Today I’ve got something new and seemingly pretty unique from Ramen Bae: Ramen Hot Sauce. This is a very specifically marketed product and I’ve just never quite seen anything like it before. Ramen Bae is normally known for their dried toppings that you cook with your noodles, but this is something completely different. It’s a jarred hot sauce whose flavor profiles are supposed to be complimentary to instant ramen. And yeah, we’ve already got things like chili crisp that can handle that, but Ramen Bae is calling this a hot sauce, not a chili crisp or chili oil, even though the description lists chili, garlic, and oil. From what I can see of the consistency in this jar, it makes me think that calling this a “hot sauce” is a marketing tactic. This does kind of look like chili crisp, so once I open this up we’re going to find out if that’s really the case together.
The Verdict:
You can buy this direct from Ramen Bae for a steep $13.99 for this single jar, and I think that price tag is a little high for what is basically 4 oz. of sauce. It’s kind of in line with the pricing of a lot of other premium small-batch hot sauces, but those usually come in 5 oz. bottles, not 4, so I don’t love the price point here. Unless this blows me away, I think that is going to knock off a point or two in my final score. But with all that said, I do love hot sauce. If you go all the way through my archives, I did throw together a very lazy video way back in the beginning of the channel talking about Bravado Aka Miso hot sauce, which is a super spicy red miso-based hot sauce that I love using to give my noodles a little kick when chili crisp isn’t enough. I haven’t done any other hot sauce reviews because honestly the number of hot sauces that don’t completely overpower the more delicate flavors in ramen are few, in my opinion.
Ramen Bae’s website says that they partnered with a San Francisco ramen restaurant called Ramen Well to come up with this flavor to compliment ramen. And when I say “ramen,” I do mean that in the very literal sense; it was developed for use with Japanese ramen, although no one is stopping you if you want to add this to other instant noodles. Ramen Bae says it’s crafted by a Michelin guide chef, and to paraphrase: this is a fragrant garlic and chili oil paired with shichimi togarashi. I’ve talked about shichimi togarashi before; it’s tasty as hell. It’s a powdered blend of a couple types of chili peppers, orange peel, black and white sesame seeds, ginger, and seaweed. It’s great. You might not think that adding spicy citrus to a bowl of tonkotsu works all that well, but I promise that it is such a cool mix of flavors you’ll get hooked on it. So essentially, the shichimi togarashi flavor profile exists in this hot sauce along with all the other ingredients in here, which includes garlic, soybean oil, sesame oil, green onion, rice vinegar, red miso, mushroom seasoning, and some other spices not spelled out on the label. I should also note that the nutritional content of this is pretty negligible. There’s only 75mg of sodium per serving, half a gram of saturated fat, and no sugar. It’s reasonably guilt-free, so you don’t really have to worry about this adding excess salt or fat to your noodles unless you use a lot of it at once.
Since the flavor of Shichimi in this is intended to be paired with something Japanese, to review this I grabbed a pack from my stash of one of the best instant Tonkotsu products you’ll ever find: Marutai’s Tonkotsu made in collaboration with a ramen shop called Ikkosha. It’s probably the second-best instant Tonkotsu product I’ve ever had, and the only reason I’m not reviewing it with the best instant Tonkotsu product I’ve ever had is because I ran out. Marutai noodles are incredible and if you’re any kind of fan of Japanese ramen, you owe it to yourself to check them out.
As I opened the hot sauce, I remarked, “That looks like a chili crisp to me.” Like I said, Ramen Bae’s marketing is calling this a hot sauce, but whatever we’re calling it, it does smell really good. Right away I’m smelling seaweed, orange peel, possibly ginger. From a consistency perspective, this is absolutely a chili crisp; to call it anything else is misleading. On its own, it is way spicier than I expected. It’s good, though. I added almost a teaspoon to the ramen, which is about a serving size. As spicy as this is, I think a teaspoon is good enough for this application and review.
Spiciness:
As far as the spice level goes, this is pretty hot. Whether you lick it off the spoon or mix it into your ramen, it is much stronger than a lot of chili crisps that I’ve had before, certainly stronger than any of the Japanese-based ones. For those of you who are instant noodle connoisseurs, I would put the spice level of this as a teaspoon mixed into this broth about on par with something like Nongshim Shin Ramen. There’s no Japanese ramen I can really compare it to because a lot of those aren’t very spicy. This is not a mild hot sauce, be warned.
• 6/10
Overall:
As far as the flavor is concerned, a lot of what I smelled I tasted in the spoon and I taste it mixed into this broth. There’s a lot of good umami, mushroom, seaweed, a nice amount of garlic that I’m very happy about, and some really good pepper flavor. It has just about everything I would want out of a really good chili crisp. I don’t know that that citrus element is really applicable to everything I would want to put this in, but it’s versatile enough. From a flavor perspective, I would give this a 9 out of 10, but I have to factor a couple other things in here.
For one, it’s very expensive. I think if this was $3 less I’d be a little more enthused about it, and if it was under $10 I would be making a much stronger recommendation. The other thing is this isn’t really a hot sauce; this is a chili crisp. You can call it a hot sauce all day long, but it’s an oil with some dried crunchy bits in it. Because this is basically just a really hot chili crisp with some Japanese seasoning in it, I’m going to point out that I could make this at home for about five bucks. I could go to my local Asian market, spend $2.50 on a little canister of shichimi togarashi and another $2.50 on S&B Crunchy Garlic with Chili Oil. Put these two things together and you get this “hot sauce” for a third of the cost.
I really like the flavor, but I don’t think it’s as unique as Ramen Bae wants you to think it is and I think it’s very overpriced. Also, while I was filming the video review, the back of the jar leaked on my table despite being re-sealed pretty tight. Factoring in that I like the flavor but I don’t like the price or the gimmick behind it, I’m going to dock some points. At the end of the day, this is a hot chili crisp masquerading as a hot sauce with a steep price tag. If you’re okay with the price and you don’t feel like making this on your own, this is a soft recommendation. It tastes really good and will pair really well with most Japanese ramen: shio, shoyu, tonkotsu, miso, or tantanmen.
• 6.5/10
