Nissin Kara Buta Raoh 日清辛豚ラ王

Nissin has a history of trying their hand at recreating the Ramen Jiro experience in the form of instant ramen. While not being able to use the name (I am not aware of any Jiro branded instant product), it is clear that Jiro fans are the target group for this bowl. The package itself uses many Jiro buzzwords such as abura (pork back fat), ninniku (garlic) and mashi (a lot). The taste of the bowl itself is described as “junky spicy”. “Junky” or “junk” is often used to indicate a “junk food” style or variant of a dish. Here, you get all the satisfaction, fat, salt and msg that easily puts this bowl in the junk food category. But I guess you’re probably not looking for health food anyway when thinking about instant ramen, so who cares?

Let’s see if Nissin has put out a good product with this Kara Buta Raoh (辛豚ラ王) bowl.

Content

The bowl comes with 4 separate packages and sachets, quite a number for instant ramen. From the top left, clockwise, we are looking at:

Kayaku, dried veggies. Here this is mainly dried cabbage.
Soup package, includes spicy chili oil.
Abura, pork back fat, to add creaminess and richness at the end.
Dried chashu, chunky slice of pork meat.

Preparation

Take all packs and sachets out. Open dried veggie and dried meat packs and fill their contents into the bowl.
Fill in boiling water up to the marking. Close lid. Put the soup pack on top of the closed lid.
Wait 5 minutes
Add soup base and stir well.
Add abura pork back fat on top.

Review

It is rare to get a bowl of instant noodles that does the combination of richness and spiciness well. Here, we have one of these bowls. It self identifies as level 4 out 5 in spiciness and I think that is a fair assessment. It is not ultra spicy, but some people with a lower spice tolerance may struggle. But it is not only the spiciness, but also the aroma of the chili oil which really adds to the experience here. The underlying flavor is a hefty shoyu soy sauce seasoning that does not skimp on the saltiness. This works really well together with the chili oil and the additional pork back fat. The seabura, while not necessarily visually pleasing, really gives this Raoh instant ramen bowl a certain depth and creaminess that a lot of other instant bowls are lacking.

The noodles are another highlight of this bowl. Thick and chewy, they are probably going to the limits of what is possible for “soaking only” noodles. I could imagine that if you want to go thicker, they would have to be properly boiled in a pot, like the ones of the Butazono packs. Another surprise: The noodles are non-fried.

Overall, this does a great job as spicy Jiro style instant ramen that can be eaten wherever a kettle and water is available.