And, after 17 packages of ramen, I couldn’t eat anymore. My feet were swollen like they’d been on a transcontinental flight. It had to stop somewhere.
If we can rank our pro football teams, I thought, we can do it to our food. Why not take the sports analogy even further, I asked myself through sodium-induced mania at 1:30 in the morning, and for a while, I was convinced I’d created a highly scientific and totally foolproof metric to measure instant noodle quality. The equation looked something like this:
rSCORE = (R_taste*1.1)〖+R〗_value+V_misc-((N_a-2000))/500
〖 R〗_value=(.69-Price)/1.1
V_misc= (E_prep+A_ttract+F_ind+S_num)/6
I eventually realized that what I had done didn’t make much sense at all; I’ll chalk it up to hallucinations due to consuming one million percent of my daily salt intake. In the end, I just assigned a 1-10 score and plotted the brands on a scatter chart based on taste and price.
MyKuali Penang White Curry
Like Hans Lienesch, The Ramen Rater, said in my interview with him, there’s just nothing like this on the market right now. The creamy, sinus-clearing broth actually tastes like it took more than three minutes to prepare. It includes a sachet of non-dairy creamer (!), and it is the one instant noodle you might be able to pass off in an actual restaurant. The only issue is that it’s difficult to find—I had to get it on eBay, where I paid about $2.75 per package.
Taste (out of 10): 9.5
Acecook Super Big Ramen Tonkotsu
I loved this ramen—the broth was deeply rich and creamy, like having a nice hot pig smoothie. The ramen block was also exceptional, with thicker-than-average noodles. This product also had, by a lot, the most insane amount of sodium: 3,080 mg, which is 128% of your daily allowance. Your rings won’t fit your hands after eating this, but your palate will thank you.
Taste: 9
by Lucas Peterson, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: uncredited
