When I was young, my sisters and I would expand our thinking and hone our hand-eye coordination skills on Saturdays, and discover the meaning of discipline, hard work, and loss of childhood through the dual school of Japanese schools and music schools recognized by tiger mothers. Eight The tight schedule of hours gave me about an hour of free time at noon. During this period, I would cook lunch while watching cartoons or playing football with my dad. Sometimes this means frozen chicken patties or pastrami sandwiches from a street deli. Usually, this means instant noodles.
I am not a ramen prescriber, but my choice usually falls on the premium Japanese brand Myojo Chukazanmai or the Korean beef and chili-flavored instant noodle Shin Ramyun brand. Its high temperature and strong saltiness have earned it some enthusiastic followers-when I asked people to name their favorite ramen brand on Twitter, this was the first reaction. It is the best-selling non-Japanese brand. One of them, available in more than 80 countries/regions.
In the two and a half years since its launch in 1986, Shin Ramyun has only been available in two forms: packaging and styrofoam cups in containers. In 2011, they launched Shin Black, a premium version of traditional ramen.
We tasted all four options to see how they stack up.
Taken directly from the packaging, there is a very obvious difference between Shin Black and standard cups: the black version contains an extra seasoning pack. Unlike the standard direct mix of beef extract, chili and vegetables, Black comes with one pack of chili mix and another pack with beef and anchovy soup base.
The black dehydrated vegetable bag is also larger, containing larger pieces of mushrooms, shallots and peppers. For the small packet version of black, the vegetable mixture also includes dehydrated beef slices. It will be described in detail later.
Although tasters disagree on the comparison of the broth and noodles in the standard Shin Ramyun with the premium black version, there is a clear consensus: Ramen noodles taken out of the bag and cooked in a pot are better than cup-style. This makes perfect sense. For the former, you are boiling the noodles quickly; for the latter, you are steeping them like making tea.
The ingredient label on the package also reflects the difference in noodle recipes, perhaps to make up for this difference in cooking methods.
Overall, the taster found that the small-bun noodles were more springy and more like real noodles, although Max Falkowitz was the only exception, who enjoyed thinner and softer noodles in the standard Shin Cup ("If you don’t To get great noodles, you might as well buy something that absorbs the sauce better," his reasoning).
The soup base of the small packet of soup is also excellent. It is difficult to decipher from the ingredient list what makes them better, but they are richer, fuller, and taste more "natural". The soup in the cup was labelled "strong", "aggressive" and "man-made". Please note that they are not bad, we will not eat them, but enough to make it easy to spend time making a packet-based version.
Interestingly, the cost has almost nothing to do with our preferences. When you buy cup-style ramen, you need to pay double the cost in order to avoid using ordinary pot. Similarly, the price of the black version of cup soup and small packet of soup is twice that of the standard version. All in all, people have different opinions when naming the standard Shin Ramyun noodle soup bag at $0.24/oz and the Shin Ramyun Black Premium Noodle Soup bag at $0.47/oz as the winners.
Here are some more tasting details.
This is the classic taste of my youth. Salty and spicy, with a mild marine aroma, a small amount of rehydrated shiitake mushrooms and green onions float in the thin and delicious broth. The noodles are better than normal ramen (I think they are on par with our most acclaimed Sapporo market), but by no means exciting. As Jamie Feldman said, this is "what I wanted when I was sick."
On the other hand, Max said that he "want to dip [his] dosas in it." I'm not sure what that means, I'm a little scared to find out.
When comparing the black version with the standard version, the first thing you will notice is the larger vegetable block. Real-size shiitake mushroom slices and chili slices float around the opaque, slightly creamy broth. The front of the package is a thick slice of real beef. Instead, what we get are these small pieces:
Kind of like the pieces you find at the bottom of a bag of beef jerky, when you eat at 169 miles on a road trip, the real food is used up a few miles after the last rest stop. Without them, we could have done it as soon as possible.
Black's broth contains dehydrated beef stock and anchovies, as well as "beef extract" and "beef fat" seasoned for the standard version to create a more delicate and balanced broth. It is more enthusiastic, but also gentler. If you are looking for more salt and spice punches, then the standard packaging is your best choice.
The overall loser, Shin Cup has the thinnest and most spicy soup, as well as ultra-thin, soaking noodles. The texture is very similar to other cup brands such as Nissin Cup Noodles. Dehydrated vegetables are also minimal-shallots, peppers and shiitake mushrooms add a little interest, but not much. As far as instant soup is concerned, we don’t kick it out of bed, but we don’t feel the need to put on a new shirt before meeting at the bar. Even though we sprinkled some ramen on the old ramen.
The quality of the noodles and broth has greatly improved from its not-so-quality cousins. The label on the top of the box claims that Shin Black Cup is "spicy hot pot golden fire taste", although inspection of the ingredients did not reveal anything special in terms of unique condiments. Just like the black package version, the black cup has a creamier, milder broth with a more "real" taste, even though this guy doesn't have the dehydrated beef slices you find in the package version. The loss is not big.