An easy way to make your already easy meal even more delicious.

Instant ramen has a unique space in Japan’s food culture. On one hand, it’s a quick, cheap, and easy-to-make hot meal, but on the other, it’s something that a lot of people genuinely like the flavor of, enough so that instant ramen fans, somewhat paradoxically, often look for ways to do a little something extra to spruce up their bowls of noodles.

One of the most popular instant ramen upgrades, called “shirotama,” is to add a raw egg to cook at the same time as the noodles, and if done properly, the results aren’t just delicious, but beautiful too.

However, achieving the sort of perfectly prepared egg seen above can be tricky. You want the egg white to get cooked enough that it solidifies, but keep the yolk nice and soft so that when you break it up with your chopsticks, it’ll blend with the broth. Ordinarily, in order to do this you have to be very careful with how you position the uncooked egg in the bowl, and how you pour on the boiling water. But now, Nissin, the makers of Cup Noodle and Chicken Ramen, have created a kitchen gadget that ensures a perfectly cooked egg every time.

Modeled after the Chicken Ramen mascot character, the Shirotama Maker is about the size of a compact rice cooker. Internally, it’s composed of three parts: the Horizontal Noodle Port, the Omnidirectional Heat Drip Shower, and the Ultimate Convectional Lo-Tech Totemo e-Desu yo Steam Manbennaku Thermal Lid (or Ultimate Convectional Lo-Tech Very Good Even-steaming Thermal Lid).

In less grandiose terms, this means that the Shirotama Maker’s base is sized to keep a disc of pre-cooked Chicken Ramen securely in place. Crack an egg into the pre-made divot in the noodles, place the interior lid on top of them, and when you pour boiling water into the opening at its top, it’ll get funneled in a showerhead-like pattern so that it directly hits the noodles and egg white to cook them, but avoids the yolk. Putting the top lid on seals in all of the heat, so that everything gets nicely and evenly steamed.

The whole cooking process takes only the instant-ramen standard three minutes, and the egg comes out mouthwatering every time, as Nissin’s repeated demonstrations show.

As an added bonus, you can even eat right out of the Shirotama Maker, since the base of it is, in essence, a bowl, and you’ve now filled it with ramen and egg.

Nissin hasn’t announced any plans to sell the Shirotama Maker in stores, but this isn’t just some in-house promotional stunt. The company is giving away 1,000 Shirotama Makers to Chicken Ramen fans who purchase a pack of Chicken Ramen and submit a photo of their receipt. Those 1,000 Shirotama Makers are being split up into two batches of 500, with winners to be randomly selected from those who submit their receipts between now and July 31 for group 1, and between August 1 and September 31 for group 2. Full details can be found on the Chicken Ramen official website here.

Source: Nissin, PR Times
Top image: PR Times
Insert images: YouTube/日清食品グループ公式チャンネル, PR Times, Nissin
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