One of the most mentioned food in Korean TV shows, radios, and dramas is ramen. It is easy and fast to cook good ramen. There are five biggest ramen brands in Korean that everyone knows about, and their brands are Shin ramen, Ansung Tang Myun, Neoguri ramen, Samyang ramen, and Jin ramen. In a Korean TV show named “New Journey to the West,” one of the MCs identified the brands just by looking at the cooked ramen pots and smelling them, not even tasting. It shows how much Koreans love ramen and how popular and developed ramen is in Korea. When I traveled to Korea last winter, there are at least ten different brands of ramen in a small convenience store. Most of the restaurants I went in have different kinds of ramen for us to choose from.
(Picture from google by typing in "Korean ramen brands")
What differentiates Korean ramen from that of other countries is the things they put into the pot. First of all, Korean ramen packages always have a special seasoning pack in them. A majority of Korean ramen has a slightly spicy flavor in their seasoning pack. One of the reasons behind the spicy flavor is the geographical location of Korea. In the fall, Korea has a lot of typhoons or rain storms that cool down the weather. During the wintertime, the temperature goes pretty low in Korea, and it snows. Because of the weather, people tend to stay indoors. The spicy flavor will warm up people’s bodies and feel less cold indoors. Moreover, many Koreans love the refreshing feeling in the food, especially if the food is served hot. This is also the reason why they love to have kimchi, a Korean traditional food that is made of fermented vegetables, as their side dishes for almost every meal. The spicy flavor in ramen brings up a refreshing feeling and makes people more addicted to the food.
One of the famous and popular Korean chiefs is named 백종원 (Paik Jong-won). He is on many TV shows right now, where he teaches his audience how to make good food on their own with simple ingredients and steps. On his YouTube channel called “백종원의 요리비책” (Chief Paik’s Cuisine), in 7 out of 64 videos, the chief talks about how to make ramen taste better in a kitchen. He uses a lot of vegetables or additional spicy sauce to make the broth deeper and thus brings the ramen a better flavor. A lot more videos on this channel talk about how to cook noodles and such. In one of his videos, he put kimchi slices and Gochujang (a Korean red chili sauce) into the ramen to make it taste refreshing. In another video, Paik shows how he mixes two kinds of ramen from two brands and make the dish better with vegetables such as onions. It’s been three months since he started the channel, and now he has 2.84 million followers. Half of his ramen videos reached one million watches, and one of them got 2.4 million watches.
Reference:
Clip of the MC guessing ramyun taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI4Fb0qmJ90
Posts about Kimchi flavor(I used google translation): https://kin.naver.com/qna/detail.nhn?d1id=8&dirId=8020112&docId=329044218&qb=6rmA7LmYIOunmw==&enc=utf8§ion=kin&rank=1&search_sort=0&spq=1
“백종원의 요리비책” (Chief Paik’s Cuisine): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyn-K7rZLXjGl7VXGweIlcA
Chief Paik's 2M-view Ramyun video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISYMu2Txp4
Comments
Thanks, Maggie! When time permits, would you please look to post links and pictures related to these topics?