the ramen blog & other goodies!

(Disclosure: I’m very sleepy, so if this review comes across as a bit loopy…well…you’ve been warned.)

The-wife-is-away-so-I’m-eating-ramen-all-week week continues with this special ramen. It’s got “PH adjustment” and “antioxidant”! Really! Scroll down and look at the label for yourself! Oh, It looks like the tonkotsu ramen I had a few days ago also had antioxidant (yes, it’s also singular). Who says instant ramen isn’t healthy?

I don’t know why you readers voted for us to show nutritional info on the ramen we review. I think I was happier not knowing what I was eating.

I was excited when I opened this bowl ramen…it came with four packets of accoutrements! Somehow, my expectations go up with every packet I see in my instant ramen. Oh, and ginger gets its own packet…yay…(I don’t like ginger, which always makes my wife roll her eyes and ask “are you really Asian?”). On the plus side, the soup powder has a very strong pork smell that reminds me of Chinese “pork sung,” which, according to wikipedia, is also known as “pork floss.” That sure sounds appetizing.

The noodles were decent, with a nice hard texture, and had a hint of instant-noodleness to them. The toppings gave the ramen good flavor, and the tonkotsu soup was rich and well-balanced. Being negi ramen, there were lots and lots of green onions, which suits me just fine. The strange thing was, while the soup had good flavor, you could barely smell it, which was especially surprising after the strong smell of the soup powder.

Overall, this was a slightly above average ramen. If you like green onions, it’s hard to go wrong with negi ramen. Marutai’s negi ramen gets a 7.

Agh!! Get it off of me! Getitoffofme! — oh, sorry… Ahem…this is the kind of instant noodles that gives people nightmares. In the interest of saying something useful besides just warning people from this travesty, I find it interesting that, even though technically ramen “started” from China, then evolved into the Japanese version we’re all familiar with today, I’ve yet to find any Chinese instant ramen that tastes nearly as good as the Japanese version. Sure, there are plenty of great Chinese noodle dishes, and plenty of really good instant Chinese noodles, but forget trying to find a good Chinese version of the Japanese version of Chinese noodles. If any of that didn’t make sense, blame this ramen.

The crowning achievement of this bowl ramen is the noodles, which are slightly thin, very reminiscent of Chinese instant noodles, and thoroughly mediocre. The toppings include corn, tiny pieces of sour, soggy bamboo, seaweed, and some unidentifiable mystery veggie bits.

The soup seasoning contains salt, MSG, and soy sauce powder, and the garnish includes sugar and caramel. Yes, the label says the garnish contains sugar and caramel. And for what it’s worth, the soup stock is chicken, not pork. So what does this concoction taste like? Have you ever had vinegar ramen? Really? Ok, no, there’s no such thing. I just made it up. But even if there were such a thing as vinegar ramen, I’m pretty sure the soup would taste better than this vile sour and vinegary witch’s brew. King Car gets a 3. The only reason it doesn’t get a 1 is because I think I could imagine eating this again if I was literally starving to death. Well…maybe…

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…)