Exploring Ramen & Design

Sharing my reflections about food and applying lessons to strengthen our creative muscle

12 min readNov 13, 2018

Introduction: what is ramen?

To keep it short and simple, ramen is a cuisine consisting of noodles and soup (although plenty of dry, soup-less versions of ramen does exist). This incredibly delicious cuisine is not something that’s only consumed in Asian countries and in Asian cartoons. Due to the increasing popularity, unique taste, ease of use, inexpensive price tag along with an indestructible shelf-life, ramen, or at least the instant packet version of it has found its way around being on the shelves of almost every single grocery store here in the US. If you’re living in a college dormitory, you know exactly what I’m talking about when all you have is a microwave, a bottle of water, and a couple of dollars. If you’re walking through Chinatown or Koreatown, or perhaps near some Japanese sushi restaurants, then I’m sure you’ve seen ramen being served on the menu. Ramen is everywhere.

You can say that ramen is primarily Japan’s take on noodles. Food historians have debated over the origin of noodles. Did it come from China or Europe? There is historical evidence of Arabs using dry, string-like shapes made from wheat, so perhaps it came from the Middle East. Regardless of where noodles came from, when it arrived in Japan, it was adapted to their culture, lifestyle, and taste.

Almost all instant ramen tastes good is because they’re packed with tons of sodium, and MSG (monosodium glutamate). While MSG is harmless, excessive sodium on the other hand is probably not good for you. This is why home-cooked, gourmet ramen tends to be on the healthier side because you have full control over all the ingredients that go into it. When we compare the taste, instant ramen is no match against its fresh, home-cooked counterpart (with that said, I do believe that instant ramen does have its place in the kitchen). Anyway, here is the composition of a gourmet bowl of ramen broken down into its five core elements:

Tare: It’s the seasoning sauce that completes the flavor, and brings life in your broth. It’s layered with Umami. Not including tare is kind of like not adding salt to your food —it’s going to be bland. Many restaurants consider their tare recipe to be their secret and most prized possession. Soy-based, salt-based, and miso-based are some of the classical types of tares.
Broth: This makes the foundation or the body of a good bowl of ramen. A clean, rich, flavorful broth defines the characteristic of ramen whether it’s going to be chicken, beef, seafood, or vegetarian. It’s worth noting that there are two categories of broth: chintan, a clear, light/transparent broth, and paitan, a thick, cloudy/milky broth.
Noodles: Without noodles you just have soup. There are many types of noodles out there. Selecting the right type of noodles (based on thickness, ingredient, texture, shape, mouthfeel, etc.) that would pair with the right type of broth requires great wisdom, time, and patience. For instance, with a paitan broth, thinner noodles with more bite and chew are usually preferred. Thicker noodles with lower hydration are paired with chintan broth.
Aroma oil: “Without oil, ramen is just boring soup…” -Alex French Guy Cooking. This is what adds that extra layer of flavor. If I were to give you a pizza analogy, it’s like sprinkling on some oregano or red pepper flakes on your slice before eating. You don’t really need it, but once you use aroma oil, there’s no going back.
Toppings: To make a bowl of ramen more packed with protein, people usually decorate their bowl with slices of cooked chicken, fish cakes, veggies, tofu, shrimp, eggs, etc. Anything and everything can be added here. Go crazy. You hardly find any toppings in a pack of instant ramen. Dehydrated, microscopic vegetables that come in small packets inside instant ramen are basically fish food. But I’m not hating on instant ramen. Some are pretty decent when you’re short on time and budget.

A cross section of a complete bowl of ramen showing how each of the elements are layered.

If you know how to harness the power of each of those five elements, then please shoot me an email or give me a call. Because I’ve been trying to figure out this technique for quite some time now, and I’ve still barely scratched the surface. And it’s a lot harder when you can only use either Halal or Kosher ingredients.

My personal ramen story

As I was growing up in the small town of Bangladesh, my mom would frequently make me something called Maggi noodles. Maggi is the Indian take on instant ramen. It only takes two minutes to make (obviously excluding the time it takes to boil water for marketing purposes), and it comes in a flavor we were all familiar with, curry. My mom is personally biased towards spicy food, so she would always add a few slices of green chilis and garlic to my noodles. This was my breakfast throughout the week.

I was hooked on this stuff. Sometimes she would make it with more soup, and sometimes she would make it dry, kind of like stir-fried, where occasionally, she would mix in a scrambled egg with chopped cilantro and onions. But I didn’t care, both versions were equally addicting.

The dry version was great for taking to school for lunch. Other kids would be eating their standard, Bengali chicken curry with rice, and I would pull out my Lamborghini version of lunch that would make other kids drown in their own drolls. My lunch was international, and it sparked curiosity (and kids are naturally curious) because noodles are not native to Bangladeshi cuisine. So eventually these kids would go home crying, begging their mom to make them ramen for lunch. I’m obviously exaggerating a bit here. Hopefully, you get my point.

From an early age, I really enjoyed the texture of those springy, curly noodles. I think this is mainly due to the fact that my mom was very diligent about not overcooking them. The noodles are extremely sensitive, and a professional chef knows that even a second too late in the boiling hot water can mess it up.

When we came to the US, we resorted to Top Ramen, because there weren’t too many Desi grocery stores around us. And the ones that were within walking distance from our apartment, unfortunately, didn’t carry any Maggi noodles. I was still young, my sense of taste was still developing, and so Top Ramen worked. It filled the ramen shaped void in my life.

When I started university, I also discovered Chinese grocery stores. They are the only stores that dedicated an entire aisle to instant ramen. I felt like I was in ramen heaven. They have countless flavors in so many different shapes and colors, I mean where do I start? I didn’t even know you could have so many variations just in seafood alone. What exactly is octopus ramen?

After trying out countless variations of instant ramen, my favorite became the ones made by Nongshim, and Indomie. They were perfect during late night projects, and when I would be running late for class but I was hungry. They were a necessary part of my diet and life.

When I moved to the upperclassmen housing, I had the luxury of a fully furnished kitchen. This is where my food journey began. I realized that I needed to learn to cook if want to enjoy fresh food. I wanted full control over how I create food with ingredients I love the most. I enjoyed doing things with my hands. Cooking also became therapeutic for me — an excellent way to deal with bad days. I was also curious to try new things. I felt like a chemist. I started with ramen and began to take the instant ramen to the next level by adding a variety of toppings. I made several basic, newbie mistakes towards the beginning. I would call my mom and ask for help. Both of my parents were eager to help and give directions over the phone.

Cooking gourmet ramen during college hit its peak and I could no longer make it taste any better. It’s not until I moved to Texas is where I became more serious about ramen. I realized that I was growing older, my body could no longer accept the amount of processed food that I used to eat when I was young. I had to cut down on my instant ramen. So what else can I do? This was an opportunity for me to discover making ramen completely from scratch. If I can make it from scratch, I can control how much of each ingredient is being added, while also creating something more delicious.

Design lessons from ramen

As a creative professional, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between my cooking experience and my design process. Below are three pieces of advice from my ramen journey that can be applied to your design journey. The first step is about discovering your palate, i.e. creating a design standard for yourself based on learnings from existing work, then you have to allow your ideas to ferment and marinate, and finally, it’s about combining everything with proper balance.

Discover your palate

To this day, I am proud to say that I am still failing. Failure is our greatest teacher, right? However, I'm happy to say that I’ve figured out one of the main reasons why I was failing — my palate for fresh, non-instant ramen is very limited. I don’t know what real ramen taste like (I know that at some point, I need to travel to Japan). I had no idea that an authentic bowl of ramen is actually made out of five different components that when combined, it’s the definition of balanced food. Sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami, all the important notes are present. So without a proper measuring stick and reference point, I didn’t know how to make my ramen. I was blindly cooking.

When it comes to design, I am going to echo what Stephen Gates wrote in his article about developing our palate. This is something that Adam, one of our design professors from our university also drilled into our brain.

If you are what you eat, then you need to eat good designs.

As weird as that sounds, it’s necessary for us to realize that our design palate also has to be good. If I were to give one more food analogy, it would be that — you can’t make a good omelette from rotten eggs. Meaning, if you’re going to design a solution to a problem, you need to have a reference point in your mind, a memorable experience from where you will draw your inspiration.

This is a lesson that I believe to be universal and can be applied outside of the creative field. Writers, engineers, doctors, scientists, they all study the work already done by their predecessors and colleagues. They all strive to build and innovate on their work in order to push it forward.

Discovering your palate is about having a collective knowledge of the work done by humanity at large. If you’re creating something, there’s a good chance that someone else has already done it. When you take a step back to look at all of their creations, you will gain context in terms of what you need to do, and how to solve your problem.

Most of us aren’t born as a prodigy. If we only depend on our natural talent, then we are creating work without any real understanding of how the work will have an impact on the people, organizations, and the businesses that would use it. We are then essentially doing work without any limitations or guidelines. As designers, we are responsible for creating solutions within a set of parameters and constraints. To quote Matias Duarte, “…if there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art.”

If you only rely on your talent, then you also limit yourself from learning and halt your own growth.

In every design thinking session, this is the groundwork that lays the foundation for all future iterations. But one way that I think we can maximize our potential as designers is by creating a moodboard, not just for our work, but for our life. We need to mindfully observe every experience that we’ve enjoyed, that made us laugh, that made us cry, that made us flip the table, that persuaded us into doing something we normally wouldn’t do, and bookmark them in our browser, as well as making a mental note. We need to be present and be open to new experiences. We need to live.

2. Learning how to ferment and marinate

I often find myself asking this question: If I were given the chance to go back in time and go to my university, what are some of the things that I would do differently? Is there anything that I would change or improve? The first thing that comes to mind is how I would start some of my projects at the very last second. I was only motivated by the urgency of my deadline. As everyone knows, last-minute work is usually never successful. I know that for certain courses, you can pull off an assignment at the last minute, but it comes at the cost of physical (sleep), and emotional sacrifice.

In the ramen making process, the ingredients have to go through a series of fermentation and marination process. Miso paste, for example, takes years to complete. The traditional way of brewing soy sauce is now an art form because of how long it takes for the koji starter to activate the beans and brings out the rich flavor. Another ingredient is bonito flakes, or katsuobushi, which takes months for the smoked flavors to sink into the dried skipjack tuna. When you’re making your chicken broth, you need a minimum of four to six hours for the bones and collagen to break down and dissolve into the liquid. As you can see, allowing time to ferment and marinate is a crucial part of the process that should not be ignored.

Our design projects were given to us well ahead of time for a reason. Time is a key ingredient that you need to use to create good work. You have to come up with ideas and allow those ideas to marinate in your brain with your thoughts. You should give time for those ideas to ferment, and develop more flavor. Most importantly, we need to look at our design from various perspectives and angles, which doesn’t happen instantaneously. Even if it does, you’re probably not seeing the full picture. A well-rounded design solution needs time to marinate so you can think through all the possible edge-cases, and ways it can go wrong. You’re pressure testing it for potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities. When you’re ready, allow feedback from other designers to further enhance your ideas.

I want to clarify that you’re not sitting idle while your ideas and your projects are marinating. Design is also about iterations, and we need to have a process, and a plan ahead of time that factors in work from other aspects of the project that can be done in parallel. For example, while you’re marinating version 1.0, why not think about your user testing strategy, or work on competitive analysis, or start version 2.0? This way, you’re maximizing your productivity while still meeting your deadline.

3. Balance

Design gurus are famous for their “less is more” slogan, but without balance, you will have too much of the “less” (or so much white space that it looks like a technical glitch) and end up designing a tasteless solution, something that never really solved the problem. In design, as well as in life, finding that middle path is probably the most difficult part of our journey.

Mastering balance in the creative field requires routine exercise. You have to constantly add and subtract. You have to keep yourself updated with the work already done by others, allow time for your own work to marinate, and revisit your past versions of the work in order to find new perspectives.

In a bowl of ramen, the tare, the broth, noodles, toppings, oil, everything is placed according to their correct portions to create a good bowl of ramen. Good food brings good people together. When good people come together, good ideas begin to take shape. It’s about creating an environment for that conversation to take place. It’s about creating a balanced lifestyle that can sustain decades of good designs, good designers, and of course, and good ramen.

Helpful ramen resources

Note: If you have any ramen recommendations or tips, please let me know! I’d love to learn about how to improve my dish.