I nstant ramen noodles were invented in Japan in 1958 by businessman Momofuku Ando . Initially a bit of a luxury, they eventually became an inexpensive global staple. The air-dried noodle brick offers a kind of culinary safety net – even when you have next to nothing to eat in the house, you may still have ramen.
Recently, however, instant noodles have been given an upgrade as people seek to adorn and improve them with fresh ingredients and fancy additions. Ocado’s sales of instant noodles have risen 50% year on year , and TikTok now has more than 22,000 posts under the #ramenhacks hashtag. Some of these recipes are just that – variations on the basic ramen template.
Others are more complicated – you can even follow Ken Yamada’s guide to making homemade ramen noodles (a heads-up: you’ll need a pasta machine and an alkaline salt mixture called kansui powder). But if you’re hungry and slightly more pressed for time, here are a further 16 instant noodle tweaks, modifications and recipes to have a go at. A few years back, one popular TikTok noodle hack went viral enough to become known as TikTok ramen .
It’s basically drained instant noodles stirred into a butter, garlic and soy sauce, with a fried egg and a sprinkling of “everything bagel spice”, which you can approximate with a mix of sesame seeds, poppy seeds and salt. How much effort you’re willing to expend to jazz up what is, first and foremost, a convenience food, may depend on how hungover (or drunk).