Spotted this in the supermarket this morning and was curious. It lived down to expectations and then went lower.
The packaging is reasonably attractive, I suppose. Best not to open it.
First alarm went off when I read that it isn't even Vietnamese. It's Australian.
Removing the lid reveals yet another foil lid and the "cooking" instructions. Pouring some boiling water on some ingredients isn't what I call cooking.
Under the foil lid, I find the ingredients.
A bunch of dried rice noodles, a small pink bag of dried vegetable, a slightly larger orange bag containing what they call 'seasoning sauce" and a litttle red bag of chilli sauce. Oh, and a folding plastic fork - which was broken and unusable, not that I intended to use it. Who eats phở with a fork?
Applied water and waited precisely the instructed 3 minutes. On re-opening the container I found this horror.
It doesn't look like phở; it doesn't smell like phở; it certainly doesn't taste like phở. It isn't phở!
The rice noodles are mushy; the seasoning is unpleasantly aggressive and not sour (bur bitter) and the chilli sauce just tastes plain off. And there is zero actual prawn in it. Just a miniscule and undetectable amount of 'prawn powder', whatever that is.
Absolutely disgusting.
Ingredients as listed.