Instant noodles have long been the standard for any starving students who need a cheap but filling meal.
Alternatively, you may be one of those night owls who wander into the kitchen at 2 am looking for a bag of chips, only to be faced with a lone pack of noodles—which admittedly you crunch up and eat secretly in the dark anyway.
From desperate meals to a little YOLO snack, this article outlines 3 ways to prepare some kickass store-bought ramen that will make your roomies swear you were Momofuku Ando himself.
Photo by Giovanni Crystal
1. Sprinkle on Some Green Onions
Photo by Giovanni Crystal
So simple, yet so scrumptious. Green onions add the perfect amount of onion flavour without a full-on assault on the senses like yellow or red onions would. Just chop up the green stalks into thin little rings and add as many as you desire.
2. Throw in Some Soft-Boiled Eggs
Photo by Giovanni Crystal
The high-protein content of the egg white will balance out the saltiness of the ramen stock.
As an added bonus, eggs are super cheap and extremely healthy. All of the nonsense about eggs contributing to high cholesterol has been debunked, so treat yo’ self and gobble up those golden yolks.
Note: Once you’ve become a ramen expert, you can move up to placing a raw egg into the boiling hot stock, but this can be pretty tricky. Baby steps, okay?
3. Finish with Nori and Seaweed Away
Photo by Andre Li
Snack-sized sheets of seaweed are available in many large grocery stores, like Sobeys and Loblaws, and definitely in all Asian grocers. You can get the standard salty version, or step it up with the sesame or wasabi flavours (trust me, seriously, SO good).
To make your dish look fancy, cut the seaweed sheets diagonally to form two scalene triangles and then stand them up in your ramen with only the bottoms touching the soup, i.e. don’t just dunk them in like you’re some ramen savage. Since they get mushy pretty quickly, make sure to add them in last.
When you add the toppings to your ramen, be sure to form them into little isolated mounds on top of the soup. If you don’t care about taking the Instagram shot of your steaming masterpiece or if YOU HAVE NO SOUL you can just throw them all in and mix it all about.
Now, get your chopsticks out and start slurping. You won’t be able to go back to plain Mr. Noodles after you’ve tasted these 3 super simple ramen upgrades.
Check out these other ways to amp up your ramen: