Ando's entrepreneurial genius was to shuck off centuries of tradition and realize that noodles did not necessarily have to be cooked fresh and served only after being steeped in vats of boiling water. After tinkering for a year in his backyard shed, he discovered that noodles could be dried, packaged and rehydrated in a bowl of boiling water in just three minutes — and served almost anywhere.
His gamble with flour, palm oil and MSG created a new food that appealed to tastes across Asia and in the United States. He began exporting instant ramen to the U.S. in 1970 and a year later created Cup Noodle — noodles that could be sold and prepared in the same container — inspired by the way American consumers plopped their noodles into a cup and ate them with a fork.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Thanks Mr. Cup O Noodles
The inventor of the instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, died recently. What would college have been like with cup o noodles? From the LA Times obituary:
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3 comments:
Why isn't there a Nobel Prize for Prepared Food Innovation?
i recently saw in the vending machine near my bldg, this really wrong flavor of cup-o-noodle...something chile lime or salsa something.
i dunno about that.
the one bad thing about cup-o-noodles is that people try to microwave it, thus leaving little explosions in the public microwaves. gross.
I never could get into ramen noodles. Too much sodium for my taste. Still, the place of ramen noodles in the lives of college students, the lazy, and those on a tight budget shouldn't be understated.
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