Saw this at T&T Market and bought a few to try. I wasn't familiar with the Hi brand, but there are more and more instant rice cups on the market these days. The product looks like the food part of it is produced in China along with the packaging, but the final assembly is done in Canada based on what was written on the side. The Chinese, English, and French text (Canada is bilingual English and French) was different as it the graphics and layout were obviously designed for the Canadian market. It think there were two flavours, but I only picked up the Scallop and Shitake Mushroom Sauce version to try as I was pretty sure I would like it more than the other one.
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3/4 view of the cup. Some nice deep colours and bright text highlights along with an attractive image of the rice in a spoon.
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Front view of the cup. You can see the nice big print telling you what you are buying and the photo of the tasty looking scallop and mushroom rice.
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The lid of the cup, with their brand logo right in the bullseye. The neatest thing about the red and white bullseye pattern is the way the name of the cup is laid out. Chinese is the most compact and in the center, then English, and finally French which tends to require the most letters (if you have ever done any translating - you know this!). So the balance in each ring for characters is kept.
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Ingredients and nutritional information. The tiny red print was actually quite hard to read without a magnifying glass. Yes, there is scallop extract in the sauce.
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Directions in English. 5 steps to prepare this rice. It is interesting that the product is packaged in Canada with components from China.
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Lifting the lid reveals three packets and a folded up spoon. Chinese cups often provide a spoon / fork. There was a packet of rice, dehydrated vegetables, and a wet sauce pouch.
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The rice and dehydrated vegetables poured into the cup. There was long grain rice, corn, and diced up green beans - something you don't usually see.
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The directions say to let the rice soak up the water for 8 minutes, I waited 10 as no one like crunchy rice. There was a fill line on the inside and the outside of the cup - a user friendly feature that you don't often see. Often it is just an embossed line on the inside.
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After everything was rehydrated, I mixed in the sauce pouch. It took a bit of doing with the provided spoon, which did hold up. The hardest part was to make sure I got the rice off the bottom corners to mix in with the sauce.
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The final scallop and shitake rice.
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A mild aroma of mushroom with a hint of a seafood could be smelled from the sauce. It reminded me a little of XO sauce. There was a good flavour profile to the sauce covered rice, but a larger sauce pouch would have been better and it was a little thin for the amount of rice provided. The flavour of the sauce was definitely mushroomy with a seafood/scallop undertone all combined with a mild to medium amount of spiciness. There were nice little bits of shitake mushroom scattered throughout that gave a nice bit of chew to the well re-hydrated long grain rice. The corn was sweet and the beans basically added a bit of a colour garnish. This was a good tasting cup of instant rice that could be even better with more sauce. I bought two of these and I've polished both off and I would buy this again if I saw it at the supermarket if I felt like having some rice cups around.
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Closeup of the rice, but I didn't check to make sure the shot wasn't blurry. Ooops.
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More cup noodle / instant ramen reviews and Japanese pop culture.
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