bomboeats

[bomboeats]

Hello everybody, didn’t think I would actually post a new review this soon since I haven’t bought any new snacks or food to try. However, yesterday I thought to myself, “Hey… wait, I bought this carbonara flavored toppoki but didn’t eat it.” So I rummaged around the tote bags and yes, there it was. I was particularly curious about this one since I first saw it at the Korean food stall—I love carbonara. It was another of my safe foods back when I lived in my apartment; I would make myself “fake carbonara” at least 1 or 2 times a week.

If there’s anything you need to know before trying this, it’s that you maybe want to boil the tteok (rice cake) separately for at least 1–2 minutes so it’s more chewy. You can later proceed to drain the water and follow the instructions (this is just my personal advice—if you want to follow the instructions to the letter, go ahead). There’s not much else I can add about this, other than the price (in my country, from a single Google search) can dangle between 8–10 USD. I got this for 10 USD, and it’s apparently cheaper in the global north and Asia—probably because of importation costs. So if you live around those lanes, it should be around 3–4 USD.

The relevant info: How to prepare and nutritional value.

The container contains two packs: one with the base sauce as a powder and a transparent one with the rice cakes and a preservative. Be careful not to eat the preservative, because I almost did. It’s also easy to miss—today when I was preparing it, I accidentally threw the preservative into the boiling water with the rice cake, so I hope I didn’t get some sort of poisoning from it.

Okay, so for my review: YPFoods Yopokki Carbonara Topokki definitely lives up to my expectations once again. YPFoods is probably one of my favorite instant food brands (expect lots of unpaid shilling from me in that aspect). There’s nothing wrong with the flavor—it does taste like carbonara sauce without the bacon (fake carbonara enjoyer here), and if you’re familiar with topokki, you’d know that most of the sauces are spicy—like REAL SPICY—or mild. But this one is not spicy at all, so if you don’t tolerate spice but want to try Korean rice cake, this could be your first go-to choice! Here's what it looked like after I prepared it:

Now, here’s the problematic part: the pricing. If you are from Argentina, I’d say try this as a luxury every now and then, since it’s technically a snack (actually, I'm sure you should eat it with something else like you would on a Korean BBQ, but I usually eat it on its own as a snack or before a light meal). You can get more fulfilling instant meals at that price—like, hell, you can get two of my favorite ramens for that price easily. If you are from any other part of the world and can afford a $3–4 snack, then yeah, go for it! Here in Argentina, imported Korean products are ridiculously overpriced since they’re all imported and not licensed in the country—also we are geologically on the other side of the world, so we get the maximum importation cost possible.

I was debating if I should implement a Bombo Stars rating system based on separate aspects of the food (flavor, texture, pricing, etc.), but nah—I think I’m gonna go for aggregated values instead, meaning that everything counts in the rating. Doing it otherwise would make it more complicated, especially if I start reviewing restaurant food. So, going back to rating: yes, I love the flavor, I love YPFoods’ products—but the importation prices are insane so that’s gonna cost it 1 star. Final verdict: 3 and a half bombo stars out of 5. (⭐⭐⭐½ )

Thank you for reading yet another one of my reviews. I haven't really worked on getting this blog properly formatted yet but I didn't have the time to do so, hope that can change by my next review. Peace out!

[bomboeats]

Okay, so this is my first food review. I'll make a one-time small intro to introduce the tone of my "reviews" to my future readers, so let's go. I'll try to be as insightful as possible since I'm a foody, but also I'm a picky eater. I like instant ramen since they are one of my safe foods, so you'll probably be hearing mostly positive things about them (though I have had ramens that I hated, and I will most likely re-subject myself to have them for the sake of this blog).

Okay, intro over. Let's go take a look at what I had tonight: Shin Ramyun Toomba Spicy and Creamy. And for my personal touch, I ended up adding a whole chorizo. For this time, I am not gonna research about this brand or its popularity since I'm tired and I just want to judge based on the taste and my first impression. The only thing I knew about this ramen prior to purchasing it is that apparently it's fairly popular, but since my access to social media is limited (and I don't wanna bother to fact-check right now), I'll just choose to believe it this time.

For the relevant info section:

The price range (according to a single Google search) was around 4 to 7 dollars. I paid around 6-ish dollars in my currency for this ramen.

Cooking instructions and nutritional information:

And the main course, the review:

So, I'm gonna start off saying I personally don't like cheese-flavored ramens. In fact, I can confidently say that Maruchan Cheddar Cheese is one of the worst instant ramens I ever had in my life. However, Shin Ramyun was really set on changing my opinion on cheese instant ramens, and I can say that… no, it didn't. But here comes the nice surprise: when I saw that cheese drawing on the packaging, I just had the bad vibe that it might be one of those evil cheese-flavored ramens, but I felt instant relief when I found out that cheese was just an ingredient, and it's meant to give the ramen a creamy consistency rather than be a huge part of the flavor—and it did that just fine. The packaging comes with the noodles, a small package with the soup base (instead of liquid or powder it has a thick consistency, similar to marmalade), and another with grated Parmesan cheese.

The instructions tell you to cook the noodles first in around 600ml of water, drain everything but "8 spoons" (you'll start noticing this annoying trend amongst Korean ramen soon), add soup and grated cheese and mix. Now for my little rant of this review, I don't know what an "8 spoons" measure is because maybe Koreans have different spoons than I do (yes, they do. I've been to a Korean BBQ where I was given a Korean spoon), and whenever I see this on instructions, I just wish I was given another universal measurement instead, but whatever. So, I did that. The aroma after I added the soup base and grated cheese and mixed it was really delicious. I sliced a whole leftover chorizo from yesterday's asado and slightly microwaved it since it was in the fridge and I was scared it wasn't going to properly heat up when I added it to the soup. Note to self: it should have been only half of that chorizo—they're too big and I ended up only eating 3/4 of it. Here's what it looked like after I finished preparing it:

My final verdict is that: It's good and I liked it. It's affordable, it's simple, easy to prepare, and I like creamy soup. I liked the texture and the chorizo was a good touch that really blended perfectly with the spiciness of the soup. I wanna try it on its own or with an egg next to see if my opinion varies, but I hardly think it will. If you're scared of spicy food, fear not—this one is quite mild despite having "spicy" in its name. I haven't decided how to rate food for this blog—do I give bombos? With a max rating of 5 bombos? I'd give it 4 bombos. It's good but not groundbreaking, and I will definitely be buying more.

That's all for my first review! Hope you like it. I'm gonna put more thought into the formatting of my reviews next time, and I'll be updating my pinned and actually make a proper bio soon. I'm tired now and I'm going to sleep, so this will have to do. Follow for more bombo reviews.

[bomboeats]

Hi. This is bombo and I will make a more elaborated pinned soon. everything is a wip right now. I wanted to just write my first review before going to bed.