What Are Your Favorite Quick Ramen Improvements?
Hello, and welcome back toWhat’s Cooking? , a weekly open thread where you can share all your brilliant thoughts, tips, recipes and opinions on anything edible. This week I want to talk about the wonderfully customizable, infinitely rhymed instant ramen.
We touched on this briefly in one of our previous discussions , but I wanted to give instant ramen a separate episode, so to speak. The beauty of this material is how clean it is on canvas. You can garnish it (with vegetables and fancy sauces) or season (with a slice of American cheese) and it adapts perfectly every time. Hell, its final form doesn’t even have to be soup. The noodles can be used to make pasta dishes, garnish a salad, or even turn them into a hamburger bun. But enough about my ideas – let’s hear yours. As expected, I have a few interesting points to talk about:
- What’s your favorite brand and flavor of instant ramen? I’m an unabashed fan of the beef flavored Maruchan and all its salty glory.
- What’s the tastiest use of flavoring outside of the instructions? I’m never mad at ramen dip , but this seasoning is a pretty good addition to fried chicken dough, and it’s not all that bad on popcorn.
- How do you make instant ramen decent (and somewhat healthy)? The best bowl of instant ramen I’ve ever made contained homemade duck broth, some really excellent mushrooms, fresh corn, and a soft-boiled egg. I think it was green onion too.
- What’s the most trash panda ramen you each made yourself? As a teenager, I had a ramen snack that I ate at least once a week and followed a fairly strict recipe. To make it, I stopped at 7-11 and bought the aforementioned maruchan and a string of cheese. I would break the noodles to fit into a large cup of coffee, fill it with hot water, put the lid on the cup and go home. Back home, I pour 95% of the water out of the cup through the hole in the lid, then add the seasoning, string the cheese, and stir. The result was a salty mass of noodles sealed with melted cheese, and it was very enjoyable.
- Have you ever eaten raw ramen as a child? Who hasn’t skimmed Styrofoam from an instant lunch to gnaw through its crispy insides filled with umami, dehydrated carrots and peas falling at their feet?
- What are your favorite no-soup ramen apps? I once made some pretty good spaghetti and meatballs from instant ramen and the innards of leftover meatballs, and I would do it over and over if I could.
- Have you ever tried a ramen burger? I ate the original and made my own (back in the days of xoJane) . Both were good.
- Cheese on ramen: yes or no? Obviously I’m a fan of this, but I’m not alone; Roy Choi adds American cheese to his cheese .
- Eggs on ramen: yes or no? Just kidding, this is an obvious yes. The real question is soft, hard boiled or fried?
To be clear: I fully plan on preparing and eating your most interesting plates, so don’t be afraid to sound weird. I will eat anything (except celery for some reason).