Today begins a trio of reviews of collaboration products between Nissin and Japanese barbecue sauce maker Bachan’s. I figured I’d start with Nissin Top Ramen Beef Flavor with Bachan’s Original Barbecue Sauce because it is the only flavor of Bachan’s that Nissin is using that I’ve tried before. So thankfully I’ve got some familiarity with the special add-on sauce here and am not going into this totally blind. This is also the reason I gave the Nissin Top Ramen Beef Flavor Bowl a try in the last review – using that flavor as a baseline, hopefully I can explain a little better how the addition of Bachan’s instead of Nissin’s normal sauce packet changes the end result.
The Verdict:
| Product: | Nissin Top Ramen Beef Flavor with Bachan’s Original Barbecue Sauce |
| Origin: | Japan (Manufactured in the USA) |
| Noodle Quality: | 6.5/10 |
| Spice Level: | 0/10 |
| Overall Score: | 7/10 |
My wife and I actually use Bachan’s Original flavor pretty regularly in our cooking. It makes for a solid base for a stir fry, and while I find it a little too sweet on its own, once we add a couple splashes of soy sauce, or a bit of miso, or some chili crisp (or any combination of the three), it turns into a pretty great sauce. The downside is it’s expensive for a single bottle, slightly less so if you buy it in bulk at Costco, but there’s really nothing comparable that I’ve found. They make a wide variety of flavors too, some of which you’ll see in the next two Nissin Top Ramen reviews.
This is a limited-time flavor exclusive to Walmart, priced at $1.47 at the time of this review. Head to your nearest Walmart store if you want to buy this or the other two flavors.
Inside the bowl, we’ve got the same Top Ramen noodles you’ll find in the normal Beef flavor bowls, a soup pouch, vegetable pouch, and sauce pouch. I believe the soup powder is the normal Beef flavor broth powder, with beef fat, egg white, garlic powder, onion powder, soy, and spices. The vegetables are corn, green onion, leek, and red bell pepper. And the pretty generous sauce pouch is the Bachan’s sauce, containing their blend of soy sauce, cane sugar, mirin, tomato paste, ginger, green onion, rice vinegar, garlic, salt, and sesame oil. The total sodium is pretty high at 1890mg.
Noodles:
Same noodles as the regular Top Ramen Beef bowl. Reasonably chewy, decent gauge, not bad at all.
- 6.5/10
Spiciness:
No spiciness here.
- 0/10
Overall:
Okay, so with no difference in the noodle quality, veggie quality, or spiciness level, the key difference between this and the regular Beef bowl comes down to the sauce’s interaction with the broth powder. Bachan’s original flavor does hit a similar sweet & umami combination as the normal Beef sauce packet, but without vinegar sourness. To my tastebuds, the sauce on its own offers a pronounced combination of ginger, garlic, soy, and sweetness from the mirin and sugar. That means that, coupled with the beef and ginger already in the soup base, you end up with something very ginger-forward, which is not my favorite flavor, but I still prefer it to the basic Top Ramen Beef bowl. As an added bonus, the sauce seems, to me, to cling to the noodles better than in the basic bowl. Veggies are once again very plentiful and provide a good crunch and contrast, and I find everything is just subtly enhanced by the sauce overall. It’s on the verge of being a little too sweet for my liking, but it’s good to know that I could just buy any normal Top Ramen Beef bowl, omit the sauce packet, and squeeze out a dollop of Bachan’s from my refrigerator in its place, and get a pretty complementary resulting flavor.
- 7/10
Continuing the Journey
- Check out Nissin Top Ramen HotPot Fusions for even more quality Top Ramen offerings.
- The soy and ginger notes in this remind me a bit of Sapporo Ichiban Soy Sauce Flavor Ramen.
- If you enjoy beef flavors like this, don’t get suckered into buying Twisted Noodles Beef Ramen.
