On the one hand, it's made in Malaysia and for Malaysian people, as evidenced by the text only in Bahasa Malaysia. And on the other
hand it's made by Maggi, a company with an international reputation. What's it like?
Terrible! By far the worst “instant dish” that I have ever had. The noodles were
acceptable, but the spice mix was mainly chili and tasted nothing like Tom Yam. And most of
these things have dried vegetables in them, but this one didn't. The chicken was something
that I added, so that doesn't count.
Now isn't that clever, hiding the instructions in a fold on the package? Presumably the
image designer never saw the packaging. But basically it translates to “add hot water to
the ingredients and wait 3 minutes”. That most certainly won't give the results in the
image, where at least raw beef and spring onions are included. But I know that from my
phở bò recipe.
What are they? The illustrations could be helpful, but they're difficult to recognize at
normal size. The green one proved to be dried vegetables, the colourless was the broth.
And the other two? The yellow one contained a clear astringent liquid, and the red one a
couple of drops of chili oil. OK, mix them all in, add some beef, spring onions red onion:
What have I learnt from the effort? Certainly that I should look further. I made it
exactly as the instructions specified, including 400 ml of water instead of my usual 300 ml.
But it didn't seem too much. Later it occurred to me that most of the additional 100 ml
would have been absorbed by the noodles, which I forgot to weigh.
