The thickness we love with the convenience we crave.

As a nation, Japan has next to no fear of carbohydrates, with rice and noodles being major building blocks of most people’s diets. There’s perhaps no clearer example of this than how at ramen restaurants, even those with extremely limited menus, it’s common to have a bowl of white rice available as a side dish for your bowl of noodles.

As a matter of fact, for some foodies, the best part of a ramen meal comes when they put their rice into the ramen broth, letting the grains soak up its flavor to a more thorough degree than even the noodles do. So now Tenkaippin, one of Japan’s most popular ramen restaurant chains, is cutting to the chase, and extra quickly, with instant cup ramen rice, now on offer at Japanese supermarkets and convenience stores.

Tenkaippin isn’t embarking on this venture alone, alone, however, and they couldn’t have chosen a more capable partner: Nissin, makers of Cup Noodle, the world’s most beloved instant ramen brand. Nissin has previously sold its own brand of instant ramen rice, but the collaborate flavor with Tenkaippin’s special broth is a new one that just went on sale at the end of January.

Peeling back the lid and taking a peek inside the cup, we got an eyeful of the freeze-dried rice, sliced pork, and other ingredients. The visuals aren’t too different than a yet-to-be-cooked cup of instant ramen, except for the noodles-to-rice swap, and the cooking method is similar too: just fill the cup with hot water up to the line marked on the inner surface, wait five minutes for everything to cook, and then stir everything together with chopsticks or a spoon for about 30 seconds to evenly distribute the flavor.

Once our five-minute wait was up we grabbed a spoon and started stirring, and right away we could see this was going to be a faithful-to-the-original Tenkaippin eating experience. The secret to Tenkaippin’s success is their signature torisayu, or chicken broth, which has a thicker consistency than other ramen restaurants’, and we didn’t even have to get up to the full 30 seconds of stirring to see that the Tenkaippin Bukkomihan Kotteri Noko Torisayu (as the Tenkaippin/Nissin collaboration is luxuriously called) is also more heartily viscous than ordinary cup ramen broth.

Starting with a spoonful of just the broth, our taste buds were happy to be reunited with the rich, deep Tenkaippin flavor that they know and love from the chain’s restaurants, which comes from a combination of chicken and vegetable notes. Next we tried some of the rice and found that it cooks up nice and fluffy, with no noticeable trace of dry scratchiness that we’d feared might have been there as a result of its stint in freeze-dried form.

Tenkaippin fans with a sommelier-style trained palate might find the flavor just a touch lighter than the broth served at the chain’s restaurants, but we may have gotten that impression simply from the fact that we were eating the rice right away, as opposed to after already chowing down on a bowl of noodles and thoroughly soaking our taste receptors with broth. Overall, the strength of the flavor felt just right, since there’s actually a surprisingly large portion of rice here, and if it was much heavier it might have gotten overwhelming before we finished the rice.

So all in all, we came away very happy with the Tenkaippin Bukkomihan Kotteri Noko Torisayu. It was 375 yen (US$2.40) well spent, and we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed for a team-up between Nissin and Tenkaippin’s Super Thick broth someday too.

Photos © SoraNews24
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