Last week, the Orlando Weekly ran a cover feature article by Henry Hong from Baltimore on ramen Noodled: Instant ramen isn’t just for broke college students. It’s a great article about the versatility of the supercheapo dish when paired with leftovers and random scraps.

Usually I tend to avoid ramen because I get a headache from all the sodium/msg/etc. but some times you get in the mood for the stuff and you gotta have it :D. Some ways of reducing the amount of sodium is to use only half the amount of the soup base package that they give you.

As you can see below in the nutritional facts, this one bag of ramen has 2080 mg of sodium, 86% of your daily recommended value. @_@

Nutritional Facts of Ramen: what nutrition?

Two packages that come with the noodles: vegetable mix and soup base

The vegetables in this soup are mostly dried seaweed that expand when you add water, and theres a lot of it. Other items included dried carrot, onion, mushroom, and fish-cake, but the majority of the dried vegetable packet was seaweed.

Bam! spices and veggies unwrapped

Bring your water to a boil and add the ramen noodles in. These noodles are actually udon style, thicker and chewier than other noodles, but also a bit bland from what I noticed. The explosively spicy soup base helps the taste a lot tho.

Some people out of necessity use the microwave to cook ramen, but boiling over the stove top give the ramen a much superior taste. Also this gives you a chance to boil the ramen once, rinse the ramen from its original fried oils,and boil it again with the added soup base and veggies, allowing it to be a much healthier dish sans frying oil.

The broth in this ramen is a bit bland tasting even though it is really spicy it is more of a one dimensional flavor, so I like to add a tiny drop of sesame oil (too much and it will overpower the soup) to add more flavor.

On this occasion, I add chopped up pieces of hot dog and a fried egg to the ramen before serving. Some people like to add a egg in while its boiling to create a egg drop soup like texture. I’ll try that next time maybe.

Ramen with egg and hot dog

Nong Shim Neoguri Spicy Seafood Noodle Ramyun

You can buy Nong Shim Neoguri Spicy Seafood Noodle Ramyun and many other ramen at various Asian markets through out Orlando. This package came from the huge jumbo 1st Oriental Market in the Pine Hills / Colonial Dr area. Try it out!