New Touch Sendai Spicy Miso ニュータッチ仙台辛味噌ラーメン

Sendai has long been known for their spicy miso ramen, which have now been brought into instant ramen form by Yamadai with their New Touch instant ramen series of local ramen varieties.

For full disclosure, I received this bowl for free from Instantramenshop.com for testing purposes as part of the 24 local ramen set by Yamadai. You can also get only this bowl if you are a fan of spicy miso ramen right here.

Content

The bowl of instant noodles comes with a sachet or freeze dried veggies, a liquid sauce pack and a sachet of seemingly fresh sprouts in some clear liquid. No chashu seems to be a bold move, but they usually aren’t the highlight of instant bowls anyway.

Fully prepared New Touch Sendai karamiso instant ramen bowl — *Fully prepared Sendai karamiso bowl*

Instructions

Take all sachets out of the bowl.

Fill dried veggies back in.

Fill up with water to the line, close lid and put sauce and sprouts on top of the lid to warm them up.

Wait 5 minutes. Then add sauce and stir.

Toss out liquid from sprouts and then add them as topping to your bowl. Voilà!

*Pulling hot noodles out of the miso soup*

Review

Once you open the sauce package and mix the spicy miso paste with the hot water, a lovely miso aroma fills the air with clear chili notes. A first slurp confirms what the smell promises. A sweet and nutty flavor, with less spiciness than one would expect from the way the soup seems to be dotted with fiery red chili oil droplets. But disappointing spiciness is a common theme among Japanese instant noodles, unless they specifically go for extreme spiciness. Other than that, the flavor is really great and enjoyable. Definitely difficult to not drink the whole soup once you are done with the noodles. If you want to make it more of a proper meal, set some rice aside to add it once the noodles are gone.

The noodles have a great consistency, with a good bite, even after sitting in the hot water for several minutes after the declared preparation time. Those noodles are definitely on the upper end of the quality spectrum.

I also really really enjoyed the addition of the fresh sprouts. How they keep them fresh in this condition is straight up industrial food magic. They had a nice crunch and were basically indistinguishable from freshly bought and slightly blanched sprouts (people, blanch your sprouts please!). Of course, the absence of any protein is a bummer, so I would recommend adding something to make up for it. However, beyond that, this is a very good bowl of instant ramen, and probably one of the best miso instant ramen I had so far. Thanks again to Instantramenshop.com for providing this bowl and many more to me.