Wendyl Wants To Know: Wonder noodles an instant joy

Giant Panda Instant Noodles Oriental Soy - $1.99 for 145g or one serve. Photo / Wendyl Nissen

Product not the cheapest but it has no MSG, no artificial anything and lots of natural tomato paste as flavouring

A few weeks ago, I thought I had done pretty well to find an instant noodle which didn't use artificial colour, even though it still used MSG, artificial flavour and a slightly dodgy oil preservative.

Then a reader thoughtfully sent me a picture of these. I found them at my local New World supermarket and was overjoyed to find no MSG, no artificial anything, and natural tomato paste as flavouring.

I'm appointing these as "wonder noodles" for providing an instant noodle without the nasties.

Ingredients

• Wheat flour — This is what you would expect in a noodle.

• Vegetable oil — Not sure what oil is used here.

• Salt — This product is reasonably high in salt at 361mg sodium per serve.

• Stabiliser (1420) — This is starch acetate esterified with acetic anhydride (1320) which is a long-winded name for a treated starch. It will be in here to keep the texture of the noodles.

• Rising agent (500) — This is baking soda.

• Emulsifier (450, 452) — These are disphosphates, or salts of phosphoric acid.

• Tomato paste (41%) — Good to see that flavouring sachet is made of nice, natural tomato paste.

• Onion — In here for flavour.

• Vegetable oil — Not sure what oil is used here.

• Soy (1 per cent) — I think this may be soy sauce, but at 1 per cent it's a very small amount.

• Sugar — This is a very low sugar product with just 1.1g per serving.

• Beef extract — A natural flavouring which is extracted from beef.

• Spices — Natural spices for flavour.

My recommendations

These are not the cheapest instant noodles on the market but they are certainly the healthiest I've been able to find. They are very low in sugar and fat, not ridiculously high in salt and are free from MSG, artificial colours and flavours and nasty preservatives.

And they taste great. Not too salty or sweet and quite a substantial meal with thicker noodles than you usually find in instant noodles and 594 kilojoules per packet. The range of four flavours that I could find all feature tomato paste as the main ingredient for flavouring. I'll definitely buy these, and eat them again.

Highlights

• No MSG.
• No artificial flavours or colours.
• Uses tomato paste as the flavour base.