When choosing what type of Muji instant curry to eat today, the answer we came up with in the SoraKitchen is “All of them.”

Mujirushi Ryohin, a.k.a. Muji, is what you’d call a lifestyle brand, and they really do sell just about everything you need in life. Walk into a typical branch of the chain and you can find everything from furniture and appliances to clothing and toiletries.

Mujirushi also has a huge selection of foodstuffs, with their instant curry pouches being particularly popular. As a matter of fact, there’s so much love for Muji curry that the chain currently offers 53 different single-serving varieties.

And since our palate here at SoraNews24 is both wide and curry-oriented, we decided to buy them all!

As we gazed out over our treasure trove of curry pouches, we quickly noticed some of Japan’s got-to favorites, such as keema and butter chicken curry…

…but Mujirushi also has some more unique, by Japanese standards, varieties, like Chicken Masak Lemak, Beef Randang, and Paneer Makhani.

They even have wild game curries with wild boar and venison.

Now, the sensible thing to do with 53 packs of instant curry would be to eat one a week, stretching out the experience of eating our way through the Muji curry catalog to just over a year. For those of you who think we’re sensible people here at SoraNews24, thank you for visiting our site for the first time, and we hope you’ll become regular readers!

Everyone else, you can probably guess what we decided to do instead…

…which was to see what it would taste like if we mixed every single one of those 53 kinds of curry together.

The complete guest list for our curry party was:
● Kerala Chicken Curry
● Pepper Chicken Curry
● Chicken and Vegetable Spicy Curry
● Mutton Keema Curry
● Butter Chicken Curry
● Creamy Butter Chicken Curry
● Green Curry
● Beef Belly Curry
● Prawn Masala Curry
● Prawn Moilee (Prawn and Coconut Curry)
● Keema Curry
● Saag Chicken Curry
● Keema Tomato Curry
● Massaman Curry
● Chunky Vegetable and Minced Pork Curry

● Spicy Beef Curry
● Homemade Style Beef Curry
● Spicy Chicken Curry
● Beef Tendon Curry
● Homemade Style Pork Curry
● Dry Ginger Keema Curry
● Chicken Curry
● Fond de Veau Beef Curry
● Lemon Cream Chicken Curry
● Mutton Do Piaza Curry
● Soup Curry with Chicken and Vegetables
● Chicken Curry with Three Kinds of Chili Pepper
● Country Style Red Curry
● Dhal Curry
● Spicy Soup Curry with Root Vegetables

● Poo Pad Pong Curry
● Soy Meat and Cheese Keema Curry
● Yellow Curry
● Spicy Keema Curry with Soy Meat
● Paneer Makhani Curry
● Red Curry
● Beef Rendang
● Malaysian Chicken Curry
● Chicken Masak Lemak
● Mild Green Curry
● Apple and Vegetable Curry
● Onion and Pork Curry
● Spinach Keema Curry
● Mild Chicken Curry
● Mild Ginger Keema Curry

● Venison and Mushroom Curry
● Three-Bean Curry with Wild Boar Meat
● Palak Paneer Curry
● Chicken and Tomato Curry
● Beef Curry
● Cheese and Mushroom Curry
● Low-Sugar Keema Curry
● Chicken and Soy Milk Cream Curry

Luckily, we have a gigantic pro-grade cooking pot in the SoraNews24 office, big enough to hold the massive mixed curry we wanted to make. Prep work fell to our Japanese-language reporter Ahiru Neko, who got to squeezing and stirring in order to blend the curries together and heat everything up.

One by one he added them to the melting pot. As you might have guessed from the eclectic list of ingredients, there’s a lot of variety in terms of color and consistency across Mujirushi’s 53 kinds of curry.

Finally, an hour after he’d started, Ahiru Neko was done cooking, and felt like a culinary conjurer who’d created the king of Muji curries in the pot. So what does the king look like?

Surprisingly normal. Shockingly normal, even. We weren’t sure exactly what we were expecting visually my mixing so many different types of roux together, but we definitely wouldn’t have predicted it’d come out looking like the perfect stock photo for “typical Japanese curry.” At a glance, we’d have had a hard time telling this apart from the contents of a bog-standard single-roux Japanese instant curry pouch.

And yet…

…all it took was one bite for Ahiru Neko to confirm the legitimacy of the Muji curry king, because his creation was some truly delicious stuff!

Curry is, of course, a pretty strongly-flavored food. Mixing so many different kinds together hadn’t really upped the intensity, but it had definitely bumped the complexity of the flavor profile up to an amazing degree, stimulating seemingly every one of Ahiru Neko’s taste receptors. The first impression comes from the chicken, beef, and baseline Japanese-style roux, but the flavor then transitions to let the Indian and southeast Asian elements come into play, with the transition noticeable without being forceful.

▼ The consistency of the roux is immaculately balanced, neither lumpy nor runny, but right in the middle.

Now, as we mentioned above, Ahiru Neko was cooking in the office, and you’d better believe everyone else at work that day noticed when the smell of an hour-long curry cooking session started drifting around the place.

So as soon as Ahiru Neko finished his personal taste test, he looked up to see a line of hungry SoraNews24 staffers had formed, so he started ladling out portions for the rest of the team to try.

After all, it’s not like he couldn’t say he didn’t have enough to share, even when people started coming back for seconds.

For those of you wondering how much this very successful cooking experiment would cost to replicate, the price for the 53 packs of curry, purchased through Mujirushi’s online store, came to…

…19,390 yen (US$156). While that’s a pretty huge bill to run up for curry, you’ve got to remember that that’s enough for 53 servings, so really the price isn’t all that bad. The bigger potential problem, though, is not being able to eat all that curry before it goes bad, but there’s a solution for that too…

…since curry is pretty easy to split up into take-home pouches, and when it tastes this good, everyone will be happy to have a cut of the leftovers.

Related: Mujirushi online store curry
Photos ©SoraNews24
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