A quick, cheap, and hearty meal around the world, instant ramen, or what is more familiar in India as instant noodles, is a living culinary relic of the post-World War II era. Developed in a war-ravaged nation to provide an ‘instant’ food source to a starving people, instant noodles emerged as a rage across the world, including India.
Japan had lost to the Allies in World War II. The predominantly rice-consuming island nation was still suffering abject food shortages even a decade later, prompting its citizens to look for alternative sources of sustenance. The year was 1958, when an idea struck inventor and entrepreneur Momofuku Ando. He wanted to fix the food crisis through simple processes. The idea was to create an affordable and easy-to-cook sustenance to fuel the development of Japan. Ando created the world’s first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen. in a little shed at his hometown of Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture that same year. Resorting to trial and error, using tools he could lay his hands on, Ando successfully developed the entire production method of flash-frying the noodles – from noodle-making to steaming, seasoning, and dehydrating in oil heat. Not only did the noodles cook instantly (ready to eat in two minutes) in boiling water, the dried noodle locks had a shelf life longer than the prevalent frozen noodles. In 1971, Ando created ‘Cup Noodles’, which was ready to eat in just three minutes by cooking in its own container. Ando died on January 5, 2 007, but his company, Nissin Foods, continued his legacy.
The process to create instant noodles is highly industrialised today. It all starts with dough made mostly of all-purpose wheat flour and water, which is shaped into strands that are pre-cooked through steaming.
Once cooked, the noodles are cut, folded, and divided into individual portions for packaging later. However, any cooked item spoils rapidly, for which the noodles must be dried. The original drying method is deepfrying, where the temperature of the noodles exceeds the water’s boiling point, thus evaporating it and removing the excess moisture. Despite its popularity across age-groups, instant noodles has been flagged as not being the healthiest eating option. The use of high amounts of sodium, preservatives and oils, has been linked to lifestyle disorders.