Peyoung Sauce Yakisoba Super Large Japanese Instant Fried Noodles 237g

Peyoung is instant yakisoba, and yakisoba is not a soup. You pour boiling water in, wait three minutes, then tip the water out and toss the noodles through a sachet of brown sauce. It tastes closer to home than the name suggests: the sauce is built on Worcestershire, so it lands near a fried-noodle version of a brown sauce you already know: sweeter, with sesame, green seaweed and pickled ginger running through it. This is the 超大盛 (chō-ōmori, super large) size, a 237 g pack against the standard 120 g, with 180 g of it noodles: twice the standard pack, and one very large dinner or a comfortable meal for two. Buy it if you want instant noodles that eat like a dinner and don't mind tipping a tray of boiling water out over the sink; if you wanted a soup or a snack-sized cup, this is the wrong one.

If you have had a Nissin U.F.O., this is the sweeter and lighter of the pair; which sauce is richer is the part nobody agrees on.

On the pack: ペヤング ソースやきそば 超大盛 (Peyoung sōsu yakisoba chō-ōmori).

What you're getting

• Flash-fried wheat noodles, and a dried garnish of cabbage, seasoned mince, sesame, aosa seaweed and pickled red ginger that comes back to life in the water.
• Everyday Japanese supermarket food, not a delicacy and not a gift.
• Three sachets come inside: the dried garnish, the sauce, and a small pepper one: pepper, not chilli. The pepper is the one people miss. It goes on at the very end, after you drain, and skipping it is why some people call the tray flat.
• It is a lot of food for one sitting, and the noodle block is physically two separate cakes, so it halves cleanly if you would rather split it than finish it.
• There is a single sauce sachet for double the noodles, and plenty of people in Japan reckon it lands light. Others say the opposite and find it salty. It comes down to how thoroughly you drain.
• Allergens: contains wheat, soy, sesame and apple. Australian labels don't have to flag apple as an allergen, and the ingredient list does not say where it comes from, so if you avoid apple, skip it.
• Also on the label: the pack also declares beef, chicken and pork, which are not allergens under Australian rules. Read the ingredient list rather than the allergen box: the noodles are fried in lard, the sauce carries beef extract, and the garnish has chicken mince. Maruka publishes an English version of this pack.

Two things worth knowing before you order. It is not spicy. Peyoung is famous in English for its "hell-spicy" packs; that is a different line, and this is the plain original sauce. And there is meat in it: the noodles are fried in lard, and there is beef in the sauce and chicken in the garnish.

Drain it over the sink, slowly. The tray takes 820 mL of boiling water and you tip it out by hand, so it is heavy and hot when full. The tray is printed in Japanese, so the five steps further down this page are your instructions. They show you where to hold it. If you see black specks on the noodle block, that is scorched noodle, not dirt. Check the name on the pack, too. Maruka sells a cheaper line called ペヨング (Peyong), one character different from ペヤング (Peyoung). This is the Peyoung.