Whoever thought up the slogan “once you pop, you can’t stop” never actually tried to eat an entire tube of Pringles. I can only make it about halfway through before the roof of my mouth and my lips are Sahara desert dry and my sore jaw feels like the morning after a MDMA binge.
That’s probably because Pringles aren’t actually potato chips. The real reason Pringles hold their shape and stack so well in a tube isn’t the tube itself, it’s the fact that they are only 42 percent potato. There is so little actual potato in these “potato chips” that the US government refused to allow them to use the name chips. (They’re called crisps in the United States, which created a whole new problem in the United Kingdom, where chips are crisps. No one said it was easy running a snack empire).
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So, when I recently saw some Pringles-flavored instant noodles in a supermarket here in Singapore, I could almost taste the cardboard nastiness in my mouth. The very thought of combining dried instant noodles with a fake-ass potato chip packed with more alien-sounding ingredients than actual potatoes sounded like a total starch overload.
Turns out I was totally wrong. That’s because the US brand’s recent collaboration with Japan’s Super Cup brand noodles is surprisingly tasty. There are two flavors I tried, sour cream and onion yakisoba and jalapeno, and both are pretty damn good.
The sour cream and onion noodles are meant to be eaten cooked, but dry, and doused in seasoning. The yakisoba tasted waaaay better than any Pringles I ever ate, and the seasoning wasn’t too salty or too MSG-laden. The jalapeno flavored noodles were soupy, smelled like jalapeno poppers, and the broth had plenty of fiery kick to it.
Neither of these are all that cheap—each packet costs $4.50 SGD, or $3.30 USD—and that may turn you off from trying them in the first place (because, what’s the point of instant noodles if they aren’t cheap?).
Super Cup sorta has the “weird instant noodle” game on lock, with past offerings including the mouth-watering (gyoza-flavored cup noodles anyone?) and the bizarre (vanilla-flavored seafood soup?).
Pringles as well, especially in Japan, has been going wild with flavors. Last last year, the crisp company rolled out some Thanksgiving flavors (turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie) in the US, and they now have “squid yakisoba” and “soy chicken ramen” flavors for this Super Cup collab. Thankfully, neither of those are available in Singapore yet, because when it comes to Pringles, apparently they make a better soup than a crisp.
