Today we have an interesting concept for a ready to eat rice bowl from CheilJedang of Korea. I found this at an H-Mart in Burnaby BC last year. There were multiple flavours and I chose tofu bibimbap. "Bibim" just means mixed and "bap" means rice in Korean. A few of these in your cupboard would be okay for a light meal / snack, or for a bit of disaster preparedness as the rice doesn't even need hydration, but would obviously be better if it were warm. The bowls are attractively presented and I really didn't know what to expect inside, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the packaging of the contents.
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| Lid of the rice bowl. Plain, but elegant in design. The white rice is shown in a very designerish bowl and the accents are all in red with the rice being shown as the highlight. |
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| Three-quarters view of the rice bowl. The lid is a tough plastic wrap, with a high-quality cardboard bowl as the main body. |
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| The side of the bowl is in English and it clearly states it is a soybean paste bibimbap. A dressed up version of the contents with some greens for garnish is shown in an attractive picture on the side of the cup. You can tell it will be a little spicy as the sauce is red and there are some nice chunks of tofu shown. |
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| Cooking directions on the side of the bowl. The primary preparation method is to nuke the contents for two minutes. You can see there are two packages to microwave. |
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| Nutritional content for the bowl along with ingredients. There is plenty of fibre, protein, and very little fat. Looks really healthy! |
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| A clear view of the front side of the bowl showing the prepared contents of the bowl. Looks like a nice meal to try. |
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| I peeled back the lid of the bowl and found three components to the rice bowl. There is a plastic tray of pre-cooked rice, another plastic pouch containing the soybean paste, and a really cool looking folding spoon that is a real spoon when assembled. Nice! |
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| The cooking directions are repeated on the side of the sauce package. |
Preparation for this rice bowl was a snap. I peeled back a cornet of the pouch before heating to let steam out,
and also opened the tray of rice to the heat line to let steam out of
that. I put the sauce package and the tray of rice into the microwave and cooked it for a less than the two minutes as I have a pretty powerful microwave. Once it was cooked I scooped the rice into the bottom of the bowl then poured the soybean paste on top.
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| Soybean paste with little cubes of tofu on top of white rice. You get a good portion to go with the rice. |
The soybean paste had a good texture and wasn't too gooey or watery. It easily mixed with the rice and it smelled of spices and tofu. You can see the sauce has some red peppers and some other kinds of vegetables including mushroom in it. The rice was fresh tasting, smelled nice, and was fluffy. This dish tasted pretty good, but you have to like tofu as the taste of tofu was quite strong in this dish with a little bit of heat. The little cubes of tofu were firm and not jello like too. It made for a good meal of flavoured rice in the middle of the day. You can see that the spoon is full sized and I think I've seen spoons like this in some of the SE Asian MRE reviews on Youtube. This is a good product overall from the packaging down to the ingredients.
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