Category: Food

Ramen 33: I Can Feel A Chicken Sliding Up To Me

Six months ago I wrote these words to end the last installment of this series: “I hope it’s not another six months until the next installment” 🙂

As it turns out I miscalculated, and in a mysterious turn of events this entry will be the biggest yet!

Myojo (460 Calories, 10g fat, 2100 mg sodium)

See those tiny pieces of dehydrated seaweed? Once reconstituted they unfolded into large sheets. This gave this entire product an unpleasant taste of seaweed, and it was chicken in name only.

Furthermore despite following the instructions to the letter, the noodles don’t seem to cook completely. It was like eating rubber bands (that tasted of the ocean) and of course this meant it was terrible. An easy 0 out of 10.

Lucky Me (250 Calories, 10 g fat, 1400 mg sodium)

I’ll keep this short: bland noodles in tasteless cloudy broth so inoffensively underflavoured you may as well not be eating anything. Lucky? Hardly! (0/10)

Cup Noodles Rich & Savory Chicken (320 Calories, 12 g fat, 1480 mg sodium)

The kings of chicken ramen return with a new product that rode the earliest waves of ‘protein’ being cool. Nissin created instant ramen, and I’ve always found their chicken to be a product I’d enjoy if I couldn’t find others (like Gefen).

But this protein variant – which contains bone broth – changes the flavour too much. It’s strong and earthy in a way I’m not a fan of, and doesn’t taste at all like chicken ramen. And I should know: I’ve tried more than 85 of them.

But I’ll concede this isn’t a bad product, and for some (like my dad who preferred beef soup) this is probably good. Not for me.

Hello Pho Wok Chicken (300 Calories, 7 g fat, 1070 mg sodium)

This is pho, which means glassy noodles, and it came with two packets of spice and one of greasy fat. I was a bit hesitant about the latter, but felt better when it quickly melted once I poured the hot water in.

As for the taste… it’s the best of today’s batch. But the noodles were slimy, and dragged the overall experience down. Had I mixed these flavour packs with a different noodle this could even have been good. I’d say it averages to 5/10.

‘Artificial Chicken Soup’ (470 Calories, 14 g fat, 2300 mg sodium)

I don’t know the brand, and it’s not written anywhere in English, but on the side is proclaims ‘A yummy soup’.

If the ‘sauce packet’ in the previous was big, this one was titanic! And it was very thick: both looking and smelling like vegemite. And it didn’t melt easily; I had to stir the noodles a lot to be sure it mixed throughout.

As it turns out I should hardly have bothered, since this had a strong taste of geosmin. This was one of the very worst ‘chicken’ ramen I’ve ever tasted, and I had to go on a quick sugar bender to reset my polluted tastebuds. Without a doubt, this one scores -10/10!

As you see I found (and tried) five new examples these past six months. Just when I think I’ve plumbed the depths of this topic it keeps delivering! How long until the next update? Who knows!?

Korean Fairy Floss

Jessica brought this back for me from Korea:

It’s a bag of cotton candy fairy floss that comes with ‘stickers’ so you can make a face.

Thats what was inside, and you can see that the stickers – printed on a thin piece of what feels like cake icing – broke a bit in transit.

I did my best, and the above shows the face I created. Does it look like anyone you know?

Bagged fairy floss is common in Japan, and now I assume Korea as well. It sounds strange but it’s quite delicious, although it’s more solid than the freshly made variety.

I’ve had fairy floss by this same manufacturer before. In fact I once ate so much I almost wrote a script for a Chinese snake movie. So without ceremony I didn’t hesitate to try it…

And it was awful. It had a terrible taste, like burned coffee (which I’ve never tasted) or rotten caramel (also never tasted) or even unripe persimmon (never will taste). And it wasn’t just me who thought this: not only did KLS also hate it, but when I texted the packaging to Jessica to ask what the flavour was she checked online and said the reviews for it were awful.

We never did find out what it was supposed to taste like 🙂

Ramen Universes Beyond: Pac-Man

The above was a recent marketing promotion here in the USA. Maruchan brand chicken ramen instant noodles replaced their normal outer wrapper with a Pac-Man themed one. Here’s a detail of the Pac-Man portion of the wrapper:

As you can see this was to promote the new game Pac-Man World 2 Re-Pac which I have no interest in and will never play. Apparently this packaging was available all over the US but I never saw it and KLS (who purchased this) only spied it once.

The ramen itself is identical to the normal Maruchan chicken, which is to say the cup and lid has no Pac-Man branding at all. The taste is ‘ok’, which is to say I wouldn’t have eaten this were it not for the branding, which means the marketing worked!

I thought that surely Pac-Man would have been on ramen before – especially in Japan – but a search online only located this one small example, which seems to have been a crane game prize two decades ago. I wonder how it tasted?