Noodle Journey Episode 176: Samyang Buldak Yakisoba Ramen

The American export version of Samyang Buldak Yakisoba Ramen recently made its way to the USA in one of the most unlikely of retailers, having been available in other countries like South Korea and Australia for over a year. Out of the blue, it started showing up at Target stores in the USA just a couple of weeks ago. That’s right everyone, at the time of this filming, I couldn’t find a single other American store that stocks this flavor in packs, not even my local Asian markets.

Read more: Noodle Journey Episode 176: Samyang Buldak Yakisoba Ramen

I grabbed a five-pack from my local Target for a review immediately. I paid $7 for the five-pack, so it should be in that same price range ballpark at your Target as well. Now, there’s one very big difference between this version exported to America and what you may see in other markets, which I’ll get to . If you are not familiar with yakisoba, it’s a stir-fried noodle dish from Japan that typically has a wonderful zesty, umami, slightly sweet sauce. Of course, in typical fashion, what Samyang has done here is combine that standard yakisoba sauce flavor with its signature Buldak heat.

Inside the pack, I noticed a new type of noodle that isn’t in any of the other Buldak product ranges. First off, we have 1630 mg of sodium in a single bag. The sauce packet contains a lot of the typical ingredients like Worcestershire sauce, oyster sauce, and sugar, but it also has a couple of surprises like apple juice concentrate. Buried way down in the ingredients list is habanero pepper extract. The flake packet contains cabbage, which is a typical yakisoba vegetable topping. What’s also a typical yakisoba ingredient is mayonnaise, and that’s the big difference I was hinting at earlier. If you buy this, for example, in Australia, the photo on the front of the package will show a drizzle of mayonnaise, and that’s because that export of Buldak yakisoba comes with a spicy mayonnaise packet. This one here in the US from Target does not. If you buy this from Target, this is what you get: no mayonnaise, and I am really disappointed in that.

Noodles:

These are much thinner than the usual Buldak noodles, but they still have a good chew. Yakisoba like this typically goes with thinner noodles, and I think the pairing of the noodle gauge and the sauce is really good. I think next time I make these, I might even cook them for two and a half minutes just to get them a little more al dente because, as it stands, these are slightly softer than I like, but all in all, still a decent quality noodle.

• 7/10

Spiciness:

Just because the habanero pepper is buried all the way down in the ingredients list at the bottom does not mean this isn’t hot; this is pretty hot. It also has a very strong linger to it. This is not quite as spicy as the original black package Hot Chicken flavor, but it’s not far off. I’ve seen some people on Reddit say that they don’t find this one as spicy as the other varieties, and I have to wonder if that is because they are eating an export from a different region. For me, these are pretty hot.

• 7/10

Overall:

I really like the smell of these because I love the smell of yakisoba sauce; it smells like Worcestershire sauce. On the first bite, I really got a lot of good yakisoba flavor, and then the habanero capsaicin kind of took over on the back end. While I can handle the spice level of this just fine, I honestly did not get very much yakisoba flavor out of it after a few bites. I think the spice level in this is a little unbalanced compared to the other flavors because all I tasted by the end was the pepper extract and very little of the things I love about yakisoba. I get that Samyang has to put that chili extract in here to make it Buldak, but the other flavors are not bold enough to stand up to the chili pepper, and I find that pretty disappointing. The cabbage flakes are good; they came back nicely with a good cabbage flavor and decent mild crunch. While I can tolerate this spice just fine, I would have liked it so much more if they dropped the chili extract down to the level of, say, Cream Carbonara or something because right now it’s just kind of overpowering everything else. In a more perfect world, I probably would have given this a 7 or a 7.5 out of 10.

• 6/10