We are all too familiar with instant noodles. Despite our parents' warnings that our luscious locks of hair would fall out if we eat too much, it's still our number one go-to food when those hunger pangs kick in in the middle of the night.
Yes, we all feel disgusted by ourselves after slurping up an entire bowl of classic chicken-flavoured maggi mee at 3am in the morning, but at least this revolutionary invention has saved the world from hearing more rumbling tummies than warranted.
Laziness was brought to a whole new level in 1958 when Momofuku Ando invented cup noodles sold in styrofoam bowls, and you know what that means - no more washing!
Today, the FMS in Tokyo team had the privilege of visiting the Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama, and let's just say we instantly fell in love with it! Apart from the usual museum exhibits like hundreds upon hundreds of cup noodles displayed behind glass walls from way back in 1958, we also got to create our very own cup noodles at the My CUPNOODLES Factory!
At just 300 yen per cup, you get to customise YOUR very own cup of noodles! From the design, to the soup flavour, and even the toppings with a total of 5,460 flavour combinations, this certainly warrants some bragging rights when you've created your own unique cup of noodles. Here's how it all went down:
1. Purchase a cup
Vending machines are located at the very start of the queue where you pay 300 yen for your instant noodles, but it's EMPTY! Look how shocked Charmaine was when she found out she paid ~SGD3.75 for a cup of... paper!
2. Clean your hands
Or rather, sanitise your hands! Nothing is worse than suffering from food poisoning from a cup of instant noodles. We had a friendly staff member going down the queue, spraying a liberal amount of hand sanitiser on both our palms to ensure the highest standards of hygiene at the "factory".
3. Bring out your inner designer
With your cup in hand, another staff member will lead you to a table with an assortment of markers to start personalising your very own cup noodles! For those of you who did badly for art classes in secondary school (including me), good luck.
4. Get your noodles in!
After designing our cups we headed straight for another queue that led us to an area resembling a factory with elaborate (and a little scary-looking) machine manned by staff dressed in aprons and headscarves behind an enclosed glass barrier, hastily yet systematically working to get the noodles done efficiently.
The first step, of course, is getting the noodles packed into the cup! My eyes only just about managed to register the massive conveyor belt with cakes after cakes of noodles laid out neatly on top of them, after having had so much to take in at the museum. They did, however, sanitise the inside of the cups before inserting the noodle cakes in. Hygiene always comes first after all!
Everything at the factory from start to finish is made interactive too! Your cup of noodles will be flipped upside down onto the noodle cake and you will be instructed to turn the lever in front of you to squeeze your noodles in tightly, leaving no redundant gaps at all!
5. Choose your seasonings
You have a choice between four soup flavours - original, seafood, curry and chilli tomato. I opted for the chilli tomato flavour as it is the only one I have yet to try, and I personally looooove my soups spicy and tangy ;)
12 ingredients are also at your disposal, and you get to choose 4 to be included in your awesome cup noodles. Choices include ebi prawns, cheese, onion and corn, but the ingredient that really takes the (noodle) cake is the naruto fishcake with the cup noodle mascot, Hiyoko-chan! I opted for the ebi prawns, cheese, dried pork cubes and Hiyoko-chan as my ingredients for the Travis Cup Noodles!
6. Seal the goodness in
After completing your concoction of flavourful goodness, your (insert name here) Cup Noodles will then be transferred to the next station where a machine seals the cup in an instant before having the cups wrapped in plastic film.
They are then transferred onto a conveyor belt that removes all the remaining air pockets and heats up the cups just a little bit to ensure the seals stay glued tightly - you wouldn't want to risk the contents losing their crispness now, would you?
Voila!
7. Bag it all up!
Of course, now that you have your very own cup noodles, surely you would want to show it off to the world? Well, the factory has got that covered. With a clear plastic bag given to you, you simply have to place the cup upright in it and pump air in with the air pumps provided at a nifty little station, after which you simply have to tie a red string on top of the bag and you're good to go!
Enjoy your very own cup noodles, and I will be enjoying my own cup of Travis Cup Noodles very soon!
The Cup Noodles Museum certainly brings audience interactivity to a whole new level. It seems like I'm attending a cup noodles workshop rather than simply visiting a museum, and how often do you actually get the chance of tasting your souvenir?
Every single one of us had fun and cannot wait to try them out! If all this noodle talk has got you craving for some, hold up before you reach for that pack of maggi mee! We have not one, but TWO limited edition cup noodle sets from the Cup Noodle Museum up for giveaway!
All you have to do is to like the photo above on either Facebook or Instagram and comment what cup noodle flavour you would love to create (let your imagination go wild!). 2 lucky people will win a cup noodle set each and the winners will be announced on 29 March 2014 at 10pm GST. So what are you waiting for? Time to get your creative caps on!
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