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.

If you have seen "Raoh" in a supermarket, that is a different pack. Woolworths ranges a Raoh-branded five-pack of single-serve noodles; the retailers listing it give its country of origin as Vietnam, and the packaging is printed for another market. This is the Japanese-market pack: made in Japan, three larger servings rather than five small ones. Same brand and the same logo, genuinely different product.

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, flat, smooth and dense, and everyone agrees on that much. Where people split is whether it eats like a ramen shop's noodle or a bit too neat and machine-made. You will know within one bowl which camp you're in.
• The soup is a Hokkaido rice-koji miso, koji being the cultured rice that ferments the paste, with a Kagoshima Berkshire-pork extract. It is a pork-based broth.
• The most common complaint is that the broth is light. Worth knowing that the noodle and the soup tend to divide people separately: very few dislike both, so if one of the two is not for you the other may still be.
• Three servings in the bag, cooked one at a time. Nothing comes with it, no dried vegetables, no meat, no garnish. The bag is sold bare so you top it however you like.
• One serving carries close to a whole day's worth of salt by the World Health Organization's guideline: every flavour in 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.

The one thing to get right: do not pour the cooking water away. You boil the noodles in a measured 450 ml, then tip that water into your bowl over the soup sachet 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 sachet is a liquid, and it goes into the empty bowl first, never into the pan. The 450 ml is a measured amount rather than "a pot of water": the ratio is the seasoning. And the pack is the Japanese-market one, so the method is set out in full above, in English.