By Georgina Gustin
Invented in a backyard shed during lean times, instant ramen has become a global food juggernaut. Walk into just about any food store, anywhere, and chances are you’ll find a few colorful packages containing a dry raft of woven noodles and a foil flavor packet.
But ramen is ever-evolving, appearing as a Japanese street favorite, a dorm room staple, a hip foodie obsession and, most recently, a hybrid that’s both artisanal and convenient.
The provenance of the dish we call ramen is a little murky, but scholars believe that Chinese tradesmen first brought the wheat noodles to the Japanese port Yokohama in the late 19th century.
In fact, until the 1950s they were referred to as “Chinese” soba, after the Japanese soba noodle. Japanese speakers also took the Chinese word for pulled noodle, la-mian, and swapped an R sound for the L, phonetically morphing la-mian into ramen. The new name stuck.
Ramen swept the country after World War II, when the US flooded a hungry Japan with cheap wheat. Popular regional styles emerged as ramen chefs riffed and created countless varieties.
In 1957, an innovative Osaka man named Momofuku Ando noticed workers lined up at a local shop, waiting for steaming bowls of noodles. He decided he could speed the noodle-preparation process and help sustain the workers who were rapidly rebuilding postwar Japan.
After experimenting in his backyard shed for a year, tinkering with heat, wheat, MSG, and palm oil, he came up with a near-instant noodle that could be rehydrated and cooked in three minutes.
His first product, “Chikin Ramen” hit the market in 1958, launching Ando’s company, Nissin. More than four decades later, the Japanese would vote instant ramen the country’s best invention of the 20th century.
Nissin released the now ubiquitous Top Ramen instant noodle line in the US in 1971, followed by Cup O’ Noodles, which cooked with boiling water poured into a plastic foam serving vessel.
First sold in the US for 25 cents, instant ramen’s irresistible salt-fat-carbohydrate trifecta gained traction with cost-conscious students and thrifty households. Even today, American shoppers can buy ramen in 12-packs for less than 19 cents a serving.
During Japan’s economic downturn of the 1990s and 2000s, the Japanese embraced ramen’s working-class roots, making it one of the country’s most popular dishes. By then, ramen had also reached every corner of the globe.
Cheap and non-perishable, ramen became a staple for the world’s poor and a common selection for food aid packages. To deflect jabs that the product is unhealthy, ramen makers formed the World Instant Noodles Association.
Members have donated more than 5 million packages to disaster-stricken areas, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Yunnan, China after an earthquake in 2014. Critics assail instant ramen’s high salt, fat and chemical content, but concede the product satisfies hunger.
In 2004, American mega-chef David Chang upended ramen’s reputation as a cheap, highly processed food for the masses when he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City.
Named for the inventor of instant ramen, Momofuku served steaming bowls of artisan noodles, topped with humanely reared Berkshire pork belly and farm-raised eggs. The formula was a hit, and customers endured huge lines.
Momofuku’s success catapulted ramen into the pages of glossy food magazines and made it the food of the moment. Restaurant entrepreneurs jumped on the trend, launching ramen shops, or ramen-ya, all over the country.
Looking for the middle ground between high-end Manhattan noodles and foam-born super fare, New Jersey-based Sun Noodle, which supplies Momofuku and other top ramen restaurants, introduced packaged consumer ramen products that bear only a resemblance to their predecessors.
Sold in Asian and high-end food shops, the fresh noodles require refrigeration and contain no MSG. Also unlike their forebears, the packages come with flavor packets that contain concentrated soup base and spices. (With instant ramen, the packet contents are powdered.)
To further research and development into ramen, the company also opened “Ramen Lab” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood. Ramen seminars and tastings are held there, along with reservation-only “ramen flights” on some nights.
In a perhaps inevitable progression, Chang pronounced ramen dead, felled by its Internet-fueled ubiquity. In his quarterly magazine, Lucky Peach, he argued that ramen is no longer the hip, outsider food it once was, and that ramen-making skills, recipes and traditions are no longer being handed down from master to apprentice. “Now the Internet’s changed everything,” Chang lamented. “People can get all the information they want instantaneously, and that has killed innovation in ramen.”
From a chef’s point of view, he may be right, but more than 105 billion servings of instant ramen were eaten in 2013, for instance. Food industry analysts say that number will continue to rise, and ramen will keep on its course toward world culinary domination.
Originally published September 23, 2015.
