When I was in Tokyo, I stopped by a 7-11, and managed to find IPPUDO cup noodle which was a welcome surprise. Ippudo is a famous ramen chain in Japan that has expanded overseas. Their specialty is a tonkotsu (pork bone soup stock) ramen. This cup noodle is a Hong Kong Spicy Shrimp pork bone flavour probably based on something offered by their Hong Kong restaurants. I snapped up a cup when I saw it and have been waiting for an appropriate moment to dine on it.
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| The Ippudo cup noodle is in bright blue packaging that is hard to miss on any shelf. A packet of spicy shrimp sauce is glued to the top of the lid. In case you're wondering, all of these cup noodles are also shrink wrapped for freshness and it also helps to keep any sauce packets from being knocked up. |
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| The cup noodle with the sauce packet removed. |
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| View of the cup noodle lid. You can see the 7-11 logo at the top with a nice picture of the ramen soup with toppings on it. |
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| Side view of the cup. You can see that the graphics are pretty attractive. The soup looks delicious, with hints of spicyness from the red oil in the soup. There is cabbage, egg, shrimp balls, and ground pork. I also kind of figured out that it was a Hong Kong cup noodle from the graphics. There are junks in the water and the buildings are all lit in neon from top to bottom! Hong Kong was the original city to do this on a wide scale, and Shanghai is pretty good now too. |
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| Nutritional information. |
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| Ingredients and more. |
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| Another view of the front of the cup. |
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| Cup and sauce. |
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| When I lifted the foil top, a deep and rich aroma of soy and other smells wafted out. Very appealing if you like this stuff. |
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| Detail shot of the dried ingredients. You can see the cabbage, pork, egg, and little balls of shrimp. It looks nice! There is also lots of soup powder. I was thinking this was going to be really tasty already. |
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| I added boiling water, closed the lid, and waited longer than the three minutes as the types of noodles in these more deluxe cup noodle take like 4 minutes or so to hydrate. You don't want to wait the full time as they will eventually overcook and become soggy too. The top of the soup after 4 minutes looked great. There were noodles with lots of toppings. |
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| I tasted the soup by itself and it was good with lots of deep flavour of pork and soy. I then added the spicy shrimp oil. This added more zip and and heat to the whole proceeding, significantly changing the character of the soup. A good shrimp flavour and aroma too! |
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| Closeup of the noodles and toppings. |
The soup was very tasty and mild to low medium in heat. The shrimp flavour wasn't overpowering, but mixed well with the other flavours in the soup base. The toppings were good and the noodles were nice and firm, maybe a little more brittle than I like, but still very good. I really enjoyed this ramen, and it went down quickly. The flavour did remind me a bit about Nissin Hong Kongs XO Sauce instant ramen in terms of the spiciness and seafood flavours. I would have liked to have had another cup of this probably limited edition cup noodle.
More ramen and Japanese pop culture posts.
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