Instant ramen noodles were invented in Japan in 1958 by businessman Momofuku Ando. Initially a bit of a luxury, they eventually became an inexpensive global staple. The air-dried noodle brick offers a kind of culinary safety net – even when you have next to nothing to eat in the house, you may still have ramen.
Recently, however, instant noodles have been given an upgrade as people seek to adorn and improve them with fresh ingredients and fancy additions. Ocado’s sales of instant noodles have risen 50% year on year, and TikTok now has more than 22,000 posts under the #ramenhacks hashtag.
Some of these recipes are just that – variations on the basic ramen template. Others are more complicated – you can even follow Ken Yamada’s guide to making homemade ramen noodles (a heads-up: you’ll need a pasta machine and an alkaline salt mixture called kansui powder). But if you’re hungry and slightly more pressed for time, here are a further 16 instant noodle tweaks, modifications and recipes to have a go at.
A few years back, one popular TikTok noodle hack went viral enough to become known as TikTok ramen. It’s basically drained instant noodles stirred into a butter, garlic and soy sauce, with a fried egg and a sprinkling of “everything bagel spice”, which you can approximate with a mix of sesame seeds, poppy seeds and salt.
How much effort you’re willing to expend to jazz up what is, first and foremost, a convenience food, may depend on how hungover (or drunk) you are. Many of these additions can be included, deleted or swapped round as you see fit, but most are worth having in your arsenal. If you take nothing else from Felicity Cloake’s upgraded instant noodles, you should absorb her quick-pickled vegetables (carrot, cauliflower, cucumber, whatever) into your repertoire. They take no time – the pickling is nigh on instantaneous – but the result makes a huge difference to the finished product.
When you’re improving on – or improvising with – instant noodles, a big decision has to be made before you start: whether or not you’re going to use the flavour powder that’s included in the packet. Suzie Lee’s frankfurter and fried egg noodles (you heard right) call for whatever soup base the noodles happen to come with, along with two hotdogs cut so they flay out like octopuses when cooked. A quick beef ramen combines the packet’s proprietary beef flavouring with some part-frozen steak (it’s easier to slice it very thinly, so it cooks in a few minutes), some shiitake mushrooms and frozen edamame beans.
However, it’s almost as easy to make your own chilli-garlic base from stuff in your store cupboard, and only slightly more involved to produce a “cheat’s” ramen bowl with chicken stock, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, ginger and any chicken or pork you have lying around.
Meera Sodha’s white cabbage ramen is a simple stir-fry of drained noodles and cabbage with a peanut, beer and gochujang dressing. Two instant noodle variations from Lara Lee, tamarind mushroom noodles, and soy pork and peanut noodles, both gently suggest you reserve those flavour sachets “for another use”.
More elaborate instant noodle tweaks require, if not a tremendous effort, at least a certain amount of foresight. Anna Jones’s autumn ramen deploys a homemade chilli miso, but once you’ve produced a batch it will keep in the fridge for three weeks. Sodha’s caramelised onion and chilli ramen contains an “overnight soy egg” – so you have to know you’re going to want instant noodles at least a day ahead of time. This, I accept, may require a radical shift in your thinking.
At the other end of the scale, you can attempt to turn your own fresh ingredients into something approximating shop-bought convenience food. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s rather ingenious DIY pot noodle recipe combines fresh chopped veg, dried noodles, ginger, garlic, chilli, soy sauce and a stock cube in a heatproof container, ready for boiling water and a stir to produce a quick and portable workday lunch.
There is a freewheeling element to the hacking of a packet of ramen. The original instant ramen noodles were a Japanese approximation of a Chinese staple, so the mixing up of traditions is a given. There is also Korean ramyun, which Judy Joo makes using soya bean paste, prawns, chicken and sugar snap peas or spinach.
If you like, you can go even farther afield. Sodha’s onion ramen was inspired not by Asian traditions, but by french onion soup. There is also more than one recipe out there for ramen carbonara, a culinary heresy that enjoyed a certain viral fame last year.
If that sort of cultural despoliation doesn’t bother you, you can also try your hand at pea and pancetta ramen “risotto” or pasta e fagioli with instant noodles. Purists may object, but then purists probably wouldn’t eat instant noodles in the first place.
