noodsletter #.0009
Tapatio sopa de fideos, it takes a Japan Village, Pepsi navy
Hello!
You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually located at the bottom of the email, everything else on top, but I ran up against the word count this week, so there’s no recipe.
As ever, I welcome your feedback! Leave a comment, send an email, whatever; you don’t have to be positive, you don’t even have to be nice, just be humane.
A Note on the Confusion Created by Going Paid
Despite saying early on in this newsletter endeavor that I would stop apologizing for things, I have to start off with an apology for any confusion caused by the most recent noodsletter, the one for paying subscribers, those ones of people who, with their inexplicable generosity—for which I’m very, very grateful!—subsidized a small portion of one of the trays of uni I ordered to gild the lily on Thanksgiving.
I didn’t quite understand what the thing would look like for non-paying subscribers, so it just looked weird, and quite a few people unsubscribed entirely. Of course, they may have decided enough is enough and fled, but I suspect that at least a few of them thought that the installment for paying subscribers meant the end of installments for non-paying subscribers. This installment of noodsletter should put any concerns about that to rest.
For the foreseeable future, noodsletter (free) will go out as it has, every other week, and noodsletter (paid) will go out once a month. My hope is to do something a little more out there for the paying subscribers each month—not necessarily pricey, but almost certainly odd. And I will do a better job of making clear which is which, right at the top.
An Instant Noodle Innovation?
I believe I’ve mentioned that I am a paying subscriber to only one newsletter, namely Dennis Lee’s Food Is Stupid1, which I can’t recommend enough. But apparently Dennis just hands out incredibly good advice about food and life and instant noodles for free on his social media accounts. You don’t even have to pay him!
I eat a fair amount of instant ramen, maybe an unfair amount given that I am almost 40 and can literally make a bowl of non-instant noodles with what I have in my fridge at all times in about the same time, but I have never tried nor heard of people dipping cheese toast into instant ramen. Cheese on top? Yes. Bread in ramen? Sure. I was even vaguely aware of the fact that people will boil instant noodles, press them into a mold, then fry them in fat to make “ramen grilled cheese sandwiches,” testing the lower limits of the concept of a functional ratio for effort and reward. But cheese toast dipped in ramen? I hadn’t heard of it, and when I went to Google, it hadn’t really either.
(Although to be fair it’s very difficult to tell nowadays, since searching Google for anything seems to return search engine optimized sites that all have the same information, as well as the source of most of that information, Wikipedia.)
So I tried it. I didn’t even really need to go to the grocery store since I had Tapatio instant ramen on hand, but I decided to buy some supermarket white bread for the occasion. To approximate some semblance of scientific rigor, I further decided to do both buttered toast and cheese toast, and although I had a few different Tapatio flavors lying around, I went with the “Original,” per Dennis’s photo suggestion.
Also, before you get to my amazing photos of this experiment, I want to note that “cheese toast” is one of those deceptively simple phrases. What does it mean? It isn’t a grilled cheese (which is a griddled cheese, in any case), and to my mind it speaks of something more than toast that has been smeared with a spreadable cheese. Nor is it simply a piece of bread that has had cheese melted onto it, which would be, to my mind, “cheese bread,” and bad cheese bread, at that. I immediately thought of a piece of toast that’s had cheese annealed to its buttered surface; I also think of it being a processed cheese that’s slightly stickier than American cheese product. After a brief consideration, taking into account that I would be trying both buttered toast and cheese toast, and what I had in my fridge, I chose to make two pieces of nearly identical buttered toast, and then to subsequently top one of them with Gruyere and some rubbery supermarket Swiss and broil it. Here, then, is the experiment, in pictures:
This…is fantastic.
The cheese toast dipped in Tapatio is incredible; the buttered toast dipped in Tapatio is just “good.” Of the two, the one that presents the most danger for my health is the cheese toast, since it has that more-ish quality that’s only present in the greatest of junk foods, the kind that gives you provokes in you, unbidden, that haunting “I should eat it again” feeling the next day. It helps that the noodles taste like Tapatio (tart, spicy), since it goes as well with cheesy toast as, well, hot sauce. However, Dennis is also right about Tapatio instant ramen being good, and there’s a very simple reason for this: Tapatio instant ramen is made in South Korea. I have written about this phenomenon and how it affects Shin Ramyun products before, and Tapatio’s ramen seems to bear it out.
I asked Dennis to give me a comment about this incredible instant ramen innovation, and here’s what he said:
One time when I was a kid, I took the googly eye off a felt toy duck and put it in my ear. I don’t know why, but that pretty much sounds like something I’d do, even as an adult. English is my mother’s second language, so when I kept telling her, “I have an eye in my ear,” she had to slowly piece together what the hell I was talking about. Once she saw the toy, she figured out what happened, and she took me to the doctor, and the googly eye was extracted from my head. This has nothing to do with food, I just need you to know the story.
Thanks, Dennis!
I ended up doing a bit more internet searching, and of course there’s a ramen shop in Japan that offers cheese-topped bread as a topping for ramen. It’s an iekei ramen spot, which makes a lot of sense, since add-ons are the whole point of iekei, and the cheese on the bread looks appropriately cheese product-y. Here’s a video from Nama Japan:
Book
He could still taste the noon meal—oddly familiar Atreides chopstick-fare of mixed grains herb-seasoned and baked around a pungent morsel of pseudomeat, all of it washed down with a drink of clear cidrit juice. Moneo had found him at table in the Guard Mess, alone in a corner with a regional operations schedule propped up beside his plate.
From God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert.
I’ve been in a little Dune worm spice nerd hole for a bit, having just reread the first four books in the Dune series, and I am reading the fifth now for the first time. My only thoughts about it are none of the fans of the major movie versions of it can understand how deeply weird the whole thing becomes unless they’ve read the books, and that, as with Foundation, future food sounds intolerably bad.
Food Court Haiku Review
Do you really think
A Japanese village would
Have badly cooked rice?
“News”
Stephen Sondheim, poet of pies, RIP.
Both intrigued and repelled by the idea of eating alligator meat, although I have zero interest in ever attending a tailgate.
And I have similar feelings about this effort by Google Mexico to map out all the street food vendors!
A lot of awful in this write up of Kellogg’s and its workers, but this bit is enraging and maybe we shouldn’t have an evil system where your employer can just (proudly!) rescind your healthcare?
Shortly after the strike began, management cut off their health care, and workers were forced to pay up to $2,980 in COBRA payments, something not even John Deere management dared pull during its recent strike. (I checked with Kellogg’s about whether health benefits had been eliminated. Bahner responded succinctly: “Correct.”)
Not sure how I feel about the sentience debate surrounding crustaceans.
Kroger cakes are metal. (Seriously!)
This NYT piece on plagiarism in recipes has this:
When the nation’s copyright law was first codified in 1790, cooking was seen as a woman’s domestic responsibility rather than as a professional activity, Ms. Hawkins said. Written recipes are a relatively new invention; many cultures passed down culinary traditions orally.
I suppose “relatively” is doing a lot of work here. Sure, relative to geologic time, written recipes are new, but relative to 2021, the year we’re living in and when this piece was published, written recipes aren’t new; you can even Google this information (imagine that), but you don’t have to since the previous sentence implies written recipes existed in 1790 (they—of course!—have existed for far, far longer!). Imagine saying something from 1790 is “relatively new” with a straight face, for example, “George Washington is a relatively new American president.”
"Meat-eating vulture bees have evolved special gut bacteria to feast on flesh”
A lack of skilled butchers means thousands of pigs in Great Britain will be culled.
Speaking of incredibly skilled labor that’s become dependent on migrant labor:
This is a really interesting IG account:
Really liked these poems in The New Yorker by Lee Baines:
Pepsi sort of bought a navy from the USSR; the photos are great.
This was true until just moments ago, when I started paying for Andrew Janjigian’s Wordloaf, made possible by the generosity of my paid subscribers. Have to support the newsletter economy, you know? Also, Andrew is very good at what he does, which is teaching people how to make crazy delicious food.
Thanks so much for the longest noodsletter ever!
Really hitting your target demographic with those aligator tailgate and communist CPG love story articles. Loved it!