Nissin Raoh Miso Ramen Packet Japanese Non-Fried Noodles 3 Servings 276g

This is a packet of ramen you cook in a saucepan, not a cup you pour water into. Three servings, each a dried noodle cake and a sachet of miso soup, and the broth is a pork-and-miso one lifted with garlic and ginger: sweet, savoury and deep rather than sharp. Raoh is Nissin's premium bagged line.

On the pack: 日清ラ王 味噌.

This is the Japanese-market pack, made in Japan.

What you're getting

• The noodle is the reason this line exists. It is non-fried, so it eats closer to a fresh noodle than a packet one usually does. It is thick, wavy, smooth and dense, and very even from strand to strand, more factory-neat than shop-rough.
• The soup is a pork-based miso broth. Just over half its miso is a Hokkaido rice-koji miso, koji being the cultured rice that ferments the paste, and part of its pork extract comes from Kagoshima Berkshire pork.
• Three servings in the bag, cooked one at a time. No toppings come with it: no dried vegetables, no meat, no garnish. You get the noodles and the soup, and you top it however you like.
• One serving carries about a whole day's worth of salt by the World Health Organization's guideline: every flavour we sell from this range is in the same territory, and most of it is in the broth. Worth knowing before you drink the bowl dry.
• Allergens: contains wheat, egg, milk, sesame and soy. Egg and milk are declared on the pack but are not in the ingredient list, so our ingredients panel does not show them: on those two, trust the allergen list. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.
• Also on the label: the Japanese ingredient list names pork extract and pork fat in the soup, and a chicken seasoning in the noodles. Anyone who avoids pork or meat should skip it.

The one thing to get right: do not pour the cooking water away. You boil the noodles in a measured 430 ml, then tip that water into your bowl over the liquid soup and add the noodles last. The water is the broth. This is the opposite of the yakisoba trays we also sell, where draining is the whole method, so it is an easy habit to bring to the wrong product. There is no colander involved and nothing goes down the sink.

A few more things worth knowing. The soup is a liquid in a sachet: squeeze it into the empty bowl first, never into the pan. The 430 ml is a measured amount rather than "a pot of water": the ratio is the seasoning. And the cooking instructions printed on the pack are in Japanese, so the method is set out in full below, in English.