(upbeat music) - Greetings, my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy. Welcome back to another Ramen taste test. Today, I'm gonna be tasting the
most expensive instant ramen I have ever purchased. And it is this one. Ichiran ramen. I picked this up when I was
in Japan a couple months ago. I ate at Ichiran Ramen. It was an amazing experience. I will put the link up
above and down below in case you missed it. You have your own window where the server will bring you your bowl of ramen and you consume it in your
own kind of peaceful solitude of your own booth. A very interesting and
delicious experience. So before I went home, I made
sure to pick up one of these. And this is a box of
instant Ichiran ramen. This cost about 20 U.S. dollars. And this is the "premium setto". So I was very curious to
see if this contained chasu and if it didn't, I knew I had
to do some preparation work. So I went ahead and opened this and let me show you what's inside. There we go. So it gives you very specific instructions on how to make the ramen noodles. You heat up 450 milliliters of water and you cook the noodles in it. And that actually becomes the broth. You don't strain the noodles,
you don't rinse them, which is kind of unusual
for typical ramen noodles. Usually they shake off the excess water, but that's also usually
with fresh noodles. These are dried. This only contains three items. Their noodles, their Ichiran proprietary soup base and their chili powder. So there's five packs of
noodles and five soup bases. So for $20, each one of
these would be about $4, which is actually very reasonable. I thought for one instant ramen noodle, it was going to be $20, but it isn't. So it's a bit misleading in that sense, but that's also my fault because
if I read this carefully, it says five servings here. So since this ramen set does not contain some of my most favorite parts of ramen, besides the noodles -- the pork belly and the egg --
I went ahead and made them. So let me show you how I made my chasu and how I made my shoyu tamago, or my soy sauce eggs. I'm also gonna show you how
to prepare wood ear mushrooms. So Japanese chasu is basically
pork belly that has been rolled and then braised for a
long time at a low temperature to get it nice and tender; and then it's thinly sliced
and served in ramen noodles. So the recipe I chose comes
from a blog called "Ice or Rice" and it's for Instapot chasu. It still takes about 90 minutes to cook. So pretty equivalent
to a stove top version, which may take up to two
and a half to three hours, depending on how big your pork roll is. But with an Instapot, you don't really have
to keep an eye on it. It's just doing its thing. And then when it's done, it's just done. So I like that aspect. I can do other things once it gets going. So this is what I did. So I went to the Asian market
and got some pork belly and made sure to get the
kind that has the skin on it. You want a longer piece
because you wanna be able to roll it. If it's too short, you
won't get a nice, good roll. You're gonna take your pork
belly with the skin side out, roll it nice and tight, and
then take some kitchen twine and tie it very, very securely. So next, we're going to blanch this for about 10 minutes in boiling water. This is supposed to leach
out any porky smells. So while the pork belly is blanching, we can prepare the Instapot. In the bowl of the Instapot,
we're gonna add two long green onions. You can also substitute
scallions or leaks. Then you're going to add
four slices of ginger, four cloves of garlic
that have been crushed, a half cup of cooking
Saki, one cup of water, a half cup of soy sauce
and half cup of Mirin, which is a seasoned Saki. It's a little bit sweet. So once we dump all those ingredients in, we're gonna place our blanched
pork belly right on top. We're gonna seal this up and then cook it on high
pressure for 90 minutes. The blog post says that if
the sauce does not submerge the pork belly, to stop it
midway and turn it over. I didn't bother to do this. I knew that it would
take a lot of time for it to get back up to temperature. I'd have to wait for it to cool down. So I just let it go for 90
minutes and it was fine. So we're going to do a natural release and allow the Instapot to cool
on its own before opening. Next, the recipe calls for
pan frying the pork roll. Mine was completely covered in twine and very, very delicate. So I decided to skip this step. And then place the pork
belly into a deep container and cover it with the sauce. And then we're gonna place
this in the refrigerator to allow it to steep in the
marinade overnight and cool so then we can slice it for our ramen. Because I have this beautiful marinade, I thought this would be
a perfect opportunity to make soy sauce tamago -- so that's the egg that comes
with the ramen noodles. So this is really easy: you just bring some water up to the boil. If your eggs just came
out of the refrigerator, you might want to place
them in a little bit of warm water before you place
them into the boiling water and that helps them from
immediately cracking. So then once the water
comes up to the boil, you're going to gently place
your eggs into the water and then allow this to
boil for seven minutes. So I was doing this
while I was making dinner so mine went about eight minutes, but seven minutes or six
minutes is really better. So mine are going to be
a little bit more cooked than I wanted them to be. But, you know.... So after the eggs have cooled a bit, we're going to crack them and
peel them and then place them into our beautiful marinade, along with our pork roll and place them all in the refrigerator and allow them to marinade overnight. So this is where I am now. Let's have some lunch already, okay? So in a sauce pan, I'm gonna add 450 milliliters of water -- it's about two cups. So while that's coming up to a boil, I'm going to slice my chasu. Look at that! So this is another good
reason to allow this to sit overnight. It's because all this
fat floats to the top and it solidifies once it's cool. So we can remove all of that very easily. I should mention that I
added about a tablespoon of dark soy sauce to this
before I added my eggs, because I wanted my eggs
to have a nice brown color, but you certainly don't need to do that. (light music) And here are my eggs. So I'm going to cut all this twine off. We don't want anyone biting
into string by accident. Oh yes. That looks beautiful. It looks like a porchetta, which is of course the Italian version of a pork belly roll. Oh yes. This is gonna be delicious. Okay, I can hear my water
coming up to the boil. So we're going to drop
our noodles in there. Cook it for two and a half minutes. So while that's going, let me tell you about
the wood ear mushrooms. Now, I went to the Asian market. I got two types of mushrooms. One is called black fungus mushroom. It looks a lot like wood
ear and it's already precut. So I got that. And then I also picked
up wood ear mushroom, which is a fungus that grows on trunks. And to prepare this, it's super easy. You just take a little
bit of the dried fungus, and then you just cover
it with boiling water and it expands incredibly. So a little actually goes a long way. After I re-hydrated the black fungus, I think this is actually
what I had at Ichiran. Much longer pieces, rather
than the smaller wood ear. They both have a very similar
texture kind of cartilaginous, slightly crunchy, not
a whole lot of flavor. It's mostly for texture. 15 more seconds. Okay. Now we're going to take our soup base. Add that directly into the pot. Ooh, look at that. That looks so rich. That's smelling pretty amazing. So oftentimes what they
do in the ramen shop is they pick it up and then
they kind of lay it down so you have a nice pile in the middle. Chili powder. Gonna put that right in the middle. I'm gonna put all of it. Add my egg. Black fungus in the corner. This is already looking so beautiful. I'm so pleased with how
the chasu turned out. Right there. I'm going to add two
slices because I am hungry. Chasu.... Lots of green onion. Oh man, that looks beautiful. I'm so excited to eat this. This looks beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. All right. I'm gonna mix this into here. Alright, here we go. Itadakimasu! Mm. Oh, that pork chasu is so good. It's so tender and porky and melt away-y. It has a great delicious
flavor because it marinated in that sauce. And because we cut it so thinly, when you put it in the soup, it just warms right up. Right out of the refrigerator. Oh, this is the best instant
ramen noodles I've ever had. Oh, I forgot my nori. Oh my gosh. Granted, when I usually
have instant noodles, I don't have chasu lying around. I don't have a soy sauce
tamago lying around. So that does make a big difference. Speaking of which, let's have some egg. Mm. That egg is actually very good and actually quite similar to
the one that I had at Ichiran. Kind of creamy like that. Not as kind of onsen and
more, almost hard-boiled. Delicious. Mhmm. The broth is nice and spicy. I definitely recommend
putting the whole pack in and because we use the
water that was boiled in the pasta water, it has a nice consistency,
kind of a thicker soup. The noodles are delicious. Two and a half minutes. Perfect time. Is it as good as the original? Not quite, but I'll take it. And I'd definitely
recommend the black fungus or the wood ear mushrooms as well. They add a really great crunchy texture component to this noodle soup. It's just really delightful, playful. There's not a whole lot of flavor. It's just all about texture,
along with the noodles. So so good. I would say this is an
absolutely delicious instant ramen noodle. Especially if you have
all the side dishes. If you don't have all
the side dishes with it, then it's certainly not as fun. You could definitely do the egg on a whim and you have to have the green onions The pork, of course, you'd
have to do some planning, but I imagine if you make a bit of this, you could probably slice
this up and have them frozen and then take them out. I think that would be a
quick work around, but yeah, this is delicious. I would say this is as good as the fresh style instant
noodles that you can get in the refrigerator case
at the Asian market. I would say this is
right up there with those in terms of just quality of soup base and quality of noodles. Oops. Delish. For those of you that are
appalled of my slurping, that's totally typical in Japan. Slurping actually is a way
to cool off the noodles. And it's a compliment to
the chef that you're really enjoying your noodles. So if you go to Japan and you
hear a lot of people slurping their ramen noodles, don't
think they're being rude. That's just what you're supposed to do. Alrighty. So there you have it: Ichiran instant noodles -- absolutely worth the money, especially if you make
your little side dishes. Especially. If you don't make the side dishes, it's not going to be nearly as good and it's not going to be as similar to the original experience. You could actually add these
side dishes to any kind of instant ramen noodle and
it would just take it to next level. Thank you guys so much for joining me. Please check out that "Ramen,
Ramen, Ramen" playlist, where I taste all different
kinds of instant noodles and yeah! I hope you guys enjoyed that one. I hope you guys learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow on social media,
subscribe, like this video, and I shall see you in the next one. Toodaloo, take care. Bye! (upbeat jazzy music) I think I have ramen noodle
down my shirt. (chuckles)
