4th Post: Letting It Cook

                  I needed something sweet.  However when you think of ramen, a savory dessert does not come to mind.  Which is why my blog took a creative turn when I found ramen topping… for your ice cream?  Before you just flat out deny this innovation, let me reassure you that this ramen will be fried.  That might not make it sound better, but according to the recipe from Ramendelicious.com, the fried noodles have a salty taste that can go well with anything and add a lot of flavor to the sugary ice cream.  Though this still didn’t appeal to me, I figured that if I didn’t like the fried ramen, I could just eat the rest of the ice cream by itself.  So why not try it?
            The ingredients were simple: ice cream and vegetable oil.  Being my cheap ass self, I went to the university mini shopping mart and bought the ingredients with my dinning points so I wouldn’t have to use the little cash that I have.  One bottle of vegetable oil ($4.09) and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, one vanilla and the other peanut butter cup ($3.99 each), left me with 12.07 fewer meal points but all the ingredients necessary to make the dessert. 

                  Before I start talking about the cooking process I went through, I’d like to say that the kitchen is a familiar place for me. I cook dinners back home and make myself breakfast and lunch here quiet frequently.  Despite my experience in the kitchen, it took me four tries before the fried ramen tasted tolerable. Four. Might I add, the specific recipe I found on Ramendelicious.com tasted terrible, but I tweaked it to my liking.  The first try (the original recipe) was using a pan with vegetable oil covering a nice layer of the bottom and then sprinkling some ramen on top. With nothing else to mix it with, I used my metal fork to ensure the ramen didn’t burn, and I let the ramen come to a nice tan and brown color.  It tasted like vegetable oil.  Meanwhile, my friends were making macaroni and cheese next to me in the same kitchen and watched my failure of a first test.  I was trying to explain to them that the noodles needed to caramelize in order to make them sweet, but this confused them because there is no sugar in ramen. So my friends retrieved some sugar packets for me, and I had another go at it.  This time (along with a nice layer of vegetable oil) I poured three sugar packets and sprinkled a fair amount of ramen along with it.  The sugar quickly started to caramelize with the heat of the stove as I mixed the ramen in my new solution.  After cooking them to a light brown color, I gave it a try. Sweet vegetable oil… you don’t want to how that really tastes.  I was getting a little frustrated at this point.  Nothing was working, and the recipe was wrong.  It was taking far longer than the projected five minutes. 

                  Luckily, my friends that I was cooking with saved the day.  They said butter might be a better tasting oil to use.  I quickly smeared butter all around the surface of the pan and tossed some crushed ramen on top.  The cooking seemed to go quicker this time around. I got the noodles to my desired color and gave it a try.  It was a tastier combination, but it was missing something.  As I was cleaning, I noticed some spilt sugar lying all over the counter top.  And then, I knew what I’d be making a fourth and final batch with.  I melted a little more butter in the clean pan and added a packet of sugar along with it.  The previous batch was good, but it was missing a sweet flavor with it.  It was crunchy and rich, but I needed it to be sweet as well.  I poured my remaining ramen on the butter and lightly caramelized sugar and mixed vigorously.  I wanted this batch to be the best, and it was.  It was the best combination of crunchiness, sugar, and flavor.  Now I could top my ice cream.

                  I was quite hopeful about the ramen topping.  The recipe praised it and said it would be delicious by itself.  I got my ice cream out of the freezer and ate some ice cream as a control (nice excuse right?).  Sprinkling a little ramen into each pint, I gave them each a shot.  There is one look that probably described my face: disappointed. There was definitely an added crunch while eating the ice cream, but no flavor whatsoever could be tasted.  The ice cream itself overpowered the added sugar of the noodles, leaving it to seem like I was eating just cooked noodles and ice cream.

                  Surprisingly, I got better responses out of my taste-testers than myself.  The vast majority of subjects admitted it had a good taste.  Now I was starting to get suspicious of this. Were they just trying to be nice to me? Did they just want to eat ice cream and appease me?  Only three out of fifteen stated that the noodles added no beneficial taste to the ice cream.  One volunteer stated that though the concoction was good, it would take a lot in order to make Ben & Jerry’s taste bad.  I’d have to agree there, as I sit here writing this post and finishing the ice cream. 

                  Would you ever put the time in and try this?  Would you consider adding ramen as a topping to something else?  Such as desserts, meals, or snacks?

Works Cited

"Caramel Ice Cream Ramen." RAMENLICIOUS. Raamenlicious.com, 27 Feb. 2013. <http://www.ramenlicious.com/recipes/ice-cream-ramen.html>.