the ramen blog & other goodies!

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.

Our local Marukai supermarket is having a sale on a variety of hakata ramen so naturally, we had to buy them all! There were 5 different types. Guess what I’m having for dinner this week!

First up: the Ogawaya pirikara hakata tonkotsu miso ramen…whew! The bright orange soup had almost no smell, which was odd. The noodles were hard hakata style noodles, which were nice and al dente, and flavorful. These noodles tended to stick together while cooking, so you need to make sure you shake the noodles well or end up with a clumpy hard mess. The soup was mildly spicy, and that was about it. I couldn’t really taste the miso or the pork flavor. The spicy taste really reminded me of Korean spicy ramen, which isn’t a bad thing, but I didn’t think it went well with the miso tonkotsu flavor. This ramen gets a 6 out of 10…good noodles, so-so soup.

One neat thing about Shimadaya’s ramen is that there are three flavor packets! There’s a packet of soup base, a packet of seasoning oil, and a pack of spices. Those of you who enjoy reading ingredients will find that there’s both chicken extract and chicken extract powder, two kinds of fat (the seasoning oil is basically a mixture of chicken fat and pork fat), and two helpings of MSG (in the soup base as well as in the “spices”). Yum! (more…)