Awesome Noodles

While a handful of restaurants make their own ramen noodles, many turn to companies like Sun Noodle to make high-quality noodles to serve their guests. Eater takes us inside family-owned business that produces more than 300,000 portions of the chewy Japanese noodles each day, delivering them to dining establishments around the nation.

Nissin Foods USA has announced a special version of its popular Cup Noodles just for American tastes. The instant ramen includes bits of sausage and eggs, along with the flavors of pancakes and maple syrup. The limited-edition noodles arrive this week at select Walmart stores. They’re either going to be awesome or awful.

This special edition Yahtzee set features a dice cup inspired by Nissin’s iconic Cup Noodles instant ramen, along with dice decorated with icons of chicken, beef, shrimp, lime, corn, and carrots. We don’t recommend pouring boiling hot water into this cup though.

Whether served fresh from a handmade noodle shop, or cooked up quick from a package of the instant stuff, Ramen is one of the world’s favorite dishes. Mental Floss digs into the origins of the dish, as a specific kind of noodle made its way from China to Japan, and eventually led us to the delicious meal we enjoy today.

Photographer Troy Litten challenged himself to photograph every bowl of noodles he ate across Southeast Asia. From crowded Hanoi food stalls to Bangkok skyscrapers, he documented his delectable lunches then turned it into a colorful 500-piece Galison jigsaw puzzle guaranteed to whet your appetite.

This playful deck of cards is perfect for lovers of instant ramen. Each deck comes packed in a resealable bag inspired by the cheap but tasty dormroom staple, while the cards themselves have a noodle pattern on back and on the suit symbols. Look closely and you’ll see the court slurping some ramen too.

Guitar maker Artem Mayer of Copper Guitars created this crazy custom instrument using 36 packs of instant ramen noodles. After casting them in polyester resin – and adding some delicious seasoning packets – he shaped the body and added a maple wood neck, hardware, and strings.

Back in the day, we lived off of instant noodles. After all, they’re dirt cheap, fill you up, and they actually taste pretty good. Now that we’re “adults,” we prefer fresh-made ramen, but we still dig Fred’s silly sticky note pad which looks like a brick of the dorm room mealtime favorite.

We’ve seen guitars made from pencils, skateboards, cardboard, and titanium, but this is definitely the first one we’ve seen made of noodles. Daniel Seidel of forward >> audio crafted this wild instrument by casting a resin body filled with Japanese udon noodles. As an added bonus, he made it glow in the dark with UV powder.

Claire Saffitz is back in the Bon Appétit test kitchen to replicate a classic junk food item. This time she turns her attention to something more savory than sweet, with the college dorm room staple of choice – those bricks of curly instant ramen noodles.

…but it’s gonna cost you. Japanese food chain Ichiran serves only tonkotsu ramen – noodles in thick pork broth. They let you customize it to your heart’s content, then serve it in private cubicles. Just you and your food. There’s one in Brooklyn, but again…

A look at a long-standing tradition in China’s Nanshan Village, where a handful of people have passed down the technique to create these long and skinny noodles, which are quite time-consuming and complex to make. We’re having some serious carb cravings now.

New York chef Keizo Shimamoto has replaced one carb with another, swapping the buns on his burgers with crispy fried ramen noodle patties. People line up for hours to get one, but we suppose it wouldn’t be hard to make at home.