taiho mukashii ramen: private, stocked

by rameniac | 07 Aug 2007

This is it. This is the one. I’m guessing I’ve about twenty-five bowls of Kurume Taiho Mukashii Ramen left, sealed away in a gigantic Rubbermaid bin, my little styrofoam Fortunatos in a modern-day Cask of Amontillado. I have to make the stash last between trips to Japan, and so I typically crack one open only on special occasions. Celebrating a successful date, or after cleaning my room (the one usually follows the other). “Karikari mukashii” Taiho circa 2005 was a good vintage. They stopped flash-frying the noodle cakes, slapped on a white label, and lost nary a step tastewise. And trust me, you can taste the difference when the instant noodle in question is the boutique product of a ramen shop’s proprietary factory in Kurume, Fukuoka. It’s not Nissin. It’s not Acecook. It’s not generic. It’s Taiho ramen, perfectly captured in powdered sachets and dehydrated form.

And you want to know something? You can get this stuff outside of Japan. Every now and then a few pallets, imported by Goodfellows, will spring up at your local Japanese supermarket, your Marukai or your Mitsuwa or your whatever, depending on where you are in the world (okay, in North America at least).  Methinks it’s a seasonal item; in 2006, Taiho made an appearance around early winter (late December?) and supplies lasted all of two weeks. By contrast, oshogatsu mochi ramen varietals, engineered to celebrate the New Year, sat lonesome on shelves well into mid-March.

There’s probably an expiration date somewhere on the package; I haven’t bothered to look. Taiho mukashii keeps well, and only the dried green onions suffer a bit of discoloration (after two or three years in the bin, if you’re determined to wait that long). For the purposes of this review, I consumed a late 2006 vintage, but then again, every year is a good year in Fukuoka
.
Hermetically sealed, the noodle cake doesn’t go stale, and the crunchy bits of karikari fried lard might well have come straight from the namesake restaurant. Topping afficionados should look elsewhere. The bare sliver of chewy chashu is no Goota, but it’s commonly how they do it in packaged tonkotsu. In this case, it’s all about the soup and noodles, which are thinner and firmer than Acecook’s half-baked strands and distinctly different from Nissin’s Honshu-centric tapeworms. The ludicrously flavorful tonkotsu is so rich in pork bone marrow you’ll find yourself grinding your teeth on gritty sediment during those final few drops. In that respect, Taiho Mukashii is a little more resolute, more earthy, than its ramen shop cousin. While the “real” stuff is mellow and smooth, instant Taiho evokes the mud flats of the Ariake sea with every slurp. It gets down and dirty, as only it can.