One of the benefits of doing reviews here on the site is I can churn out reviews of limited-time products much more quickly than if I had to schedule time to film and edit for the YouTube channel. So with that in mind, I’m checking out the first of many limited-time Cup Noodle products from Nissin right here for your reading pleasure, with this Butter Chicken Curry flavor. Oh yes, and it comes in the “BIG” Cup Noodle size only.
Read more: Site-Exclusive Review: Nissin Cup Noodle BIG Butter Chicken CurryNissin likes to make limited-time Cup Noodle flavors available in Japan several times a year, like for example the French Cup Noodles I reviewed a little while back. Like those and most other limited-time Cup Noodles, I can’t say how long Nissin plans on selling this one before it’s gone for good, but as of the time of this post, it is still available from Japanese-snacks-republic.com, and it may also be available from other Japanese specialty stores and eBay sellers. For what it’s worth, at the time of this writing it has already disappeared from Nissin Japan’s Cup Noodle product page, so I’m guessing what’s left in stock is the end of the production run. Don’t worry though – sometimes these flavors come back, and then this review will be here for you to decide if you want to buy it or not!
If you’re not familiar with butter chicken, it’s a reasonably popular dish found in Indian cuisine, sometimes known as “murgh makhani” (thank you, Google!). From a personal perspective (and at the risk of pontificating too much here), it’s basically the dish that eased me into liking Indian food way back when I started dating my wife; she’s a huge fan of Indian food and my stupid combination of the cilantro gene and hating cumin for a long time made it hard for me to find Indian food I liked. Thankfully, I’ve grown to love Indian food of all kinds, but butter chicken was really the first Indian dish I remember trying that made me say, “Oh, this is really good.” It’s a creamy, buttery chicken curry with some touches of tomato, garlic, and various spices, and what makes it such a good entry-level dish is that those spices are pretty mild. And while Nissin does indeed make Cup Noodle products for India, this is a product made for sale in Japan using an Indian recipe. Should be interesting!
The salt equivalent up above is 6.5g, which is about 2600mg of sodium. That is hefty for a single Cup Noodle, even by Japanese ramen standards!
Inside the cup, you’ll see the standard block of noodles, some soup powder, and a mix of dried toppings. You can check out the ingredients list here on this archived page from Nissin’s site (use your browser’s translate feature if you can’t read Japanese). Nissin says that this curry is a blend of 13 spices, plus chicken extract, tomato, and butter. The dried pieces are minced chicken (aka Nissin’s “white mystery meat”), carrot, and green onion.
Noodles:
I’ve never been shy about how mediocre I find the texture of Cup Noodle noodles, but over the last few years I’ve come around to enjoying them well enough when the broth/sauce and toppings are excellent. So they’re still nothing special, a little soft for my liking, but they work fine with this sauce.
- 5/10
Spiciness:
This isn’t hot at all to me, and unless you find curry spices in general to have some heat to them, I think you’ll find this is 100% mild.
- 0/10
Overall:
Like I kind of touched on above, I’ve really come to appreciate when Nissin comes out with an amazing Cup Noodle flavor despite the noodles’ mid (IMO) texture. And let me get right to the point: I do like the flavor of this, but it has some quibbling issues that aren’t related to the noodle quality. First and foremost, this doesn’t resemble butter chicken at all. What it does resemble is the regular old Cup Noodle Curry flavor with a bit more tomato and a slight touch of sweet cream. That boast on the label about there being a blend of 13 spices… to me, those spices don’t taste any different than what’s in the normal Curry variety. Maybe there’s something different in here, but it just tastes like a sweeter tomato-forward Japanese curry to me, which is already on the sweeter side of curries. Any additional butter flavor was imperceptible to me. The curry sauce did thicken up as I ate it, but still ended up a bit loose all the way to the bitter end, which was surprising given how long it takes me to get through a “BIG” Cup Noodle. The carrots and scallions added very minimal additional flavor and texture, but I do like Nissin’s minced chicken pieces quite a bit and they definitely broke up the texture & flavor of the sauce & noodles nicely. Overall I like this, but at best it’s a lateral variation on the original Curry flavor rather than something a bit more special, and so I’m scoring it exactly the same as that variety.
- 8/10
I know there’s some of you out there who love trying these limited flavors from Nissin when they come out, but unless you’re a die-hard fan of the Curry flavor and want to try every variation on the formula, I don’t think you need to seek out this one. It’s very tasty no doubt, but it’s not astonishingly different and it’s definitely not something I would call “butter chicken” flavored.
