The Ramen Aisle

• Price: 80p(?)
• Manufacturer: Ottogi Co.
• Packet contains: noodles, cheesy powder sachet, generic other powder sachet, vegetable and/or fish(?) sachet.

I approach this product with all the trepidation its core concept clearly warrants. Cheese ramen?

Visual impression upon assemblage of product: utter revulsion. I firstly sample one of the floating pink cubelets, to find I am eating something like a dense-foam scouring pad having bathed (the scouring pad) too long in fishy dishwater. A faint cheesy smell accompanies the product, but the soup has no discernible flavour (though it is very mildly spicy). The noodles are standard fare – a blessing in the circumstances – but they are gone far too soon, leaving an empty and horrifyingly opaque pond. Desolation.

• Noodle rating: 3/5
• Spice level: very mild (but should cheese ramen actually be spicy at all?*)
• Flavour rating: 1/5
• Associated substance rating (cubelets): 0/5
• Slurp rating: N/A (I could not bring myself to slurp)
• Would noodle again?: Lord, have mercy

Bonus factoid: Ottogi Co. is the sole condiment provider to McDonald's in Korea. [Citation needed, but true according to Wikipedia.]

* Positivists here reject my question as ill-formed, cheese ramen clearly being a specious construct thrust upon us by Ottogi Co. or whatever nefarious agency lies therebehind.

As if proof of my stupidity were needed – despite the name of the product, the helpful picture on the packet and clear written English instructions to the contrary, I failed to realise that I was supposed to drain the water from the noodles after they had softened and instead left it all in the bowl. Thus what should have been consumed as a dry noodle dish was in fact consumed by me as a noodle soup. Not one to go down with my sinking ship, I resolved to review these not as “dry noodles” but as “wet noodles” for now, and to revisit the (correctly prepared) same product at a later date. Onwards!

• Price: £1.20
• Manufacturer: Sichuan Baijia Food Co.
• Packet contains: noodles, oil pack, flavour pack, bean sprout pack.

Despite its intimidating deep red appearance, the sesame-littered soup was not as spicy as feared, in fact having a reasonably good aromatic flavour with a tasteful hint of aniseed. The whole thing was a very oily affair (the oils in question being “low-erucic acid rapeseed oil” and palm oil). The vegetables were supposedly bean sprouts, but they just looked like generic green stuff to me, and they didn't add much to the experience.

The unexpected twist in the tale of this amateurish noodle-preparation misadventure is that the never-ought-to-have-been soup was actually quite fantastic for slurping, owing mainly to the toothsome sesame seeds!

• Noodle rating: 2/5
• Spice level: ideal
• Flavour rating: 3/5
• Associated substance rating (“bean sprouts”): 2/5
• Slurp rating: 5/5
• Would noodle again?: I feel that my relationship with this endearing product has merely just begun.

Bonus factoid: The herbs/spices in this one include ginger, garlic, fermented soybean, cinnamon, liquorice, laurus nobilis (bay leaves, apparently), anise, lemongrass and cumin.

• Price: £1.20
• Manufacturer: Sichuan Baijia Food Co.
• Packet contains: broad noodles, soup base sachet, powder sachet, vegetable sachet.

My nose didn't hugely like what it encountered when I opened the sachet of pickled vegetables (which are apparently pickled mustard leaves in chilli, oil, salt, ginger, plus some E-numbers), but the stuff tasted surprisingly good, if a bit one-dimensional. The large flat noodles had a satisfying chewiness, and the veg added some bite too. The beef flavour from the powder sachet complemented the pickled flavour very well. Nevertheless I didn't feel compelled to slurp up all of the remaining soup once I'd consumed all the solids.

• Noodle rating: 4/5
• Spice level: ideal (most of the spiciness came from the pickled veg)
• Flavour rating: 4/5
• Associated substance rating (this refers to the pickled veg): 4/5
• Slurp rating: 2/5
• Would noodle again?: You betcha!

Bonus factoid: I just nuked my recommended daily allowance for salt – this packet contains a whopping 9 grams!