Nissin Raoh Tonkotsu Shoyu Ramen Packet — Pork & Soy Broth, 3 Servings, 279g

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 soup, and the broth is soy-led with pork richness through it and a real hit of garlic. Raoh is Nissin's premium bagged line, and this flavour carries the thickest noodle in the range.

On the pack: 日清ラ王 豚骨醤油.

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

• It is not the tonkotsu you are picturing. If "tonkotsu" makes you think of the thick, opaque, milk-white Hakata bowl, this is a different thing: the first ingredient in the soup is soy sauce, and there is no pork-bone extract in it at all. What it has is pork fat and pork extract in a soy broth, with garlic. It tastes like iekei: the Yokohama style, soy-based and garlicky, rather than anything from Hakata.
• The noodle is non-fried, so it eats closer to a fresh noodle than a packet one usually does. It is the thickest and straightest of the Raoh bags we stock: firm bite, springy, slippery.
• Two things go into it: a Kagoshima Berkshire-pork extract and an Aomori garlic paste.
• Three servings in the bag. Nothing comes with it, no dried vegetables, no meat, no garnish. Nissin's own instructions suggest chāshū (braised pork belly, or any leftover roast pork), spinach, spring onion and nori seaweed, which is a useful shopping list.
• The honest one: it will make your kitchen smell, and it lingers. It is a garlicky pork broth doing what a garlicky pork broth does, worth knowing before you cook it in a flat with the bedroom door open.
• One serving carries near a whole day's worth of salt by the World Health Organization's guideline, and most of it is in the broth.
• 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. There is no colander and nothing goes down the sink.

Two more things. This flavour cooks for five minutes, not four: a minute longer than the miso and tantanmen bags, because the noodle is thicker. Going by another Raoh's timing will undercook it. And the pack is the Japanese-market one, so the method is set out in full above, in English.