Instant ramen: the backyard invention that fed the world

Somewhere in the world, right now, someone is peeling back a paper lid, pouring in boiling water and waiting a few minutes. It might be a student at midnight, a hiker in a tent or a parent at the end of a long day. Few foods are so humble, so universal or so easy to take for granted. And it all began in a shed in a suburb of Osaka.

A shed in Ikeda

The inventor was Momofuku Ando (安藤百福), a businessman born in 1910 in Taiwan, then under Japanese rule, who built his working life in Osaka. As he told the story in later years, the idea took root in the hungry years after the war, when ramen stalls were feeding a rebuilding country (our history of ramen tells that part). He saw people queuing in the cold for a bowl of noodles and wondered whether ramen could be made so that anyone could prepare it at home in moments.

In the late 1950s, by then in his late forties, he set to work in a small shed behind his house in Ikeda, a city just north of Osaka. He is said to have set himself a handful of goals: the noodles had to taste good, keep for a long time on the shelf, be quick and easy to prepare, be affordable and be safe. Working largely alone, he tested method after method for drying noodles so they would last and then come back to life in hot water.

The tempura trick

The breakthrough was oil. Ando seasoned and steamed the noodles, then flash-fried them. The hot oil drove out the moisture, leaving the noodles dry and riddled with tiny holes; when hot water was added later, it rushed back into those holes and softened the noodles in a couple of minutes. As he told it, the idea came to him while watching tempura being fried at home.

The result was Chicken Ramen (チキンラーメン), released by Nissin in 1958 and widely regarded as the world's first instant noodles. The seasoning was already in the noodles: you put the block in a bowl, poured on boiling water, covered it and waited. For busy households in a country racing to rebuild, it was a revelation. Chicken Ramen is still sold today, and modern packs have a little hollow pressed into the top of the noodle block, meant to cradle an egg as the water goes in.

Many instant noodles, like fresh ramen noodles, rely on alkaline salts called kansui for their springy bite; our piece on kansui and ramen noodles explains why.

Cup Noodles, 1971

Ando's next leap came in 1971 with Cup Noodles: noodles sold in a foam cup that served as packaging, cooking pot and bowl all at once. The story goes that the idea grew out of a trip to the United States, where he noticed people breaking noodles into cups and eating them with forks.

The design was cleverer than it looks. The noodle block is held in the middle of the cup rather than resting on the bottom, which protects it in transit and lets hot water reach it from all sides. Dried toppings sit on top, so when you open the lid, the first thing you see looks like a real bowl of ramen.

Cup Noodles' big break in Japan is often credited to a 1972 hostage standoff at a mountain lodge in Nagano, broadcast live for days, during which television viewers saw riot police eating cup noodles in the snow. Whether or not that one event made the product, the image of hot noodles anywhere, with nothing more than a kettle, stuck.

From there, instant noodles spread across the globe. Today they come in countless flavours and styles, from fiery Korean ramyeon to Indonesian fried noodles, and are eaten in almost every corner of the world.

Noodles in orbit

Ando lived long enough to see his noodles leave the planet. In 2005, Nissin developed a version called Space Ram for Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to take aboard the Space Shuttle. The noodles came in bite-sized blocks and the soup was thickened so it wouldn't float away in weightlessness. Ando died in 2007 at the age of 96, having taken an idea from a backyard shed all the way into orbit.

Visiting the museums, and eating it well

Two museums tell the story today: the CupNoodles Museum Osaka Ikeda, in the city where it all began, and the CupNoodles Museum Yokohama. Both recreate Ando's research shed and offer a hands-on workshop where you design your own cup and choose the soup and toppings that go inside. They're popular with families and school groups, so check current opening details and booking information before you go.

If you're in Yokohama, you can make a full ramen day of it: the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum, in another part of the city, recreates a Tokyo streetscape from 1958, the year Chicken Ramen first went on sale.

As for eating it, I have only opinions. Try Chicken Ramen once exactly as intended, with just boiling water and a lid, to taste what people tasted in 1958. Then improve it shamelessly: a soft egg, a handful of spring onion, a sheet of nori, a few drops of sesame oil, whatever is in the fridge. Instant ramen is a blank canvas that happens to be delicious already.

It's easy to take Ando's invention for granted precisely because it works so well. Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay a piece of design is to forget that anyone ever designed it.