The Ramen Project

On my first trip to the Manila Oriental Market in Excelsior last year, I discovered something wonderful-- an entire store aisle devoted to instant noodles. The store offered an impenetrably diverse array of ramens, with flavors I'd never run across, like "cuttlefish" and "pickled cabbage fish". Sarah and I first just tried the ones that sounded best to us and tried to keep mental track of our favorites. It wasn't until I was on my own that I decided to take a more systematic approach to dealing with the intimidating breadth of options. By then it had become apparent that memory alone would not be sufficient to map out the best and worst of instant noodles. At the suggestion of a coworker (Laura Ray), The Ramen Project was born. This post is its ultimate fruit. I bought one of each of about two-thirds of the aisle's offered instant noodle varieties (the poor girl at the checkout looked ready to kill me) and began to work my way through the pile one lunch at a time at work, saving the packaging with brief post-it reviews affixed. After months of careful study, the results are in.

The survey covers 39 flavors of instant noodles, all single-serving with one exception. Prices mostly ranged from 39 cents to 79 cents, with a couple of standouts costing over a dollar. Ramen noodles are generally fried in saturated vegetable fat like palm oil and the broth typically includes flavor-enhancers MSG, Disodium 5'-Inosylate, and Disodium 5'-Guanylate (which is actually a component of DNA/RNA, interestingly). The artificial meat flavor is non-vegetarian, which means it includes animal products and isn't fully "artificial" in the classic sense, but only a couple of brands included such luxuries as straight-up crab meat or beef extract and forwent synthetic flavor enhancers. There's nothing really dangerous or unhealthy about synthetic flavor enhancers, but as a rule I tried not to consume ramen more than once per 48-hour period, as the calories are pretty genuinely empty and it would have made me feel "off". Noodle packages typically included 2-3 packets inside them in addition to the bare noodles, usually powdered broth, garlic or soy-infused palm oil, and freeze dried garnish. The survey includes "glass" noodles, rice noodles and noodles intended to be served without broth, in addition to the more classic ramen noodles.

I've condensed this to the "discoveries" or "best-of", but you can find the complete unedited reviews here. Below are the highlights:

Both Thai brands (ZoZo/Wai Wai and MAMA) were consistently excellent, and the general sour/tom yum genre is pretty solid.
-ZoZo/Wai Wai Sour Soup Flavour Instant Noodles- Good. Spicy, delicious and simple.
-MAMA Shrimp Creamy Tom Yum Flavour- Creamy, delicious, appropriately spicy, and with good texture. This is probably my favorite Tom Yum of the lot. Note that my coworker Jeri's favorite ramen is the non-creamy variant, but I prefered this by a slight margin.

Vietnamese company Vina Acecook has a few brand name titles, including Hao Hao, which was uniformly mediocre, and Daily, which had its moments (see below). Vietnamese brand Vifon was ok, but I wasn't especially fond of the mealy texture of their rice noodles and they didn't quite rise above "good" anyways.
-Daily Beef Ball Flavour- Surprisingly delicious, with complex spicy herbal seasoning.

Both soup type ramens from Filipino brand Lucky Me! were excellent, but the chow meins (served without broth) tended to be rancid for whatever reason. It wasn't the only brand for which I ran across a rancid one, but these were pretty consistently rancid. Otherwise the chow meins were quite good, but I'm only featuring the soups.
-Lucky Me! La Paz Batchoy (La Paz Style)- Fancy! Four packets, including one with little balls of textured soy protein. Rich and garlicky broth.
-Lucky Me! Bulalo (Bone Marrow Soup)- Smells fantastically savory. Great flavor, salty.

Indonesian brand IndoMie's chow meins were excellent and it is the brand I'd recommend for the chow mein style. The process of straining the water from them was a bit tricky to do at work with nothing but a microwave, a fork, and long sweater sleeves to insulate my hands, but the results were great. Note that these and the Lucky Me! chow meins are Sarah's favorite instant noodles.
-Mi Goreng BBQ Chicken- Absolutely delicious.
-Mi Goreng- Excellent, sweet and peppery.
-Soto Mie Flavour- Sesame and chili flavor. Delicious as always.

Unif is a pretty gigantic brand out of Taiwan, with a lot of different packaging configurations. It's offerings range from outright "meh" to quite good.
-Unif Tung-I Chah Chiang Flavor- I believe this is seaweed flavor. Dark, savory and surprisingly unsalty (relatively speaking) soy sauce-derived broth. Would pair well with Californian hops, esp Simcoe or Citra.
-Unif Tung-I Instant Bean Vermicelli Mushroom Flavor (Bean Thread)- Good, interesting nutty mushroom flavor.

As I am sure will surprise no one, the Japanese brands were the most expensive, nutritionally substantial and reliably delicious. I decided that udon took a bit too long to cook to be practical for work.
-Tonkotsu Artificial Pork Flavor- The "nondaily creamer" milk solids make it pretty chill. Nice and garlicky and sesame-y.
-Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup "Gourmet Spicy"- Totally excellent in flavor and texture. Pleasantly spicy, but otherwise fairly normal.

Honestly, the most promising (and as-yet unexplored) frontier in ramen at this point for me is the multi-serving packages. These tend be on the higher end of the price range per serving, include some of the most unusual flavors and the quality has so far been remarkable. Only one multi-serving noodle was included in this survey, and it certainly makes the list. The brand is unclear but it was manufactured by Sichuan Baijia Food Co., Ltd.
-Artificial Pickled Cabbage Fish Flavor Instant Sweet Potato Thread- Unique and utterly delicious. Cabbage and beans and sour and spicy oh my! Note this is vegan and rather oily, with chewy clear noodles

Below is the full array of recommended noodles. Hopefully this will prove useful to everyone who has access to an asian grocery store. It's a great way to keep your lunches at work cheap and interesting.