DAY DAY COOK Self Heating Soybean Rice Bowl Review

I've had this Day Day Cook Taiwan Style Soybean Rice Bowl kicking around for a month or so, but haven't had the time to go and make it.  I almost said "instant" rice bowl, but then remembered that it takes 15 minutes to have it rehydrate the dehydrated rice, so it isn't exactly instant - not even the instant as in instant noodles which is usually three minutes in boiling water.  This product is marketed under the Day Day Cook name (possibly associated with the cooking media company DayDayCook in Hong Kong) and is manufactured by Xinghua Lianfa Food Co. Ltd in China.

There are all kinds of self-heating hot pots or various other dishes coming out of China these days, and they don't exactly come cheap either as they cost $7 to $12 Canadian to buy.  I've always wondered about the hot pots, but spicy / sour isn't usually my thing so I don't want to blow the money on something I'm not going to like. This Day Day Cook rice bowl was $7 or $8 and it came in a more mellow / savoury flavour so I splurged on this. 

The rice bowl uses a water activated heating element, much like a self-heating military meal or survival ration, but these types of products are pretty common in the Japanese, Chinese marketplace for commercial products too.  I've had a gourmet self-heating slice beef bento on a bullet train that used a similar type of steam heating but in a more easy to use fashion (basically you just pulled a string to mix some salt water with the heating element in a bowl).  The self-heating element of this is kind of prepared meal is a little gimmicky, but it definitely would be handy in certain situations where all you had was water but no way to heat your food.

The rice bowl has a pretty attractive cover picture which is a cardboard sleeve over the plastic bowl.  This helps to keep the bowl closed even though it is shrink wrapped.  The picture shows a nice savoury sauce with soy protein, green onions, and rice.  There is a pile of nutritional information printed on top along with the product name text indicating this is a tasty soy sauce type rice bowl.  I like the NO RULES printing all over the blue background.  Nice colour combos.

The rice bowl was fairly heavy, coming in a 202 grams and it has a typical one year shelf life, and like most products out of China, it has a production date, but no expiry.  The rice bowl provides 540 calories and only has 7 grams of fat. I kind of suspect the shelf life is longer than a year as the sauce is in a retort pouch and everything else is dehydrated or dried.

Ingredients listing, manufacturing information, and nutritional information on the right.

When I opened the package it had a number of pouches and included a plastic spork which is nice touch to provide an eating instrument. There is a fair bit of packaging here, something that is both neat, but overdone as a necessary requirement for this product to exist.

There is the outer black container and lid.  A white inner tray for your rice dish, a heating element, a large retort pouch of soy / soybean protein / mushroom sauce, a packet of dried carrot, a packet of dried green onions, a foil package of dehydrated white rice, and a spork.

This photo shows the bottom of the black container where the heating element is, with the white tray removed.

The packet of dehydrated rice next to the heating element which is covered with warnings to not touch with wet hands or to ingest, etc.

The sauce pouch and dehydrated vegetables.  The sauce contains water, soybean oil, shallots, king oyster mushrooms, vegetable meat (soybean protein), soy sauce, single crystal Rock sugar, shiitake mushroom,salt, MSG, yeast extract, spice, chili powder.

Cooking instructions.  Quite important as there are a number of steps.

Remove the heating element from the waterproof packaging and place at the bottom of the black container.

The preparations steps I did come in this order.

1. Empty the dried white rice into the white tray.  Put in the dried vegetables too.
2. Put in 10 mm of water to submerge the rice.  I actually heated the sauce too by pouring that on top of the rice too.
   
3. With the heating element ready, put in 210 ml of cold water to submerge the element.
4. Put the white tray back on top of the container.
5. Put the lid on.
6. The element took a few minutes to get started but then bubbled and boiled water for over 20 minutes.
7. The steam heats the water for the rice and gets it to rehydrate the rice better.  
8. I let it cook more thatn the recommended 15 minutes as no one wants crunchy rice.
   

The rice and sauce ready to be rehydrated / warmed up.  There are gaps in the tray to let steam out from underneath.

I put the lid back on to keep the heat in better.  Notice the vent hole in the middle.

The prepared dish with the rehydrated rice!  Actually looks pretty good.

The sauce mixed in with the rice.

The savoury sauce packet actually looked pretty good right out of the pouch with lots of little chunks of soy protein and mushroom mixed throughout.  After everything was warmed up the rice and sauce actually looked like a tasty combo.  One of the funny things about this dish was that it wasn't really all that aromatic.  I thought that rich looking sauce would have smelled pretty amazing but the aroma was actually a subdued soy mushroomy smell.  I then mixed the sauce into the rice well to flavour all the rice.  The finished dish tasted good with the expected soy sauce and mushroom flavours giving it a mild savoury sensation.  However, I think this dish could have benefited from some more sauce.  The rice also rehydrated really well and there wasn't a single crunchy grain.  I easily ate the whole thing and enjoyed the little chewy bits of mushroom and soy protein.

Closeup of the rice and mushroom/veggie protein.

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