Twisted Noodles Shrimp Ramen Review | Noodle Journey Episode 193

Today’s review is of one of the most poorly received instant ramen companies I’ve ever come across. This is Twisted Noodles Shrimp Ramen, in both cup and pack form. And given that a lot of people really seem to hate this brand, I might regret my life choices by the end of this review.

I don’t need to spend too long telling you what shrimp flavored ramen is, so let me just touch on a few other things before we get to the review. These are available in a lot of grocery stores across the USA for dirt cheap. I just found them at Big Lots for 49 cents for the cup and 29 cents for the pack. It also appears they’ve popped up in chains like Dollar Tree, Grocery Outlet, and HEB. These are produced by a company called Albany Farms, which is not based in Albany, New York, but Belle Fourche, South Dakota, and they say these noodles are made in the USA with their own locally grown flour with the goal of Twisted Noodles being the only 100% American-made ramen noodle. I think the ship has sailed on that already, but that’s what they’re claiming and I’m really not going to waste any more time on this review fact-checking.

The reason I’m reviewing the shrimp flavor first, because I do have the chicken flavor on standby, is that my buddy The Ramen Rater already did a pretty thorough beatdown of the chicken flavor and the beef flavor, so I figured I’d cover the shrimp flavor and maybe come back to the chicken cup and pack another time (EDIT: which I did here).

Twisted Noodles Shrimp Ramen Cup

The Verdict:

Let’s start with the cup. This has 1,200 mg of sodium in it which is pretty average, not terrible at all. Inside the cup we’ve got a block of very thick looking ramen noodles that are made from Albany Farms wheat. There’s a powdered soup base on top of them that contains salt, soy sauce, sugar, and shrimp powder, and underneath that is a really sad amount of dried veggies. There are three peas, five kernels of corn, and maybe ten pieces of carrot. There’s also supposed to be parsley in this, but I don’t see any sign of that.

Now you can steep this in boiling water or you can microwave it. And since a major complaint seems to be that these noodles are trash when you steep them, I’m going to try microwaving them and see what happens. After microwaving, the noodles were really not moving very well, they were super stiff. I’ve reviewed enough instant noodles by this point to know when they feel rehydrated and when they don’t, and these definitely did not feel rehydrated. I also got a weird fry oil aroma off of the whole thing. It doesn’t smell bad, but it doesn’t smell like any shrimp flavored ramen I’ve ever had.

Noodles:

These noodles are not as bad as I’ve been led to believe, but they’re also not at all good. In my opinion, they’re pretty far from rehydrated. They’re very stiff, they’re very chewy, very clumpy, and they’ve got a weird aftertaste almost like they’re stale. The freshness date on this cup is 7 months from now, so these shouldn’t be stale, but that’s how they taste, that’s how they feel in my mouth. Really not good noodles. I’m not sure that any additional microwaving would have helped with this.

• 2/10

Spiciness:

There’s nothing spicy in here.

• 0/10

Overall:

Let’s talk about the flavor of the broth, or rather the lack thereof. Basically tastes like salt and oil. That stale noodle flavor kind of carries across into the broth as a stale oil flavor, and aside from salt, I’m picking up a really strange hint of maybe something citrusy. I don’t know what it is, but it sure doesn’t taste like shrimp. It barely tastes like soy sauce. There’s just no appreciable flavor here to speak of. And you could say, “Well, what did you expect for 49 cents?” But for a company that is so focused on their website talking about how proud they are of their product, I would be embarrassed of this if I made this and sold it. The only thing I really can’t complain about is the rehydration of the vegetables; the corn, the peas, the carrots, they all came back fine, nice and tender. Not a lot of them of course, not enough to save this from a really low score, but when the corn and the peas are the highlight of your ramen cup, you done goofed. At least I’m only at 49 cents with this cup. I just think this is something you should completely skip even if you’re as curious about it as I was. Don’t waste your money, don’t encourage them.

• 1.5/10

Twisted Noodles Shrimp Ramen Pack

The Verdict:

All right, so after that showing I’m really not sure that I should continue on with this pack version, but it’s either that or just throw it in the trash right now. I kind of want to see if the noodles in the pack come out better by boiling them on the stovetop or if they’re just as bad as they are in the cup. I’m going to push through this for the sake of science, and for you if you care at this point.

There is a staggering 2560 mg of sodium in this bag. That’s 111% of your daily allowance. It is over twice the sodium content of the cup and the cup is 2.25 oz; this bag is only 3 oz, so they jammed a lot more salt into this than they did in the cup as a ratio of sodium to noodle volume.

Inside the pack we’ve got a block of noodles and a single seasoning packet containing from what I can tell the exact same ingredients as the cup, just a lot more salt. Oh but here’s the kicker: the packaging says this contains dried corn, dried peas, and dried carrots. Now I will concede that maybe this flat soup base contains dried carrots since they’re sliced thin, but there’s no way in hell that there are peas and corn in this (EDIT: there were no carrots either). So way to QA your packaging Twisted Noodles, it’s like you’re not even trying.

If you read the package instructions it tells you to boil the noodles for 3 minutes then add the seasoning and stir that for 1 minute so I did. When the noodles were cooking the amount of (for lack of a better word) discharge coming off of them and floating to the surface of the water was off-putting. It was just an insane amount of this like yellowish-brown foam (EDIT: I took photos of it in my Chicken Ramen review, if you’re morbidly curious). 190-plus reviews and I’ve never come across anything that looked as bad as this while it was boiling. As far as aromas, quite frankly once cooked it doesn’t smell like anything. Maybe the faintest whiff of soy sauce but that’s all.

Noodles:

I will say that the noodles came out better on the stovetop than they did in the cup. They’re still terrible. The saving grace of the stovetop is that since you have to stir it really vigorously right after it’s done cooking, it loosens these up so they’re not clumpy like they were in the cup version, but they still have that same oily aftertaste, that unpleasant chew. I’ll give them extra half a point over the cup version just because the stirring loosened them up a bit.

• 2.5/10

Spiciness:

Once again, there is no spice to this.

• 0/10

Overall:

Let’s talk about the flavor. There’s none. This tastes like salt water. I’m not getting anything else off of this, no shrimp, not even that little hint of citrusy ginger flavor that I was getting out of the cup. This is just unbelievably bland, flavorless, and I can’t even say, “Well at least the vegetables were good,” because there’s no damn vegetables in this. So what else can I say about this? I didn’t think it could get worse than the cup version but here we are.

• 1/10

Final Thoughts

Look, I appreciate what Twisted Noodles is trying to do with all their talk about being 100% American-made and having a zero carbon footprint, all the stuff on their website is great. But I can’t give these noodles a free pass because I like the company’s ethics. I think these are awful. Certainly in my current bottom 10 of all time. The pack version is worse than the cup version and I cannot recommend these at all unless you are dying to know how bad they really are, like an instant ramen equivalent of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. If you want to find out for yourself if these have a place in your diet then hey, at least they’re dirt cheap if you think you can improve upon them with additional toppings and seasonings. But even then I’d have a hard time recommending at least the pack version because the sodium amount in this is absolutely insane for something so bland and flavorless.