One of my coworkers recently returned from a trip to Guam and brought me quite an assortment of noodles cups & bowls that I’m going to be reviewing over the next little while, starting with this Interfresh Instant Rice Noodle Pho Tomyum Flavor. I’m starting with this particular flavor because it’s the most interesting to me – it’s a Japanese brand I’ve never reviewed before, and I’ve never seen something that touts itself as both pho and tom yum before, so this should be quite a ride. Read on for more info!
Read more: Review: Interfresh Instant Rice Noodle Pho Tomyum FlavorWhile I didn’t know the Interfresh brand right off the top of my head, a little research while writing this showed that I have actually seen some of their products before – one of the product lines they make is Yum Yum noodles, which must be made for global export since I have definitely seen those in my local Asian market before. The product line this flavor I’m reviewing belongs to is just called “Pho rice noodle bowl,” and there are two other products in the line, Chicken Flavor and Seafood Flavor. Now, based on that, my gut feeling about this flavor is that this isn’t really a fusion of pho and tom yum broths, but a tom yum broth that has pho-style rice noodles in it. If it wasn’t obvious, I write these intros ahead of the actual review portion, so by the time you get to the end of this post, we’ll both have learned the answer.
As I said up above, this came from a grocery store in Guam, but it’s possible it’s available in other regions since it appears to be meat-free and thus pretty easy to export. If this interests you, check out Asian markets where you live, otherwise plan a flight to Guam.
We have a fairly reasonable amount of sodium for a tom yum bowl here: 1080mg according to the import label.
Inside the bowl, which is a pretty sturdy plastic like I’ve never really encountered before, we’ve got a bundle of flat rice noodles made from rice, salt, and sugar. No wheat at all, so the noodles themselves appear to be gluten-free if that’s important to you. I can’t vouch for the gluten content of the other ingredients, which includes a powder packet and a seasoning oil, which altogether contain garlic, chili pepper, green onion, MSG, and various extracts and flavorings. This being a tom yum broth, those other flavorings are supposed to be things like lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, coriander, etc., but we’ll see for sure. This is a Thai soup made by a Japanese company in a facility in Vietnam, so authentic flavoring may be completely out the window! As I was assembling things, I noted that the powder packet had a very generic salty/umami odor, almost as if it was a basic flavoring packet from other products, and the seasoning oil had a strong concentration of citrus aroma. Based on the Google Lens translation of the ingredients, this appears to be vegan, but check for yourself if that matters to you.
Noodles:
These are pretty far from the best rice noodles I’ve had. The instructions were to steep these for three minutes, but even that feels like it was probably too long. They’re very soft, a little clumped together, with a borderline mushy chew. Not good – and unsurprisingly, the longer they sat, they worse they got.
- 3.5/10
Spiciness:
There’s a very light hint of chili in this, concentrated in the seasoning oil from what I could determine, but I found it barely perceptible when drinking the broth. If you’ve had other tom yum instant noodle varieties, you’ve already had spicier than this, in my opinion. Totally tolerable and mild.
- 1/10
Overall:
As I suspected when I wrote the introduction, this is essentially an attempt at a tom yum broth using pho-style rice noodles rather than a fusion of pho broth and tom yum broth. And I find the attempt at being a tom yum broth to be an abject failure. One of the things I frequently look out for when reviewing products that have added citrus flavor is how authentic that citrus flavor is. In this case, it smells less like lemongrass and more like Pledge, and also tastes like what I would assume Pledge tastes like (I’m not in the habit of drinking wood cleaner, so I couldn’t say for certain). Aside from the salty base and that light hint of chili I talked about above, that phony citrus flavor is all I could taste with this despite constant stirring. I found it to be overpowering and unpleasant, without any nuance or subtle undertones detected from the other ingredients. There were some scattered little green flakes floating around, contributing no additional texture or flavor that I could discern. It’s not completely inedible – I did stick it out to the bottom of the bowl for the sake of a thorough review in case I was missing something, and the flavor very marginally improved as some of the umami elements that had settled towards the bottom popped out – but this isn’t something I would ever recommend. Skip this in favor of Mama or one of the other more tried-and-true tom yum instant noodle makers.
- 2.5/10
