This Yamadai New Touch Original Kimchi Ramen is the fifth product from my Guam review pile, and is certainly one of the more interesting ones. This is, I think, a first for me: a Japanese manufacturer making a Korean kimchi stew instant noodle. And not just any Japanese manufacturer… Yamadai is one of the premier Japanese instant noodle brands, with a few dozen premium bowl products spread out across its various product lines. Read on for more info and the review!
Read more: Review: Yamadai New Touch Original Kimchi RamenIt wasn’t necessarily my intention for this to be my first Yamadai review, since it’s a little far off from a more traditional Japanese ramen. I have several other flavors of theirs waiting for a review, including a trio of bowls they export specifically for the American market, but I really want to get through everything I have from Guam, and this one is speaking more to me than the other Yamadai bowl I have from Guam as I write this.
If you’re looking to get this outside of Japan or Guam and are willing to pay for shipping, good news! I was able to find it in stock on one of my favorite sites, Japanese Snacks Republic.
This particular bowl is part of Yamadai’s New Touch product line, arguably their flagship line, which features regional noodle recipes in bowl form, similar to what Marutai does with its Local Series stick ramen. The official product page for this has a translated part that reads: “The first kimchi ramen in the instant noodle industry,” which seems very unlikely to me unless they mean it’s the first kimchi instant noodle in the Japanese instant noodle industry. Otherwise, I would wager that one of the Korean manufacturers probably beat them to the punch ages ago. That said, I’m always excited to see what noodle makers do with recipes from other regions, so this should be interesting.
This has a salt equivalent of 6.6g, which is in the neighborhood of a whopping 2600mg of sodium. Not as bad as that Nissin Salt and Shrimp bowl I just reviewed, but this is still very high even for an instant noodle product.
In the bowl, we’ve got a bunch of noodles, a soup powder, a seasoning paste, and dried toppings. The noodles are fried wheat noodles and contain a variety of flavor extracts built right into them: vegetable oil, lard, soy sauce, chicken extract, pork extract, and vegetable extract. These should be some damn tasty noodles with all of that in them. The soup powder and paste contain salt, sugar, animal fat, fish sauce powder, soy sauce, pork extract, miso, kimchi powder, and other unlisted “spices.” And in the dried toppings, we’ve got napa cabbage kimchi flakes, fried garlic, and chives. Sounds heavenly to me!
The paste has a strong kimchi garlic scent to it, while the aroma of the soup powder leaned a little more in the fishy direction.
Noodles:
Unexpectedly awesome noodles, especially for being a bowl product with a 3-minute steep time. They’re medium thickness, reasonably firm and bouncy, and overall some of the best bowl noodles I’ve ever had.
- 9/10
Spiciness:
Being a kimchi product, of course this is spicy. It’s the kind of spice that kicks you in the back of the throat and then goes away pretty quickly. Not nearly as spicy as what you might get from the Korean manufacturers though. If you like the flavor of kimchi but have found the offerings from Nongshim, Samyang, etc. to be too spicy, this might be way more up your alley.
- 3.5/10
Overall:
Is it sacrilege to say that this Japanese product is probably the best kimchi-flavored noodle I’ve ever had? Look, I’ve liked what the Korean companies have to offer (that I’ve tried so far), but this broth takes everything I love about kimchi – the fermented combination of flavors and tangy, sour finish – and adds a ton of extra umami notes and garlic. Like a metric shit-ton of garlic. Garlic is my weakness, and I especially love a garlic-forward refrigerated kimchi, which means I was in heaven eating this bowl. It’s missing the slightly sweet elements you might get from a Korean noodle product, which makes for a bolder, more savory flavor. Another important note is that the seafood smell I got from the powder (a necessary ingredient in authentic non-vegan kimchi) completely disappeared when mixed with all of the other flavors, so this doesn’t take on any kind of fishy aftertaste that I could detect. The kimchi flakes themselves rehydrated nicely, with a tender texture and great flavor, and they’re quite sizable compared to other varieties I’ve had. The chives are plentiful and delicious. If you’re a kimchi and garlic fanatic like me, you’re going to want to hunt this down. I’m struggling to find any reason not to give this a perfect score, and I can’t come up with anything, so a perfect score it is.
- 10/10
