New Touch Toyama Black ニュータッチ富山ブラック

The New Touch series Toyama Black ramen is recent endeavor by Yamadai to recreate the famous ramen style from Toyama. This quite unique ramen style is famous for it name-giving black soup, which is flavored with a heavy helping of dark types of soy sauce.

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.

Content

A sachet full of dried veggies
A sachet full of liquid concentrated soup
A spice sachet full of black pepper (still hidden under the noodles)

Preparation

Open lid half and take out all sachets.
Open all sachets with freeze dried stuff and pour them back into the bowl.
Add boiling water up to the line in the bowl and place liquid soup concentrate on top of the hot bowl.
Wait 5 minutes, then open the bowl and pour soup concentrate in.
Stir vigorously.
Add black pepper from sachet on top.

Review

The Toyama Black bowl holds the first promise right from the start: The soup is deeply black and fills the air with the typical Toyama Black aroma of smoky soy sauce. Taste-wise, the soup has an almost burned tamari soy sauce flavor. Very unique and easy to get addicted to from the first slurp. The soup is so rich and tasteful that it almost screams to be dressed up with more toppings. Especially since…

…the original toppings are, what they are. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is a miracle of science that we can make meat last this long without refrigeration. But it’s still a thin slice of sorry meat after rehydration.

My recommendation is to add a good amount of chashu and fresh negi (green onion). If you want to further expand this further into a proper meal, I can also recommend a side of white rice to finish up the leftover soup at the end.

The noodles have a nicely firm texture with a good slurp and bite. The shape is square and slightly flat. It is really impressive what Yamadai is doing with non-fried noodles and this bowl is no exception.

With the strong flavor of the soup, this one of the easiest bowls to transform into a full meal. But even with just the noodles, the Toyama Black by Yamadai from the New Touch series is a good recommendation for all shoyu ramen lovers out there.