS – you can see them on the packaging photos above. So this is kind of a branded cross-promotion thing that I have no particular stake in; I like what little BTS music I’ve heard well enough, as much as I like any K-pop really, but I couldn’t tell you anything more about them. I’m just here for the noodles. Besides that carefully sourced soy and sesame, this sauce also contains black beans, onions, shallots, mushrooms, licorice, and fermented corn sauce. Despite the promise of a fiery kick, there is no mention of chili pepper in the ingredients, but everything else is really quite a combination. A bit of a different take on a black bean sauce if I’m understanding correctly. This should be interesting. And this one is also vegan.
Here’s what makes this box different from the BT21 Street Style Box – assuming you don’t get a mess-up like I did, which I am still salty about if you can’t tell. The noodles in this box are what A-Sha is calling their “Universtar Meteor Noodles,” also called “3D Noodles,” meaning they have a different ridged texture compared to the thin, flat Dandan noodles in the other box. Are these the same as their “Meteor Noodles”? No idea, but I’ll be reviewing Meteor Noodles soon and will have an answer for you then.
Also, there’s 1420mg of sodium in here. Still not too bad.
Inside, we’ve got noodles and a single sauce packet, and you can see the ridges in these noodles that make them unique. Here’s a close-up:
This is supposed to not only affect the texture a bit but will cling to the sauce in a different way. They kind of look like little I-beam steel girders in noodle form. We’ve also got the BT21 Sauce, which I described above. Here’s the final product:
Noodles:
Absolutely stellar. I did not love the Dandan style noodles at all – I felt they were far too thin and lacked the texture I usually love about air-dried Taiwanese noodles in general – but in this case, A-Sha delivers on a pretty unique texture. These are a bit thicker, they have an amazing chew, and they absolutely stick to the sauce better because of those ridges. I’m not exaggerating when I say these may be the best noodles I’ve ever had from A-Sha. Mind blown.
- 10/10
Spiciness:
Despite the official product description mentioning a “fiery kick,” I got absolutely no heat from this whatsoever. And indeed, there aren’t any chili ingredients listed on the package either. I am going to very cautiously score this above a 0 for spiciness but trust me when I say that if there is any spice in this, it is so imperceptible that I don’t think it counts.
- 0.5/10
Overall:
This is a lot of different flavors at once, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room with A-Sha sauces first: I’ve learned by now (and maybe you have too) that they’re all just a soy sauce base with x additional flavoring, where x is something like sesame oil or chili or vinegar, etc. In this case, x is additional umami earthiness and anise flavor. Beyond the initial hit of soy sauce, the earthiness of the beans, the umami of the mushroom, and the kind-of-bitter pungent bite of licorice is all very noticeable. I can’t say I’ve ever tasted this combination before. It’s not as weird as I’m making it sound; while I think this is the most complex sauce I’ve ever tasted from A-Sha, it really is like a cousin to a Chinese-style black bean sauce at the end of the day, just with more soy flavor and less thickness. You can hopefully see from the photo above that the consistency of this sauce is probably a little looser than you might expect, but it is still thicker than most of A-Sha’s offerings and has some little chunks in it too. Oddly enough, despite the promise of sesame oil, I get very little, if any, sesame flavor out of this; I think the other flavors overpowered it a bit. I’m really on the fence about how much I like this sauce. It’s certainly interesting (I keep using that word, I know) but I don’t know that it’s something I’d want regularly. If you like that sort of umami-anise flavor in other dishes, you’ll like this. Still, the noodles are absolutely killer and together with the sauce, it makes for a good base.
- 7/10
Alright, so now it’s time to move onto the other sauce from this box, Galaxy Spicy Sauce.
Nutritionally, this isn’t far off from the other pack, clocking in at 1400mg of sodium.
Once again, we’ve got the Universtar Noodles from above, and “Galaxy Spicy Sauce.” Once again, this is a vegan sauce, this time containing sugar, soybeans and soybean oil, yeast, sesame oil, sichuan peppercorn, and some dried vegetable extract like cabbage, carrot, onion, tomato, and garlic. That formula sounds awfully close to the sauce found in the A-Sha Momofuku Tingly Chili Noodles, which I thought was honestly pretty good; it was easily the least boring sauce of the original Momofuku lineup.
Finished product below:
Noodles:
Same as above. Stellar noodles that I will happily use as a base for bigger meals.
- 10/10
Spiciness:
There’s no chili pepper or pepper extract specifically listed in the ingredients, but there’s definitely something a little hot there besides the sichuan peppercorn. If you haven’t had it before, what sichuan peppercorn does is give your mouth and lips this tingly sensation, but it’s not extremely spicy on its own. Usually it’s combined with chili pepper for added heat, and I definitely get a hint of chili here. So yeah, this is tingly, and it’s hot, but it’s not super hot.
- 2.5/10
Overall:
The sichuan peppercorn aroma is unmistakable – a little floral, a little pungent. Also a good soy aroma. But like I talked about above, where A-Sha’s sauces are more or less soy plus x, the x here is peppercorn. This eats like a salty mala sauce, which is not a complaint. I like this one. It does give me strong vibes of the Momofuku Tingly Chili sauce like I expected, but leans into a slightly more savory direction in its execution. The sesame oil flavor here is also much more prevalent to me than in the BT21 sauce, and it works. Decent sauce and amazing noodles. This one’s going to get a lot more usage as a base/side-dish than the BT21 sauce is.
- 9/10
So that brings us to the end of these A-Sha BT21 Variety boxes, and I can safely say that the 2 flavors in the two boxes are worth your time if you like Taiwanese noodles and are willing to add some of your own toppings for a meal or make them as a side-dish. The Galaxy Spicy Sauce is my personal favorite here, but the BT21 sauce is still alright and definitely intriguing if you like trying unique flavor blends. Either way, the noodles are exceptional. Skip the Street Noodle BT21 box and buy this one if you like this style of dry noodle.
