In which Sho eats 3x his recommended daily salt intake.
A few months ago, I, the iconic and now ubiquitous instant noodle product produced by Nongshim, had compromised its quality when reformulating its noodles for a cup noodle version. I also noted in passing that I thought Shin Ramyun Black, a putatively premium version of that product, was inferior in every way to the less expensive original. I followed that piece up with a, in which I found some distinct differences, and determined that I vastly preferred the Japanese versions to the American.
That being said, I prepared each dueling set of products simultaneously, following the instructions on the packaging exactly and weighing out the amount of water called for in grams, and using similarly sized cooking vessels to control for possible evaporation of water during the cooking process and, thus, intensification of seasoning.
After a few tastings, alternating between each bowl, I decided to dig a little deeper into each one to get a better feel for each experience, and I found that the main differences between the two, as has been the case with the previous taste tests of various instant noodles, lies in the noodles. The American ones are less chewy and easier to cut with your teeth; the Korean noodles have a squeakiness, a resistance to being cut, that translates to a far more pleasurable eating experience.
The verdict here, if it isn’t immediately apparent to you already, is that I preferred the Korean version by a mile.
On the taste front, the two products are entirely different. The American Shin Ramyun Black is everything that I’ve always hated about the product: barely distinguishable from the cheaper Shin Ramyun Red, with those same dusty noodles. The Korean version, however, is remarkably good: It smells, and the promise of that aroma is realized as soon as you take a sip of the beefy broth, which, just like the Korean Shin Ramyun Red, also has a roundness of flavor that is absent in the American version.
That being said, I enjoy a Neoguri from time to time, and that’s mostly because it seems to have an unapologetically seafood-forward flavor, a rarity in the American instant-noodle market, and since there was some possibility that a comparison of Korean and American Neoguri could shed light on the relative differences between Shin Ramyun products, I thought it couldn’t hurt to add them as data points in this larger test.
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