Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Maruchan Ramen, Japanese beef noodle soup

Did I show you this already? Search says no. It's from another of my sites posted a long time ago, a few years, I think. Sometimes stats show unusual clusters and this was looked at from a bunch of disparate places suddenly at once and that is unusual. Most originating from Facebook as if a member there liked it. I read the post again as if somebody else wrote it and thought, eh, that's kind of funny. You know, it occurred to me while reading my mum would slap me. She would. If she read the stuff I wrote she'd just without warning *whap!* And then tell me I'm lucky she doesn't wash my mouth out with soap.



Another summer day goes by and another three meals are missed. Unless a glass of chocolate milk counts as a meal. It is 11:00 PM and I am finally becoming hungry enough to start scrounging around. 

Oh joy! Maruchan ramen. Beef even. 

These are the things we buy for 25¢, I think. Maybe $1.00. I don't know. Let's see what is.


Goody gumdrops, a flavor packet! I cannot wait to open it and see all its beefy goodness.


Hey wait, where are the beef chunks? It's powder! What ever could it be? I wet a finger and taste some. 


It tastes like beef bouillon with powder onion, powder soy things, MSG, it's very salty. Chemicals. Maybe I can help it with real beef since it doesn't have any.

I used only half this steak. This looks like a sirloin steak. I just recently learned that sirloin steak is not the same thing as New York steak. Apparently a New York steak is better. I think a New York steak is the long non-tenderloin portion of a T-Bone or Porterhouse steak. 



The thinly cut slices were put into a pot with hot olive oil on medium high. They browned nicely in less than a minute. They were removed to a plate leaving behind a little mess in the pot. We like that mess. We cook-types call it fond. We call it fond, I guess because we're fond of it. Makes sense to me. It is the result of non-enzamatic browning reaction between amino acid (think protein) and reducing sugars (think carbohydrate) which result in hundreds of flavor compounds that was first described by a French guy named Maillard. FACTS ! 

We'll leave the mess in the pot and persist with vegetables, since our flavor packet is bereft of vegetables. I scrounge around some more and find these. Here they are mise en place, which is an important thing to do because it means the cook won't be racing around like a poulet décapité looking for ingredients once the heat is on. 

Left to right: scallion, mushrooms, carrot, broccoli, careless jalapeño, fresh ginger, fresh garlic. Not too bad, eh?, for a scrounge session. 


The fond would probably work all by itself with water but even with hundreds of flavor compounds it's going to be fairly diluted, and since this Maruchan Ramen is Japanese we can go with our Asian soup flavor enhancements. I drag out the usual suspects, always reliable. 


Then I get the idea to include tamarind. If I didn't have tamarind then I'd consider Worcestershire sauce which is basically a tamarind sauce. It's a British/Indian thing. 

I taste the soup. It's delicious. Much better than the sample from the flavor packet. You know what? I'm just going to throw away that flavor packet. It's crap. 


Let's look at those noodles again. They're dry. They've already been cooked and dehydrated. They've been produced for convenience and for speed which is very odd since regular dry noodles are already convenient and speedy. How can pre-cooking and additional dehydration possibly help? I taste a piece of broken noodle. It's nothing at all. I conclude these squiggly noodles are the sickly anemic poor cousins to actual noodles. I'm telling you that I know from one tiny sample that these noodles are not right. Fuck it, I'm throwing away these stupid annoying noodles too. Lordy, even at 25¢ this product is a rip-off nutritional hoax. 


In an attempt to stay Asian about this, I take a handful of starchy rice and mill it in the coffee bean grinder, handy little thing. It's fun!


I break an egg and add a little water, all the rice powder, salt, and AP flour by the tablespoonful until a dough forms. The dough rests briefly.





So there ya go. Here's the enhanced Maruchan Ramen. 


The meat here is more than evident, it is actually something to chew on. The broth is delicious, well-rounded with no extraneous questionable chemicals that might hazard what remains of my delicate nervous system. The noodles are surprisingly sturdy toothsome tasty and filling. This is the best Maruchan Ramen I ever had! Hurray! I urge you to try this with your Ramen packages, you'll be amazed how those convenience packages can be improved with just a little help. 

Here is the ingredients list for Maruchan Ramen beef published on Food Facts. 

14 comments:

Chip Ahoy said...

Oops. I goofed up. I looked at the Trooper post that is holding and apparently hit publish instead of "get out." So corrected by reverting to draft but that moved the post to the top.

You typed "So let's d"

And I bet $100.27 you were about to say "decide" but suddenly became undecided. A distraction perhaps, a phone call, or nature's call, maybe a stroke, electrocuted statically by cat, any number of distractions. A bat flew in the house. A car accident outside. A parrot appeared and spoke your name startlingly 22 floors up (that happened! I'll tell you about it some time if I haven't already). Maybe you realized you can watch the moon drop from the sky and record it. That'll take your attention from your post mid-word. Maybe you simply fell asleep. It happens. Who knows? It could be anything.

The moon is almost dropped out of sight. The thing is, I can see it quite clearly but it's showing fuzzy. And each lens I tried and no matter which setting extreme it did the same thing as if lenses get the moisture up there but the human eye does not. I don't comprejendo and it's pissing me off. Because I want a clear moon.

Chip Ahoy said...

pulsating moon drops like a rock

A floaty rock. A reflective rock floating in the darkness of space. It's actually like a half moon or maybe 3/4 moon or possibly more or 3/8 moon or 9/16 moon, but it's showing as if it were full and THAT BUMS ME OUT!

It has to do with light bleeding to nearby sensors no matter the settings no matter the lens. Wide open blink normally, or open normally and hold open a long time, change the ISO to be more grainy, either way light bleeds over and makes the moon look fuzzy. But I will keep trying to the point of frustration, right before I toss the camera over the balcony, that's how much and how long and persistently I'll keep trying, and I won't care about anything else in the photo so long as the moon is photographed clearly. It's a new challenge so long as the moon is visible in my space.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I remember asking you to make a ramen post, I don't remember when thoug 🤔

ricpic said...

I've got to learn how to make a good soup. But I don't want to use that cube they all tell you to drop in the boiling water because I've heard horror satires about the salt content and harsh taste that gives the soup. Then there's something called soup base but I can't find it in my supermarket. Is it enough to just throw the veggies and chicken or beef in the boiling water and then add salt to taste? I know about skimming the chicken fat off the top.

ricpic said...

horror stories

Chip Ahoy said...

Soup is the easiest thing for mankind to make. It's something and water.

Soup base is marked as "soup stock"

It's in cartons, like milk cartons. At the market on shelves near the regular tinned soup. Usually at the edge of them.

Vegetable
Chicken
Beef

In the Ramen above, the soup base was made from the bits of burned meat that stick to the pan. It's lifted off with water and dissolves mostly. The other bottles I'm showing fill it out, give it more body and flavor.

For vegetables, simply boil vegetables. Remove the exhausted vegetables and discard. Their nutrition is now mostly in the water. For vegetable soup, use this vegetable tea as your base with new freshly chopped vegetables. Vegetable soup is fresh vegetables in pre made vegetable-tea

Fish stock is simplest of all and fast. Fish head, fish skeleton, boil ten minutes, remove the junk, boom, fish soup.

Japanese make kombu dashi, seaweed tea, that is the most extraordinary fish stock available. They add shaved dry tuna flakes to it for double the sea-food pleasure. Those two things together make the best base for bouillabaisse type fish soup that I've ever tasted. And it's incredibly fast.

And now they're making bisques and a lot of other really good soups in marked with them in cartons.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Ah.....ramen soup. The staple of many a college student's diet. A blank canvas on which you can do so much. And CHEAPLY too!


ricpic said...

Thanks Chip.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I'm a big soup fan.

When somebody buys me lunch, I've often asked for the soup and something light.

deborah said...

I always liked the children's story 'Rock Soup.'

Dust Bunny Queen said...

Soup soup beautiful soup.

Soup is inexpensive, healthful and a great way to use up left overs and odds and ends in the pantry or freezer. I always keep a couple of bags in the freezer for scraps of meat and bones (save the bones!), another for fowl and carcasses, one for those veggies that are on the edge...wilted celery, limp leeks, questionable onions. When the bags get full, it is time for making soup stocks. Freezer burned meat...throw it in and simmer the heck out of it with veggies, spices and other condiments. Strain and ta dah...soup stock. Not as beautifully gourmet as Chip Ahoy but still makes some good ole Mom type soup.

I save the half gallon plastic jugs of fruit juice and fill those up with the stock, label date and freeze.

deborah said...

Great info, DBQ. Keeping an eye on when veggies are on the edge, then freezing, saves a lot of guilt of throwing away spoiled food. Double that for meats.

MamaM said...

The name of the folk tale is Stone Soup.

And the concept within it applies to blogs as well, with posts prompting others to bring forward something from their lives to fill the pot.

As for "a lot of guilt" about throwing food away, that stopped years ago, so there's little to save a lot of in that area, with the focus being, what do I want or need to do to make this work? Sometimes what's leftover is used for soup or stew, sometimes it goes to the animals and sometimes it is returned to the ground from whence it came.

ampersand said...

A few years ago when lobster was very reasonably priced, I saved the shells to make lobster stock for a bisque. Bad idea! The house stunk for days. If anyone attempts it make sure you cook it outdoors. Shrimp stock smells pretty good though.