The Official Ramen Homepage

In case you have forgotten, the local student paper in my town has posted a recipe for cooking ramen. It has 3 ingredients, one of which is water, the other two come in the ramen packet.

A mystery customer walked into a ramen shop in Osaka earlier this year and left 1 million Yen (about $11,500) with instructions to buy ramen for kids. CNNGo reports on the follow-through from the ramen shop:

A ramen store in Osaka has followed through on the wishes of a mystery customer who left the shop ¥1 million (US$11,685) and a message “Use this to let children have ramen” on July 27 this year.

Whatever his reasons, the restaurant was able to give 1,540 dishes for free to local children, feeding 70 local junior high school students on the first day and over a thousand more pre-school children and elementary school students over five more days, according to the Mainichi newspaper.

PS – The link is worth clicking just to see the wall of ramen choices which is very cool, although probably unrelated to the actual story.

I pulled the Mama Pork Flavored Ramen out of my Ramenbox tonight and cooked it up. I was interested in this mainly because it was on-top, well, right underneath the onion flavored ramen that came double wrapped. (I am saving that one for when my wife is not home to complain about the smell).

Anyway, this ramen has a unique feature, the spice packet has a side packet that contains chili powder. This let me easily control the level of spice, although for me that was simple, just dump in all the chili powder.

Double sided flavor packet

Something else that I noticed at the bottom, ramen packets are recyclable. Right below the ramen symbol I saw “Product of Thailand, For export only”. I wonder why it is export only? Perhaps because there is no Thai on the packet for instructions or ingredient?

When I dumped the noodles into the water, I found a new surprise, there’s a 2nd flavor packet in there. It was a paste of some sort, so I saved it and added it to the noodles after I strained them. I think it had most of the good flavor in it, but I’m not 100% sure.

Anyway, the flavor was good for this ramen. I should have gone with my gut and ate it as soup, but I really enjoyed the texture of the noodles. The spice left a nice tingle on my lips but was not too much. I find myself without too much to say otherwise about the flavor, mainly, it was porky. I guess it’s a good thing that food reviewer is not my full-time job.

Hans from RamenRater.com sent me a note today about his site. Although it’s been up since 2002, I never knew about it! (You guys really need to keep me informed . Anyway, the site is basically a huge list of ramen reviews. Hans has reviewed way more ramen than I have and always has a good set of pictures for each review. Check it out!

PS – Don’t miss Hans’ lowest rating ever, posted just this week.

http://www.ramenrater.com/

Someone sent me a link to this recipe. It is “Hiyashi Ramen”, or chilled noodles, which work great in Vietnam’s 11.5 month long summer. If you happen to be anywhere near Ha Noi, drop by the Fortuna Hotel and try it in person.

For lunch today I dug into the Ramenbox and picked out the Sapporo Ichiban original flavor. I wanted to eat this as a soup, so I started by adding some carrots to the boiling water.

Starting the carrots and about to add the noodles.

While the noodles and carrots were cooking, I chopped some ham and green onions, which I had in the fridge.

Ham and green onions

Here is the finished product:

The Finished product

Now onto the review. The soup ended up salty, mainly because I cooked it too long in too wide of a pan and I also added ham. That was my fault. Other than that, this noodles were good, but I found the flavor to be lacking something. It’s probably my least favorite so far, but it would make a good base for a dish if you could add something else to give it flavor (ham, carrots, and green onions were not enough).

Fark.com has come through again with a link about a 70-year old who holds a PhD in noodles. He wrote a book about the subject as well called (in English) “1,300 Years of Noodle Culture in Japan”, but I think it’s only available in Japanese. Read the article, this guy sounds dedicated…

“I simply wondered why ramen and soba noodles always rank high in Japanese favorite food surveys,” Ayao Okumura, 72, said.

His book, “Nihon men-shoku-bunka no 1,300-nen” (1,300 years of noodle culture in Japan), won the Tsuji Shizuo Shokubunka-sho food culture prize in spring. The book was the culmination of two years of fieldwork.

Although he is a well-known expert in traditional foods, Okumura believes a person can always learn something, no matter how old he or she is. So he entered Mimasaka University’s graduate school in Okayama Prefecture shortly before turning 70 and chose noodles for his doctoral thesis.

I was still hungry after dinner so I cooked up some ramen from my Ramenbox. I picked out the Paldo Bibim Men which looked to be spicy and contains, “addition more 8% apple juice in soup”.

The noodle brick was larger than the normal one, so I knew that this would be a filling snack. There was no dry seasoning, instead a packet of liquid that has “paste soup” printed on the side provided the flavor. The seasoning smelled spicy and was a fiery dark red color indicative of the chili powder inside. One surprise to me (since I never remember to read the description before eating) was the sweet taste that accompanied the spice. I didn’t get much other distinguishing flavors here, so I think this one would be improved with some add-ins like soy sauce, onions, carrots, chicken, etc. Overall I liked this ramen, but it looks like it’s going to be tough to top the Paldo Fire Cup.

PS – My after cooking picture was blurry, so no after cooking pic today.

Yes, just what the title says. I can only imagine the boredom that led to this.

From the Toronto Sun

Knitter Carissa Browning learned that quickly when she decided to see if she could turn noodles and chopsticks into “something unusual.”

Knitting is her main hobby, says Browning, 27, who lives in a Dallas suburb and works at Starbucks. Her most complicated project thus far has been a traditional sweater for her husband with a pattern of skulls and crossbones.

Today for lunch I dug through my Ramenbox made my son and the Garlic and Sesame Ramen.

WuMu Garlic and Sesame, waiting for the water to boil

This ramen had no seasoning packet as I’d come to expect, but instead had a packet of what I think was soy sauce and another packet of sesame oil with garlic. The noodles had a good consistency and cooked faster than the directions said. After draining the cooked noodles, I opened the seasoning packet and there was an amazing aroma of garlic with a bit of sesame oil mixed in. Before adding the seasoning, I added some chopped grilled chicken that I had in the fridge, poured the seasonings on top and then sprinkled some sesame seeds on top of that.

WuMu after cooking with added chicken and sesame seeds

My son really enjoyed these noodles and the chicken, but I thought that they needed more seasoning. The garlic really came through, but the sesame and soy sauce were muted. I’d eat these again, but they are not my favorite. If you have the same issue, maybe try more soy sauce and if you have it, you could add more sesame oil or sesame seeds.