the ramen blog & other goodies!

According to Businessweek’s Asia’s Hot Growth Companies: 2007, the #1 growth company in Asia isn’t an electronics company. It’s not a cell phone company, a bank, or any other type of company you would normally associate with a “hot growth” company. Give up? It’s Hong Kong based Ajisen Ramen!

Follow ‘big in japan’s’ quest as they search for the “perfect bowl of ramen” in Japan

Milk, seafood, and…ramen?! The folks at Nissin are as creative as ever. Introducing the Milk Seafood Cup Noodle!

Read all about instant ramen from a student perspective, featuring two, yes two quotes from yours truly, at the Florida International University’s student paper, the Beacon.

I’ve been to Japan over 15 times and not once have I ever set foot in a Denny’s. But then I never knew they served ramen! (…and…Chivas Regal?!?)

It seems like everyone’s making a pilgrimage to the Yokohama Ramen Museum in Japan lately. Check out the writeups, photos, and videos at Shanghai Toys and Go Ramen! And check back here soon for our own writeup and review.

The discontinued and hard-to-find maruchan tomato ramen has been found! Is anyone at Maruchan reading this? Please bring back the your tomato ramen!

Interested in making your nama ramen more than just “instant” ramen? See what the Tasty Island does with a pack of shio nama ramen.

Interested in knowing how global warming will affect the question of “What role should instant noodles play in 50 years time?” If you have an invitation to the 6th World Instant Noodles Summit in Osaka, you can find out! (No, we weren’t invited…sniff sniff…)

This somewhat ordinary looking package hides a somewhat not-so-ordinary nama ramen. The first surprise of this ramen is the lack of individual plastic bags around the noodles. This is certainly the freshest-looking package of ramen I’ve ever seen.

I could almost picture the noodles being made from scratch, packaged, and delivered straight to the store.

After pouring the soup mix into a bowl, I noticed a strong and familiar scent. I inhaled the aroma to get a feel for the flavor and smelled nothing but…sesame oil? I smelled again…yes, slightly burnt sesame oil. Interesting. The soup was a mild and clear with just a hint of msg. It wasn’t very oily, and it also didn’t have a very strong pork flavor. If I didn’t read the package, I’d think the soup was sesame oil based, though the soup base ingredients on the back of the package read simply: soy sauce, vegetable oil, salt, sugar, amino acid & spices. Hmm…no sesame oil, no pork/pork fat/pork bone/pork flavoring/pork anything. I still enjoyed the soup, it just wasn’t really tonkotsu-y.

Onwards to the noodles! The noodles were indeed fresh tasting, and had a slight floury taste. They held the soup flavoring well, and were also pretty fragrant. Unfortunately, they were also very hard, and slightly raw-tasting. The cooking instructions were a bit unusual: instead of the typical “cook for x mins,” it gave a range of 1-1/2 minutes to 2 minutes “depending on your desired firmness.” Don’t believe it. I like my ramen al dente and 1-1/2 minutes made the noodles just barely edible. They were still a bit too hard even at 2 minutes. Your mileage may vary of course, but I recommend starting at 2 mins and working your way up.

Overall, this was just a decent ramen. The noodles looked better than they tasted, and the soup, though good, was slightly unusual with the heavy sesame oil fragrance. This gets a 7 out of 10.

Oh! One last thing. The Miyako nama ramen comes with a packet of desiccant…I think…(they call it an “oxygen absorber”…sounds dangerous). Kids, make sure you don’t accidently mix that into your ramen!

This is the last day of Ogawaya ramen week (actually, this review is 2 days late. Sorry…had a busy weekend), and I’m a bit sad. But, I’m also a bit glad…you try to come up with 5 different and interesting ways to describe the same noodles! I also want to give a shoutout to rameniac for his timely and wildly informative “field guide” to 22 (yes, 22!) popular ramen styles in Japan. If you want to read up on the background behind the hakata and kurume ramen I’ve been talking about for the past week, this is a great resource.

Every once in a while, events fall into place that makes you think of fate; even though I chose this week’s ramen in random order, it turned out I was actually eating them in order: each day’s was progressively better, and today’s ramen was the best of the bunch. (more…)

I have a bad habit of not really looking at or reading the packages of ramen that I eat until after I’ve eaten them. In this case, I was a bit surprised to open the package and see two different colored soup packets…was this some special “red/white song battle” (K?haku Uta Gassen) ramen? No, there’re actually two types of soup in this package! Cool! The white one is tonkotsu. The red one is tonkotsu shoyu.

(more…)

Day 3 of Ogawaya ramen week continues with the kurume ichiban noko tonkotsu ramen! (It just occurred to me to read the rest of the ramen packages I bought last weekend, and I realized that all the ramen were made by Ogawaya. Duh!) Kurume ramen is from the Kurume region of Fukuoka, where tonkotsu ramen originated. Unlike the first two packaged ramen I had this week, this one is a “pure” tonkotsu ramen. The noodles were again practically identical to the other two Ogawaya ramen, which is to say, good! The noodles had a great chewy texture and absorbs the fatty pork bone flavors nicely. The light-tan soup had a subtle but satisfyingly fatty taste that doesn’t scream out “pork.” There’s just a bite of pork taste that lingers in the back of your throat with every slurp. A slight aftertaste of garlic and MSG leaves a nice tingle on your tongue once the ramen is gone. This is a good solid ramen that deserves an 8 out of 10.

Day 2 of hakata ramen week continues with Ogawaya’s nagahamakko tonkotsu miso ramen. Ok, I’m actually cheating. I’m writing the reviews for day 1 and 2 on day 3, and I’m getting tired so I’ll probably write day 3’s review on day 4.

I think this is supposed to be based on an actual ramen-ya’s ramen. Surprisingly, this tasted very much like yesterday’s hakata ramen. At the time, I didn’t bother reading the label closely enough: same factory. Hmm…maybe not so surprising after all.

This ramen also had a bright orange soup, but was more fragrant; I could actually smell the miso. Like the pirikara ramen, these noodles were also prone to clumping and had almost the exact same great texture and taste, even though the instructions had different cooking times (2 mins vs 90 seconds). The soup isn’t spicy, which ironically gave it more flavor. The miso stood out, but I still couldn’t taste much of a pork flavor.

This ramen tastes a bit better than yesterday’s ramen, but the soup could still use some improvement. This gets a 7.