the ramen blog & other goodies!

There are numerous kinds of instant ramen, from the ubiquitous brick ramen, to cup and bowl ramen. A less common type of instant ramen is “stick ramen.” Unlike the other kinds of instant ramen, stick ramen noodles are packaged straight, like a package of spaghetti. As with other kinds of instant ramen, stick ramen comes with packs of soup base and seasoning.

This stick ramen has a shoyu tonkotsu base and the seasoning packet comes with a handful of sesame seeds and dried green onions. The soup has a heavy sesame smell, and is lightly flavored. There barely a shoyu flavor and not much tonkotsu. The flavors are entirely overwhelmed by sesame.

The instructions call for cooking the noodles for 2-1/2 mins, which is much too long. The soggy noodles are too slippery and not absorbent enough. Instead of working together, there’s too much of a contrast between the taste of the noodles and the soup.

Even though this tonkotsu-shoyu stick ramen ends up tasting like Chinese sesame oil noodles, the flavor does grow on you. If you’re looking for something a bit different, Marutai’s stick ramen is worth a try. It gets a 6.

With packaging reminiscent of something out of a science fiction setting, this is one of the neatest forms of ramen packaging I’ve come across. Goramen’s Keizo was nice enough to share his spoils from the Yokohama Ramen Museum, and I expected quite a treat.

I spent some time opening the ramen cube and taking pictures. Hidden within two almost-secret compartments were two bags of noodles, myriad packs of toppings, and the biggest packet of soup base I’ve ever seen. Read the rest of this entry →

Have any of you ever woken up in the morning and thought: hmm…it’s going to be 99 degrees today…what a great day for a nice steaming hot bowl of ramen! Since Mitsuwa Supermarket decided to hold their Gourmet Food Fair on the hottest weekend of the month, I found myself in the awkward position of doing just that and convincing my wife that I wasn’t already suffering from heat stroke! The wife and I went early to beat the heat, only to find an already packed parking lot and an already packed food court. We eagerly ordered the Kujiraken Shinasoba ramen (there’s only one choice) and circled the busy food court a few times before we were able to find some seats. Read the rest of this entry →

Hot on the trails of their last ramen festival, Japanese supermarket chain Mitsuwa Marketplace is holding a Umaimono Gourmet Food Fair (roughly translated as “yummy stuff” food fair), complete with two very different types of ramen along with other “gourmet foods.”
For the ramen lovers, you get your choice of “scary” (scary?!) shark fin ramen from Tokyo’s Chibakiya, present at the ramen festival, and shina soba from Kanagawa’s Kujiraken Honten (“Love for the noodles, and soul for the soup.”)
For everyone else, there’s beef tongue from Sendai, takoyaki from Osaka, and various sweet potato snacks.

Chibakiya: available 5/15 (Thu) – 5/18 (Sun) at the Torrance, CA Mitsuwa, and 5/22 (Thu) – 5/25 (Sun) at the New Jersey Mitsuwa

Kujiraken: available 5/15 (Thu) – 5/18 (Sun) at the Costa Mesa, CA Mitsuwa, and 5/22 (Thu) – 5/25 (Sun) at the San Jose, CA Mitsuwa

Via goramen.com

Update 05/14/08 9:10PM Gulp, I just found out that the shark fin ramen is $18! I guess they’re using real shark fin. The shina soba’s a more reasonable $7. If anyone’s rich enough to try the shark fin, please let us know how it is!

Those of you that visit our humble site regularly know that I don’t particularly care about the nutritional value of the food I slurp down my gullet. But lately, after starting to post the nutritional information of the instant ramen we review, I’ve started paying just a bit more attention to what’s on the label. While nobody will likely argue that instant ramen, especially instant brick ramen, is especially nutritious, I’m not sure how many people have noticed that the “Nutrition Facts” on these things is…well…I don’t want to make any unfound accusations, but has anyone in the history of instant ramen ever eaten only one-third of a pack of ramen and considered that “one serving”?

I’m not sure if all brick ramen use the same way of showing nutritional info, but a cursory glance at all the ramen in ramen HQ’s cupboards showed the same thing: that the instant ramen industry considers one pack of instant ramen to be three servings.

So what do you think? Is this way of presenting nutritional info purposefully misleading? Or business as usual?

 Loading ...

Quick, describe the taste of chicken to someone who’s never had chicken before…having trouble?

Just as chicken seems to be one of the lowest common denominators in food flavors, so is the “instant ramen-ness” of Sapporo Ichiban’s original flavor. The “original” flavor doesn’t belong to the typical ramen flavor groups: it’s not shoyu, not tonkotsu, not shio, not miso. There is a slight miso-ness to the soup base flavor, but it’s barely discernable underneath the barrage of onion-ness, white pepper-ness, MSG-ness, and the plain original-ness of Sapporo Ichiban’s popular instant ramen. The curly instant brick noodles with a good chewy texture and the non-descript tangy aftertaste rounds out Sapporo Ichiban’s Original flavor experience. Ramen purists will turn up their noses at this instant ramen, but to a whole generation of college students and anyone who’s ever been on a tight food budget, this is a decent, affordable, and welcome alternative to Top Ramen.

Brick ramen rating: 6/10. Click through for the nutritional info. Read the rest of this entry →