Myojo Ippei-chan Instant Yakisoba — Mustard Mayo, 135g

Ippei-chan is instant yakisoba. Japanese fried noodles you drain, rather than a soup you drink. The sauce is thick and sweet-savoury, in the Worcestershire family, and the last of the three sachets is mustard mayonnaise, which goes on top of it: the part nobody expects, and the reason people pick this one. It is an ordinary supermarket cup in Japan, not a specialty item, and one of the three brands Japanese eaters compare against each other.

Myojo's Ippei-chan range runs from this 135 g cup up through a large and an extra-large that comes with two mayonnaise sachets, and sideways into other flavours: a salt one, a cod-roe one, and one built on okonomiyaki sauce, the brown sauce Japan puts on its savoury pancakes. This is the original: the one the range is named after.

明星 一平ちゃん夜店の焼そば, ippei-chan yomise no yakisoba. Worth matching against the pack if you are checking what arrived: 一平ちゃん is the brand, 夜店の焼そば is this product.

What you're getting

• Flash-fried wheat noodles that hold their bite, staying firm rather than going soft. Under them a thick liquid sauce rather than a powder, so it mixes through easily.
• The mustard mayonnaise comes in a squeeze sachet, so you control it. Put half on, stir, taste, then decide: some people get a sharp hit up the nose from it and some barely notice, and you cannot take it back out.
• The cabbage is already in the cup. Three sachets come loose under the lid: the liquid sauce, a furikake, a dry topping, of green seaweed (sea lettuce) and pickled red ginger with savoury flakes through it, and the mustard mayonnaise. On the ingredient list all three are grouped together under "sauce", which is why mustard mayonnaise turns up inside it.
• It is a rich cup and it is meant to be: heavy on both salt and calories. If you find heavy sauces cloying, this is not the yakisoba to start with.
• It is not vegetarian, the sauce contains pork extract.
• Allergens: contains wheat, egg, milk, soy, sesame, orange and apple. Australia's allergen chart has no orange or apple category, so neither can appear in the pack's allergen box here — check the ingredients, not the chart; ours is the fuller list.
• Allergens, two more: there is pork in it as well, as an extract in the sauce, declared in Japan, not an Australian allergen. Made on equipment that also handles prawn, crab and walnut.

Three things people get wrong the first time. This is not a soup, at three minutes you pour the water out, and the lid is the strainer: peel the marked corner, hold the lid down, and tip. Drain it over the sink, not over your lap: the cup is full of boiling water. And the sachets go on after the draining, never before: liquid sauce first, then the furikake, then the mustard mayonnaise last, stirring as you go.

Two more worth knowing. Despite the soba in the name, yakisoba is a wheat noodle: there is no buckwheat in it, and it is not gluten-free. And a chilled "Ippei-chan" stir-fry pack sold in America is a different product, cooked in a pan with oil: if you land on those instructions, they are not for this. The only method Myojo publishes for this cup is boiling water poured in, waited on, and drained.