I found this Nissin Cup Noodles Malatang flavor a few months back when I placed a big noodle order from Japan. I’m always intrigued when Nissin tries something wildly new with their limited-time Cup Noodle flavors instead of just adding a new seasoning oil to an existing flavor and calling it a day. This Malatang cup looks to be a pretty cool new recipe!
Read more: Review: Nissin Cup Noodles MalatangThis is Nissin’s take on a popular Szechuan street food dish called Malatang, and you can read all about it on its Wikipedia page here. Essentially, this is paying tribute to that dish by creating a Cup Noodle with a spicy Szechuan pepper and chili broth with added meat and vegetables. If you’ve ever had anything with mala (aka numbing) seasoning before, this is that.
As with many new Cup Noodle products, I’m pretty sure this is a limited edition since it very recently disappeared from the Nissin Japan website, although as with many of the “limited” flavors, sometimes Nissin will bring these back if they were popular enough. If you want to try this and spot it, buy it up quickly, otherwise you’ll have to wait for Nissin to start making it again.
This has a salt equivalent of 4.2g, which works out to about 1654mg of sodium.
There’s quite a bit going on in here when you open the cup. The broth powder, Nissin says, is made with a blend of 14 spices. The base behind that spice blend is a pork and chicken extract combination. The dried toppings are seasoned minced pork (aka Nissin mystery meat), cabbage, bok choy, and wood ear mushrooms. And there’s a chili oil on the lid that warms up as this steeps.
Noodles:
Standard Nissin noodles. You know what you’re getting with these.
- 5/10
Spiciness:
While the spicy numbing element is certainly present, overall this doesn’t have nearly as much spice as I would have expected. I had a little taste of the chili oil on its own, and it didn’t have much of a kick, nor was the broth very hot either. I have to assume Nissin toned this down a bit to appeal to the Japanese market.
- 3.5/10
Overall:
Lots of interesting flavor in this one. It felt like every bite brought something a little different to my tastebuds. I can’t possibly figure out all 14 spices Nissin says they included in here, but the ones that stood out to my palate were Szechuan peppercorn, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, garlic, and MSG. The combination of spices gives it a simultaneously sweet, savory, floral, slightly bitter flavor profile, very typical of other mala-flavor products, and I found it to be pretty tasty overall. I did like how the usual blast of MSG umami typical of Japanese Cup Noodles brought in a salty, savory element at the end of each bite. The wood ear mushrooms and leafy greens were plentiful and gave it a nice crunchy finish. There were a couple downsides, however. That chili oil I mentioned in the section above was not only pretty tame, but also a pretty small portion and downright flavorless. I was hoping for some sort of additional chili pepper flavor infusion that just wasn’t there. Between the lack of actual spice, volume, and flavor, I don’t feel like the chili oil really served any purpose. I was also disappointed in the amount of mystery meat in the cup; I counted maybe three chunks of pork (compared to sometimes six or more pieces), and it was sorely missed. The few bites I had with the mystery meat in them, the meat imparted a great, fatty, salty sausage-like flavor that complemented the broth very well. With so few meat chunks in there, I wanted more of that flavor combined with the mala broth. Still, those issues weren’t enough to detract too much from the overall experience. I think if you enjoy mala flavors and are able to score noodles from Japan easily enough, you should seek this one out the next time it’s in production, with the caveat that the noodles themselves are the typical mediocre Cup Noodles quality.
- 7/10
