acecook noukoku tonkotsu: uneasy being green

by rameniac | 05 May 2007

Cruise the instant noodle aisle of any Japanese supermarket and you’ll likely find a few Acecook “Super Cup” varieties on offer. These perennials are distinctive for their packaging; Super Cups come in oversized (by Japanese standards at least) paper cartons oddly reminiscent of KFC buckets. At least it’s a refreshing packaging alternative to the styrofoamed masses.

But how do Super Cups taste? Sometimes it’s an issue of quantity over quality and you just want to reach for for the largest thing on the shelf. But beware, appearances can be deceiving. Rip open a bowl of Super Cup Noukoku Tonkotsu and you’ll find the dried noodle cake barely occupies half the space of the oversized container, a full 2 centimeters shy of the grooved “fill-to” water line. That’s fair; the stuff expands, after all. Time to get cooking.

Noukoku means “thick,” and Acecook’s spin on mass-market pork bone slurping does rehydrate fairly frothily three minutes into the future. Surprisingly, the noodles gain heft and you don’t feel like you’ve been all that cheated (although the aforementioned water line is still a full inch shy of the lip of the cup). The powdered soup is par for the course for instant pork bone, reminiscent of fifteen varieties of quasi “Hakata"-style non-bowl packaged ramens, from the ubiquitous Charumera to Umaka-chan five-packs. Sometimes I wonder if they change the formula at all from product to product, or if there’s simply a lone source for all this MSG-laden goodness.

Topping-wise, you get negi (green onion), kikurage (wood ear mushroom), tanuki (tempura batter) and sesame seeds with the Noukoku ton. It’s not bad, but why they didn’t simply go with an infinitely more renowned “Hakata-style” selection of negi, benishoga (pickled red ginger) and maybe a chip of leathery dried chashu for their flagship tonkotsu flavor I’ll never know. Japan associates pork bone ramen with Fukuoka and Kyushu anyway, so why rock the boat on the most mainstream of offerings?

Sadly, what sinks this one are the noodles. Despite the ubiquity and the heft, Acecook serves up a near embarassment when it comes to the dried noodle cake, pretty much standard across the entire Super Cup line. While thin and curled, the strands have a styrofoamy and slightly unreal quality to them that becomes more and more unnerving as you make your way through the entire oversized mass. At least we now know where all that styrofoam went, if not into the packaging!

Still, Super Cup Noukoku Tonkotsu is a reasonable filler-upper, especially in a pinch. It’s not world-class instant ramen by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s easy to find and an acceptable alternative to other, more common offerings like Nissin Cup Noodle, if only for a change of pace.