Replicating Instant Ramen

Today in class, we watched a video ” Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Instant Ramen“, about making instant ramen, and I think this video will be useful to people who love to eat instant ramen, but worry about the safety issues of it. With this video, they can make instant ramen on their own through the healthy ingredients, so that they no longer need to worry eating instant ramen will make them unhealthy.

In this video, the chef, Claire tried three ways to make the noodles. According to Wikipedia, Claire found that the key ingredient of instant noodles is something called “Kansui”, an alkaline solution consisting of a 9:1 ratio of sodium carbonate to potassium carbonate, so that the noodles can get springiness and chewiness (4:59). So she decided to use baking sodium solution to reduce acidity so that the noodles can be basic (5:18). However, this kind of noodles could not be rehydrated. Therefore, at last, she tried to add baked baking soda, turning sodium bicarbonate into sodium carbonate, which make the dough more alkalinic so that it can retain its texture after fried (13:21). And this time, she succeeded. The final recipe of noodles is the following:

280g water

10g salt

5g baked baking soda

500g bread flour

After mixing these ingredients together, Claire boiled them first, and then air fried them with low temperature. This aimed to make the noodles have the ability to rehydrate, and not make it as mushy as the ones that were fried in oil.

When Claire finished making the noodles, she started to make the chicken-flavour powder, which she called “umami bomb chicken stock”. In this part, she put vegetables and chicken in water to cook, and then pureed the soup into solid. After the soup became sticky, she dehydrated it by putting it in a dehydrator for 18 hours. After the 18 hours, she put the paper-like soup into blender and made them into powder. At last, she added msg and salt to the powder in order to give it a taste of umami. During the cooking process, the starches in food were combined together by the high temperature to form a long chain, which made the soup sticky like “baby food”. When the soup was dehydrating, the starches were losing all the water molecules, which made the soup into “a sheet”. By just adding water to the powder can give the starches back water molecules again to have a soup.

In my opinion, I like this video for it attracts me with its topic “making instant ramen”. I love instant ramen, and I consider it as my second life, not only the food that keeps me alive from school food, but its amazing flavours and tastes. And seeing her successfully replicated instant ramen made me really happy. One point I feel a little bit uncomfortable about this video is it takes too long time on how Claire made the noodles as curve as the noodles she bought. This is just a little bit too off topic. But consider the video as a whole, I am amazed by Claire’s ability to make instant noodles through her knowledge of food science (especially her use of baking soda as alkaline solution to replace Kansui). I pretty enjoyed watching this video.