momofuku ando

ASIAN POP
Forever and Ever, Ramen

- By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate

In memory of the late instant-noodle king, Momofuku Ando, Jeff Yang speaks to notable ramen authorities about the meal-in-a-bowl's awesome cultural impact -- including Robert Allan Ackerman, director of the forthcoming Brittany Murphy film "The Ramen Girl."

Over the past half-century, Japan has built its reputation as a mother lode of innovation, brick by silicon-grooved brick. Nanoscopic consumer electronics. Friendly household robots. Cars that get 100 miles per gallon, with digital surround-sound systems and in-seat butt massagers.

But ask the residents of Japan about their greatest contribution to the world, and they're nearly united in their response. According to a turn-of-the-millennium poll by Fuji Research Institute, it's not the compact disc -- that came in fifth. It's not the Sony Walkman -- that was No. 3. No, Japan's most significant gift to mankind, said poll respondents, was also one of its most humble: that thrifty, tasty snack treat, instant ramen. (Karaoke, in case you wondered, came in second.)

Absurd though it may seem, the poll's respondents have got a point. Let's look at the numbers: Over the entire span of its existence, the Walkman sold just 350 million-with-an-m units. In 2004, about 17 billion CDs and DVDs were sold around the globe, including blank media. But that same year, the world gulped down over 70 billion servings of instant ramen. And though the Walkman is gone and CD sales continue to tail off, instant ramen sales just keeping on bowling along: In 2006, worldwide consumption hit a record 85 billion packages, and has 100 billion square in its gunsights by 2010. These are sums that stagger the imagination, and which certainly represent something of an ultimate vindication for the snack treat's late inventor, ramentrepreneur Momofuku Ando.

Ando, who was slurped into the eager gullet of heaven Jan. 5 at the well-preserved age of 96, was moved to create instant noodles in 1958 as he watched how legions of his hungry compatriots lined up for bowls of steaming ramen despite the rampant poverty of postwar Japan. After a few failed attempts, Ando developed a flash-frying technique that evaporated the moisture content of parboiled noodles, transforming them into uniform bricks of preserved carbohydrate. Unfortunately, the process was not, at that time, cheap -- leading to the unusual circumstance of instant ramen being a luxury product in a time of dramatic recession, available only to those who could pay extra for the privilege.

Of course, time and automation have transformed instant ramen into the ultimate subsistence fare -- with prices as low as six packages for $1 common in supermarkets across the nation. Both despite and because of this, instant ramen connoisseurs are surprisingly legion: For these peripatetic potboilers, ramen isn't just a belly-filler, it's a meal worth savoring -- a five-minute express ticket to noodle nirvana.

Rah Rah Ramen

The ranks of ramenthusiasts might well begin with Seattle-based architect-musician Ron Konzak, who literally wrote the book on instant ramen, a short but tasty tome called, naturally, "The Book of Ramen," which gathers together notable ramen factoids (the average pack of ramen has 100 individual strands, each about 16 inches long) and recipes created and compiled by Konzak and his wife Mickey. His second wife: "I actually first got into ramen after my first wife and I divorced," says Konzak. "I was living by myself, and I didn't have a heck of a lot of time, but we all have to eat."

Konzak had spent time in Japan after the war and encountered the traditional variety of ramen then. When the instant stuff arrived in local supermarkets, he bought it by the carton and lived on it for months as he built his own house. "It was boil water, make noodles, eat, get back to work," he says. "And finally I got a little tired of eating the plain noodles, so I started making it in different ways -- adding this and that, using the dried noodles as an ingredient for other dishes." Like spanakoramen, an instant-noodle variant on the Greek phyllo-and-feta pastry. And ramen rarebit. "And don't forget ramelets," he says. "Great for breakfast."

Konzak's recipe collection grew and grew. When he met Mickey, she urged him to put them out for the world to share. The book's first printing was a modest 10,000 copies. They're now on their third run back to the presses -- meeting the demands of stressed professionals, divorcés and, especially, college students. "That's more than 90 percent of our readership!" he laughs. "I don't know how many times I get e-mails from people saying, 'I'm so happy you wrote this book, I'm getting it for my son in college.'"

Ramen and wonking out go together. It's the perfect dorm-room treat, cookable with nothing more than a coffee maker or hot-water heater, fast and just about free. PCs have "Intel Inside" stickers; the programmers sitting in front of them should sport "Ramen Inside" tattoos.

Ramen.com

Given instant ramen's staple-meal status on campus and among the digerati, it's probably not surprising that a healthy ecosystem of ramenbloggers has developed, cataloging the many hundreds of varieties available, reviewing brands by the bowl and packet and sharing breaking ramenews as it hits the wires. (The passing of Mr. Ando, the Godfather of Bowl, was a seismic shock to the ramenblogger community, as you can imagine.)

Perhaps the most prominent of these net noodlers is Orange County resident Ed Wu, the proprietor of ramenramenramen.net, notable not only for its relative longevity as far as single-subject blogs go (he's been obssessing over ramen on the Web for going on two years now) but also because Wu has, through his connections, become the sole source for prized "Ramen Bowl" pins -- a sexy way of wearing your ramen-love on your sleeve, or at least on your lapel.

Wu's love of instant ramen is at least in part nostalgic. "I was born in Taiwan and came here at age 7," he says. "And I remember being terribly homesick when I first moved here, away from our friends and relatives." Hot bowls of instant ramen doubled as both therapeutic regimen and budget-friendly fare for him and his sister. "Both my parents worked, and we weren't well off -- and about the only thing I could do as a 7-year-old was boil water, so as kids we ate a lot of Maruchan Beef Flavor," he says. "And I actually really enjoyed it. I ate instant ramen every chance I got."

Wu's ramen jones followed him through high school, into college -- where he studied abroad in Japan -- and then into adulthood, as he joined his parents' company and began traveling to Asia on business. "When I go to Japan with my dad, it drives him crazy because all I ever want to eat is ramen," he says. "He says to me, 'There are so many nice restaurants we can go to, and you want to eat this?' But there's no comparison. I just think it's the most amazing food in the world."

It goes without saying that when Wu got married three years ago, it was to a woman who accepted and even embraced his ramenia. "Alice also enjoys ramen -- I probably couldn't be married to anyone who didn't!" laughs Wu. "We'd go on ramen dates to this place about 20 minutes away from us -- we still go there just about every weekend. And she was so cool and down-to-earth about it. She never looked at it as being a cheap date, but rather, a way for me to share something I'm passionate about with her."

In fact, it was Alice who first encouraged him to start blogging about ramen ... after they got back from their ramen honeymoon in Japan. "We went to the ramen museum in Yokohama!" he says. "Alice was a good sport about it -- she thought it would be fun. And it was crazy: We went on a weekday, late in the afternoon, and we still had to wait for almost an hour to get into any of the restaurants in the museum. I only got to have one bowl ... but it was a big bowl. And that's still a highlight of my trip -- biting into a piece of pork that literally melted in my mouth. Such an incredible experience."

The Wus also loaded up at the museum store, buying as many packages of instant ramen as they could fit into their luggage -- "Not nearly as much as I would have liked" -- and bringing it home with them. That began Wu's personal quest to collect and sample as wide a variety of instant ramen brands as he could, and ultimately, at Alice's urging, to document his ramencounters online. He now has an audience of thousands of fellow ramen-lovers per week -- and ever since Ando's passing, swarms of journalists pestering him for his ramenological insights. (For the record, Wu is painstaking about following package directions exactly as written. His preferred flavor is shoyu, and his current brand of choice -- as blasphemous as this may seem -- is a Chinese brand called Tong-Yi. "But the concept of instant noodles is originally Chinese," he points out. "And Ando is ethnically Chinese himself, from Taiwan!" So OK then.)

But the pot's just beginning to boil for ramenophiles everywhere. Later this year, a film is coming that promises to expand the Ramen Empire into Hollywood and onto movie marquees across middle America.

That's Ramentertainment

The film in question is "The Ramen Girl," starring "8 Mile"'s Brittany Murphy as a young American woman who travels to Japan to be with her boyfriend, gets summarily dumped and decides, spontaneously, to apprentice herself to a stoic noodle master, played by beloved Japanese thespian Toshiyuki Nishida. It's been dubbed a "romantic comedy," a mislabeling that irritates director-producer Robert Allan Ackerman. (Although Ackerman should be used to mislabeling: He directed the made-for-TV biopic "The Reagans," which conservative pundits and bloggers soundly and wrongly hounded into deletion.)

"I have no idea how that characterization happened, and it bugs me," says Ackerman. "There're a lot of very funny scenes in this movie, and there's a romantic subplot to this movie, a love story between Brittany's character and a Korean Japanese guy -- he's Japanese, but his ancestry is Korean, so in a sense, he's as alienated in Japan as much as an American might be, and discriminated against in many ways. But I wouldn't call this film a romantic comedy" -- which is to say, don't expect any "Sleepless in Shibuya"-style meet-cute claptrap.

Ackerman also bristles at early comparisons to films like "Tampopo" and "Lost in Translation." "'Tampopo' is about learning to cook noodles, or part of it is, and 'Lost in Translation' is about Americans in Japan, but beyond that, this is much more of personal story, about somebody coming of age, finding out who they are, and having to go to a completely different culture to do so," he says. "And while I like 'Lost in Translation,' I do think our film is a lot more respectful of Japanese culture. In 'Lost,' Japan became just a stand-in for a strange, foreign place. It could have taken place anywhere."

"Ramen Girl," on the other hand, is deeply immersed in Japaneseness, with a crew, production team and cast that is almost entirely Japanese. Ackerman himself has spent a good part of the past 15 years directing theater in Japan, which gave him access to some of the nation's most promising and prominent talent. It also gave him a deep sense of the dichotomies between Japan and the United States -- and within Japan itself, the quintessential Old-New World.

"Working with young Japanese artists, what really has struck me is how they're all struggling to get better, not struggling to get famous," he says. "On Broadway, you do a casting call, and as soon as someone gets a part, they're on the phone to their agents, looking for the next one. It's not that they're not serious about their art ... it's that they're so serious about their careers. Here, you really see this commitment to the work -- even if it's a small role or a small production. It's about making you better at who and what you are. And that's something we explore in the movie. It's about dedication, discipline, commitment, even if you don't know what's on the other side. It's about the nature of art."

The scene that Ackerman is currently editing is an example of that art-versus-commodity dichotomy. "It's this scene where Yoshida's character, the master chef, is explaining what a bowl of ramen is," he says. "How it contains all the different elements of the world -- earth and sea -- and the soup is the soul, the thing that holds it all together. And she doesn't understand a thing. She can't understand Japanese, he speaks no English. But it's more than that. He's saying 'observe the bowl.' She, being American, wants to do something, she wants to act. It's a disconnect."

There's a soulfulness to ramen, that comes in part from the traditions upheld by the family-owned shops that still thrive throughout the nation.

"You go to these places, and there's a soup bowl that contains the remnants of spices that could be hundreds of years old," he says. "They never, never clean it. Spices are just added to this bowl. And so it contains the residue of their grandfather's ingredients, and that's the most secret part of it. That's something I find incredibly profound. It's like owning Shakespeare's inkpot and knowing it was never washed. Some part of the ink you're using might have been on Shakespeare's pen. There's the weight and depth of history in each bowl of this soup."

This homeopathic connection to ancient days, this unbroken spiritual line, is part of what fuels the ritual associated with ramen at its most traditional. There is an art to its consumption as well. "There are people who only go to a specific ramen shop, on a specific day of the week, and wait in line for hours to get in," says Ackerman. "And some chefs are so strict that they don't allow any conversation. Customers eat in silence or get kicked out. And they close the shop as soon as the noodles are done -- they prepare 40 servings a day, and when it's gone, they won't make any more."

Is there anything at all similar to this phenomenon in America? "I think the only thing that comes close is barbecue, perhaps -- the regional variation, the way people carry on about different rubs and sauces," he says. "The way some people spend their entire lives trying to perfect a single recipe." (One can imagine a sequel called "The Grill Girl," about a Japanese expat searching for self-actualization in the spice rubs and smokers of America.)

But if traditional ramen is like grandpa's old-school, hand-smoked 'cue, instant ramen is, well, the McRib. And both are emblematic of Japan today, in all of its schizophrenic splendor. America, too: For every worshipper at the altar of char-grilled authenticity, there's a cultist who craves (and celebrates, in prose and poetry) the wonders of Mickey D's mutant variation on the theme. But that's the brilliance of today's magnificently mixed-up cultural reality. We live in a time where haute and basse don't just co-exist -- they converse, conmingle, get sexy together.

Like ramen itself, popular culture today is a blend of all the elements of the world, held together by a soulful soup of human interaction. It simultaneously embraces both the resonant residue of the ancients and the piping-hot spontaneity of Nissin's globally successful product.

And even as I write this ... somehow, I get the feeling Momofuku Ando is smiling.
Ramen Recipes from "The Book of Ramen"
courtesy of Ron Konzak

Ramburger

Vegetarians love this one. With a little bit of imagination this can taste just like a hamburger. Serve it on a bun with ketchup, dill pickle and fried onions.

1 pkg. ramen noodles
1 egg
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 tbsp. flour
1 tbsp. oil
1 flavor packet
1/2 tsp. poultry seasoning
1 tbsp. steak or Worcestershire sauce
black pepper to taste

Knead unopened package of ramen noodles until broken up real fine. Boil noodles in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes. When noodles are done, drain and rinse with cold water and let drain for a few minutes to make it as dry as possible.

Chop onions and nuts finely and saute in an iron skillet. While frying, add black pepper and poultry seasoning.

In a bowl, mix together egg, flour, steak or Worcestershire sauce and contents of flavor packet. Add drained noodles, sauteed ingredients and mix well again.

Cook in an oiled skillet on medium heat until browned, then turn over and brown other side. Use a cover on the skillet to get them to cook evenly. The mixture can be shaped neatly into individual patties before they firm up.

Rambalaya

Yes, it's true. This is a ramen version of Jambalaya. Don't laugh, it tastes just great! You can also add cooked chicken, smoked ham, spicy sausage and shrimp.

1 pkg. ramen noodles
1 small green pepper
2 pimentos, canned
or
1 small sweet red pepper
1 small onion
1 cup mushrooms, large pieces
1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
1 tbsp. oil
1/2 tsp. paprika
1 tbsp. butter

Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Knead unopened package of ramen until broken up medium.

In a small saucepan, boil noodles in 2 cups of water for five minutes.When noodles are done, put into a strainer, rinse with cold water and let drain for a few minutes, shaking the water out to make them as dry as possible.

Saute together mushrooms, onions, peppers and celery. If you feel brave, add your favorite hot chili pepper.

Mix all the ingredients together in a greased baking dish. Bake covered at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour.

Serve with corn bread and salad. Also makes a nice side dish to shrimp or crayfish.

Jeff Yang forecasts new Asian and Asian American consumer trends for the market-research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of "Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China" (Atria Books) and co-author of "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action" (Ballantine) and "Eastern Standard Time" (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). He lives in New York City. Go to www.ouatic.com/mojomail/mojo.pl to join Jeff Yang's biweekly mailing list offering updates on this column and alerts about other breaking Asian and Asian American pop-culture news.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2007/01/18/apop.DTL