Nissin celebrates the 45th anniversary of Cup Noodle with a trio of different instant ramen products. These limited editions celebrate both instant noodles in a cup or bowl and Japan at the same time with the different types of flavourings.
Today, I'm reviewing the Matcha Green Tea Seafood Cup Noodle, a product I'm happy to be able to get my hands on. The cup noodle is in their regular sized cup, but it has some pretty fantastic looking packaging. This is one of the things I like about Japan when they go all out. The theme is green tea, with very traditional Japanese icons shown.
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| This is a very attractive cup noodle from the design. |
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| You can see Mt. Fuji plays a centerpiece role, with a bullet train running along the bottom. |
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| Looking to the back, you can see the nutritional content. Pretty standard for a cup noodle. |
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| On the left of the logo are a thunder god wearing sneakers, some pagodas, a rising sun, a lucky cat, some otaku-looking dude with a flashlight that looks like he is illuminating a Mario-esque level in the clouds, and a truck with some traditional dudes. Some of the imagery is beyond me, but it is mixing traditional with modern pop themes so it is pretty cool. |
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| On the right there is a skyscraper pagoda, a quadcopter drone with a kabuki mask and a lantern, a lady in fancy traditional kimono with a hot water kettle, and a sumo wrestler that is DJing music. Again, really cool graphics. |
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| The top of the cup. |
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| The cup again. |
Opening up the cup, you can see it does look different from the regular cup noodle. The green theme of the matcha pervades the contents. The instant ramen noodles are even green as they are mixed with matcha. I took a sniff of the contents and can say that the green tea was pretty subtle, but I could smell it. It is kind of nice that these noodles are not just packaged nicely, they are a little different too.
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| The ingredients include: powdered milk and cheese, seafood extract, slices of octopus, cabbage, egg, carrots,green onions, black pepper, and many others. |
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| After adding boiling water, the soup was quit frothy and thicker than normal. I suspect this was from the milk which added a creaminess to the soup. Closing the lid, you let the soup for three minutes. |
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| After the three minutes, the soup and noodles have finished rehydrating. The contents were greenish and it smelled seafoody, but it was pretty appetizing to me. |
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| The noodles are shown here in more detail. They have a greenish tinge from the tea, but there is no pronounced tea taste. |
This was a pretty tasty cup noodle with nice pieces of octopus and egg in a creamier seafood broth. The noodles were firm and the combination with matcha was interesting, as the role of the green tea was subtle on the palate. Definitely worth a a try, this cup noodle is a winner in both taste and packaging. It is also interesting to note that you often have sushi with green tea and this just combines both into one package!
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