Today we have a limited edition cup noodle that is a burnt garlic chicken tonkotsu created by the chefs at Hakata Shinpu and Kimuzukashi-Ya. This is the tenth special edition in this "double dream collaboration" series of noodles from Maruchan. Hakata Shinpu is from Fukuoka and Kimuzukashi-Ya is from Nagano. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a lot of background information on these ramen shops, even in Japanese - but they have to be pretty famous in their own way. I'm always game to try these limited editions so lets get on with the review.
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| Very distinctive white cup with red and black highlighted areas for each ramen shop. Big bold black lettering makes it clear what you are getting, but there is a fair bit of text making it look a bit busy. Kind of like a sign with too many highlights. Three quarters view of the cup and you can see it has a busy design that imparts a lot of info, but it is still eye-catching. |
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| Top view of the lid. Red and black sides for the ramen shops. |
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| Another view of the cup with the oil packet removed. |
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| Ramen shop 1 from Fukuoka. Their sign has red in it! Pick of the head chef too. |
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| Ramen Shop 2 from Nagano. And their sign has black in it! Pic of the head chef. |
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| Ingredients, nutritional information, manufacturing information. They packed in the information on this panel. |
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| After opening the lid, you can see plenty of powdered soup base, little pieces of meat, green onions, menma (bamboo), and I think a kind of shelf-fungus (could be seaweed too). |
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| I added boiling water, closed the lid, and waited about three minutes for everything to rehydrate. This is what I saw when I opened the lid. Looks pretty nice. |
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| I then added the burnt garlic oil packet to the soup. |
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| The cup in all of its glory. |
I gave everything a good mix to ensure the garlic oil mixed in with the soup. The burnt garlic oil wasn't garlicky as it is kind of burnt and caramelized. It adds a richness and a bit of oomph to the soup. The soup itself was pretty nice with a good fragrance indicating its chicken and pork broth roots. The thin noodles had a nice chew to them and rehydrated quite nicely. The little bits of meat were actual thin cuts instead of ground meat blocks and were pretty good. Maruchan obviously has this type of meat as a standard as I've seen it in other soups from them. The toppings went well with the soup and it was definitely a pretty tasty cup of noodle, but one that didn't pack quite as much flavour as I expected with the infusion of the black garlic.
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| Closeup of the noodles and some toppings. |
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