When times are tight, there's ramen

Yet while most noodle slurpers simply move on with their lives, that doesn't mean there aren't flashbacks.

Ramen -- the not-instant, traditional kind -- has become hip.

"Out here in San Francisco, there definitely has been a ramen boom, especially in the South Bay," Raskin says.

"We are living in a ramen moment," GQ restaurant critic Alan Richman agrees. Elvis Costello even named a 2008 album "Momofuku."

The "real" ramen won't be mistaken for something with a flavor packet, as a recent outing to a ramen joint in Manhattan's East Village showed. The broth was dark and complex, the noodles supple, the bowl nearly overflowing with toppings of chopped scallions, seaweed, perfectly boiled egg halves.

Of course, a skinflint might note that he could have eaten for a month on that $9.

Ramen won't kill you . . . will it?

Anybody who's ever felt his tongue shrivel or lips pucker with a salty slurp of ramen has wondered: How bad is this stuff for you, anyway?

Well, the noodles are flash-fried in vegetable oil, which sucks out the moisture but also adds fat. And then there's the sodium, aka salt. "It's mostly going to come from the flavor packet," says Chung, of Nissin Foods.

Make that lots of salt: A serving of instant ramen -- any brand -- can have more than one-third of the recommended daily allowance of salt.

But here's the thing: That packet of ramen you just opened isn't just one serving. As The Ramen Blog points out, a "cursory glance at all the ramen in Ramen HQ's cupboards showed the same thing: that the instant ramen industry considers one pack of instant ramen to be three servings."

But that three-servings-in-one payoff is at least part of the reason Ness recently spent five weeks eating nothing but ramen.

His young son took ill and could eat only soups and yogurts. To make recovery easier for his son, Ness thought he'd do the same. Trouble was, the soups and yogurts didn't fill him up. "And when you are a chubby buddy like me, you desire to fill your belly."

So it was ramen, usually two packages (six servings!) for lunch, every day. And he'd like to report that he's still very much alive. And reasonably healthy.

"This isn't like the movie 'Super Size Me,' where I ended up with liver damage or something," scoffs Ness.

Nissin sells a more healthful soup called Choice Ramen, with baked noodles, that has 80% less fat and 25% less sodium than its popular Top Ramen. But "we are looking to discontinue it, to be honest, because it's not selling so well," Chung says. For the people who shop for ramen, "health is not at the top of their list" of priorities, she says.

Well, there's a shocker.

Use your imagination

People who've eaten instant ramen for years -- and continue to, at least occasionally, even if they can afford steak -- long ago left the all the salt and the just-add-water simplicity behind. They doll up their soups all sorts of ways. And they've got advice.

You can take your tips from prisoners, college students or the experts at Delish, MSN's new food site.

Or you could take them from writer Ness, who obviously is a bit of a connoisseur by this point.

"I don't use the broth as prescribed, if you will," he says. After the noodles are cooked, he pours out the water usually reserved for broth, mixes in a raw egg -- "the egg cooks up a bit because, if you mix it up well, you've got it with boiling hot noodles, and it's nice and sticky" -- and finally stirs in just one packet of flavoring. "And enjoy!"

Worldwide, noodle flavors range from cocoa (really!) to chili.

"Lime shrimp, I think, is kick-butt. It just stands out compared to the rest. There's chili, which is a little hotter than some people would like. But anyone can do pretty well with a 12-pack," Ness says.

His wife remains mystified at his passion for instant noodles. (Very rarely, she'll eat a pack of Sapporo Ichiban noodles, which Ness thinks costs about 80 cents a pack -- an act whose profligacy seems almost to wound him.)

All in all, of his five-week noodle orgy, he says, "I consider the experiment to be highly successful and proof that man can exist forever on ramen."

He reconsiders.

"Well, maybe not forever."

Published Nov. 4, 2008

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