the ramen blog & other goodies!

The wife is away, so let there be ramen! It seems like I can’t go wrong with instant tonkotsu ramen, so I was eager to try this cup ramen. The ramen comes with a few bits of seaweed, a sprinkling of sesame seeds, plenty of green onions, and a few pieces of pickled ginger to balance out the flavor. Since it’s a tonkotsu ramen, it has the typical thin, hard noodles that are nice and chewy. The noodles held the thick broth well but were mostly adequate. The soup smelled great! Unfortunately, it was a bit of a letdown. The tonkotsu broth starts off with a rich, thick flavor. After a few more slurps, though, it becomes a bit one-dimensional, and very MSG-y. There isn’t much of a full-bodied porkiness to the soup, and after a while, the MSG starts to beat mercilessly on your taste buds. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but you’ll probably be really thirsty afterwards. There are much better tonkotsu bowl/cup ramen out there, and the small portion doesn’t help either, unless you’re just looking for a light snack. This cup ramen gets a decent 6.

Have you read our review of Cup Noodles Souper Meal Beef Minestrone? If you have, there’s not much more to add. Like the Beef Flavor Minestrone version of the Souper Meal, this shrimp (with tomato and garlic flavor) is basically an over-sized Cup Noodles. The big difference between this flavor and the beef flavor is that the soup on the shrimp flavor tastes more like a mild chicken soup than beef stock. There’s the requisite peas, corn, little carrot pieces, and I think I counted 2 miniature shrimp. There’s not much to make this particular flavor stand out from the other Cup Noodles varieties, and there’s disappointingly little shrimp, tomato, nor garlic flavor.

It’s Cup Noodles. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It gets a 6.

This spicy miso-based ramen comes with your basic green onions and sesame seeds and that’s about it. It’s got a pretty generic spicy soup broth that reminds me a bit of Korean ramyun, but that’s about it. The noodles are hard (cook it for an extra minute or 2 because 3 minutes is not enough and have a taste I can only describe as “instant noodle-like,” and that’s about it. And that’s about it for my review! Daikoku chigekara ramen gets a mediocre 5.

The lovely and gourmet-looking packaging lured me in. Wow! Deluxe noodles, exquisite shoyu…even the salt is special! How could I possibly pass this up! There’re special ingredients galore: large chunks of lightly grilled onions, miniature shrimp (yes! shrimp!), shiitake mushrooms! Visions of instant ramen nirvana floated through my head…

I slowly poured the boiling water in excitement, being extra careful to fill the bowl exactly to the indented waterline. I impatiently counted out exactly 180 seconds (3 minutes for those of you patient enough to count in minutes, not seconds)…
(yes, I’m actually going to make you click on “more” to read the rest of this review, because that’s the kind of person I am!) (more…)

Wow! The first thing you’ll notice when you open the lid is how many packets of goodies there are. It was almost like a magic trick of never-ending flavor packets. There are FIVE packets of ingredients: there’s the obligatory soup powder (aka MSG), the liquid soup base, a packet of fresh ginger, one for onions, and finally, a packet of toppings. Toppings include very ordinary sesame seeds, somewhat special judas ear (fungus!), and a slice of pork.

The skinny tonkotsu noodles were just about perfect for instant ramen: chewy and flavorful. It soaked up the soup nicely and retained a rich pork flavor. The skimpy (sesame seeds, fungus, and ginger?! that’s it?!) toppings worked well together…well…except that I absolutely detest ginger, so I gave that to my wife (hi hon!). The pork was an unfortunate ultra-thin slice of…well, it was bacon-like, but then again, who eats boiled bacon? Luckily that the only thing that detracted from this ramen. Onwards to the soup! (more…)

I think this is just a repacked version of this. The noodles seem to be a little bit better this time around…maybe…but overall, this instant ramen is still pretty average. The soup is decent but not particularly flavorful, and whatever flavor it has is overwhelmed by garlic and msg. Be prepared to down a large glass of water to chase the msg and garlic flavor from your mouth. It gets the same score as last time: 6 out of 10.