This Yamadai Sugomen Green Onion Miso Ramen is the last review in the series of products picked up for me in Guam, and I saved it until the end because it’s the largest and, frankly, most exciting one to me that my coworker brought back. This is a gigantic noodle bowl from Yamadai, one of the most revered noodle manufacturers in Japan. A couple reviews ago, I actually tried Yamadai for the first time, although it was a Korean-style kimchi ramen rather than a more traditional Japanese flavor profile like this one. If this one is half as good as that kimchi flavor was, I’ll be ecstatic.
Read more: Review: Yamadai Sugomen Green Onion Miso RamenThe previous Yamadai review was a product from their New Touch line, but this product is part of their Sugomen line. While most of the time the names “Yamadai” and “New Touch” are used interchangeably (their own website is even newtouch.co.jp), it’s not completely accurate here; Yamadai’s Sugomen product line is characterized by restaurant-quality recipes specifically using non-fried noodles, while their more prolific New Touch line consists of smaller bowls with recipes inspired by regional specialties. Yamadai’s site indicates that Sugomen is meant to recreate the boiled quality of fresh noodles in a ramen shop, a claim I’m eager to put to the test. Here we have a rich miso soup base paired with thick noodles, strips of crunchy green onion, and grated garlic.
You know the deal with these Japanese varieties by now: the salt content is super high. Here we have a salt equivalent of 7100mg, which is about 2800mg of sodium. Not surprising for a miso broth, but that is very high and anyone with sodium issues needs to be careful of this.
If it’s not apparent from the pictures, this is a huge bowl; it nearly fills the entire base of my photography box. The noodles inside the bowl are thick, yellow, and non-fried, and also a much simpler recipe than the fried noodles from the previous Yamadai variety I had – here they contain only wheat, salt, and dietary fiber. The soup base is made from miso, animal fat, sesame, pork extract, garlic, onion, ginger, and “spices.” The package advises warming the soup base on the lid as the noodles steep. We also have a small packet of pure grated garlic paste. And the dried toppings, which come in a freeze-dried block as you can see from the photo below, are green onions and red chili pepper. You may notice if you buy these (or zoom in on the photo below) that there is a light film on the noodles themselves. The packaging translation says that this is part of the manufacturing process and is completely normal – which is a relief, because when I opened this up, at first I thought the bowl was contaminated with plastic. Thankfully that’s not the case, and the residue cooks off during the steep.
Here’s the mountain of green onion that that freeze-dried block above turns into once it has finished steeping:
And here’s the finished product with the liquid broth and garlic paste added:
Noodles:
I don’t know what kind of sorcery Yamadai has summoned in creating these noodles, but these are without a doubt the best noodles I’ve had in a steeped bowl product, and they’re even better than many stovetop noodles I’ve reviewed. They are thick and chewy and perfectly al dente after a 5-minute steep, and I will even go so far as to say they rival restaurant quality. An astonishing feat of instant noodle making.
- 10/10
Spiciness:
Those little red rings you see in the pictures are indeed pieces of red chili pepper, but they are so completely imperceptible that this doesn’t even register as spicy for me. That said, I’m sure someone out there could maybe consider this spicy when they get a bite of one of those chilis, and so I am giving this bowl a cautionary nonzero score for spiciness. But really, it’s objectively very, very mild.
- 1/10
Overall:
This is just incredible. Give how good the Kimchi variety was, I had very high hopes for this, and they were exceeded. Let’s start with the aroma: as this was steeping, the wonderful smell of green onion filled the air, and I knew right then and there that we were off to a good start. The liquid broth packet has a mostly miso aroma, not too fermented-smelling in case you were worried that it leans too hard into the red miso category, and there was a ton of fat that dissolved nicely in the hot water – you can see the end result of that in the oily finish on top of the broth. Then there’s the garlic paste, which did have a kind of citric acid odor, the kind of thing you would smell in a jar of pre-minced garlic. I was a little worried that garlic preservative would come off as pungent in the finished product, but thankfully it did not, although I think I would have preferred dried garlic in here instead of a paste. But that is really my only quibble, because the finished product here is amazing. The broth is thick, super rich, salty, heavy on umami, comforting in all the right ways, and heavily fortified with onion and garlic flavor. The green onion pieces are plentiful and huge, adding not only an incredible onion flavor, but a nice light crunch to every bite. I don’t think the red chili rings necessarily bring anything important to the table here, but their inclusion doesn’t detract from the overall score in any way. Did I mention how huge this bowl is? It’s massive and very filling. I think this is stellar, and if you’re a sucker for miso, onion, and garlic just like me, you’re going to love this if you can get your hands on it.
- 10/10
