Koka Mushroom Flavour Noodles

Tagged: Koka, Mushroom, Mushroom flavour, Spinach

Hey, I've seen this one before! This is a classic!

This is going to be once more pretty squarely into "I'm just writing about my lunch" post territory. I prepared and ate this one pretty quickly, and while sometimes I write the posts while I'm still eating, that isn't the case today as I'm writing this "post-mortem". Post-comedere? Post-morsus.

Once again I'm asked to put the seasoning in after the noodles are cooked, not together. I think there might have been cases where I haven't been paying attention enough and have prepared the noodles together with the seasoning despite the instructions, and now I really want to get a few packs of the same ramen and do a side-by-side test to see if the different preparation would make much of a difference in the flavour. That's right, we might still get to do some actual science some day!

The little drawn mushrooms on the seasoning packet are adorable.

One thing I might not have noticed last time we tried a Koka noodle is how nostalgic the noodle itself feels to me. However Koka is making their wheat noodles feels like the "golden standard" to me, mostly because it's almost identical to the stuff I used to get as a kid. Probably would mean to other people it's just plain and ordinary, but I think it's good to set a frame of reference. I like leaving these noodles a little "underdone", with a bit of a bite to them still.

The flavour confounded me a little. I swear this tastes like beef, not mushrooms. In fact, going back to memories of instant noodles of yore, it tastes almost exactly like the store-brand beef flavour noodles that are a little too generic. Again, subjectively to me that's a bonus because I'm a sucker for nostalgic comforts, but if you were judging this by mushroom-ness? I dunno.

There's no need to panic however, because I know how to fix that. Add real mushrooms! Once again my loving wife has meal-prepped however long ago a few more portions of stir-fried mushrooms and we keep them in the freezer for just such occasions. I also added some cut spinach, and since both were frozen blocks, I popped the whole bowl into the microwave for a quick spin.

Just like our last time with a very similar bowl of Koka, the mushrooms immediately dominated the flavour. I could still taste a bit of the artificial-instant-noodle-seasoning in the background, and it definitely still felt more like a beefy contrast that way, no Vegemite required this time. I gotta say, as far as lunches go, this was pretty high up there.

Meal Components

The Scientific Method

• Prepare noodle brick in bowl with boiling water
• Add seasoning after 3 minutes and stir
• Are you sure we got the right flavour packet?
• Add frozen mushroom and spinach
• Microwave for another minute and stir
• Enjoy!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was very reminiscent of our other encounter with Koka noodles. I think this one will go right underneath that, however, because of the more complex flavour the Vegemite brought out.