[Maruchan Ramen] Chicken Flavor

I'm sorry guys for my absence last week... I got lazy, things led to another and I just didn't have the time to write this post last week. I'm also really running out of things to review... I would review the Union food, but everyone knows how bad their food is. So today, I decided to steal one of my roommate's ramen!

Now, as a Korean student, ramen is... kind of like the holy grail of cheap and delicious food. If any of you haven't tried Korean ramen yet, you are really missing out in life. In fact, if you comment on this post, I will randomly pick two people and get them a pack of ramen each!

But anyways, even though I'm pretty much addicted to ramen, I haven't had any ramen since I came to the United States. The ramen I will be eating today is my roommate's favorite, the Chicken Flavored Maruchan Ramen.

I cooked the ramen as I would cook any ramen. Open the package, broke the noodles in half, put water in the bowl and cooked it for 5 minutes in the microwave. Up until then, everything was normal. Then, I put the powdered flavoring in. That was when things started looking weird.

The thing is, almost all Korean ramen are spicy. So any ramen that doesn't look red or some shade or red looks... weird to me. But I mean, I've had non-spicy ramen before. So I mixed the flavoring in and let it sit for a minute to cool down a little.

Hmm. The smell was interesting. It really wasn't the smell of "chicken" but rather herbs used in traditional Korean medicine. The slightly bitter and earthy smell mixed in with what I assume was the artificial flavoring to make the soup taste like chicken stock. It wasn't completely unpleasant, but it definitely didn't smell like chicken soup.

Nonetheless, I took a bite.

Well. It really wasn't too bad. It was very... plain and one dimensional. It wasn't that the soup wasn't flavored, but it was rather flat. I could tell what was meant to taste like chicken, but it tasted more like artificial flavoring. The texture of the noodle was actually pretty decent. There was a slight bit of chew in the middle although the outsides were soft. Almost perfectly al-dente.

Overall, the ramen itself really wasn't too bad. It was a little too salty for my taste, but it's cheap and filling. Maybe next time, I'll try cooking it with actual chicken stock with some vegetables and actual chicken to give it more flavor and depth. But as a quick dinner when you're too lazy or busy to make an actual dinner, this would serve as an acceptable alternative.