Instant Noodle Cup

52weeksofcooking 2026 - Week 22 - Fifteen Minutes or Less

May 28, 2026

A glass jar with a metal clasp lid sits open on a wooden surface, filled with sliced mushrooms, tofu cubes, noodles, and small pieces of red chilli and green pepper, all submerged in a dark, glossy broth. The ingredients are tightly packed and colourful, giving the jar a rich, layered appearance.

Yes, I cheated a bit.

I’m not naturally inclined to cook anything in fewer than fifteen minutes. I like taking time to make food. I like process. I regularly make dishes that happen over days rather than minutes. So fifteen minutes or less is both interesting and uncomfortable as a challenge.

So, of course, I found a loophole. What if I put all the the work into the preparation of the dish, and the actual “cooking” was fast? A Korean supermarket near me has an entire wall of instant ramen and I’ve been exploring spicy noodles from Buldak to Paldo Teumsae to Shin Red Super Spicy and beyond. What if I could make my own instant noodles?

Ever since I made Miso Ramen last year, I’ve been interested in making my own alkaline wheat noodles. The alkaline treatment is what gives ramen noodles their characteristic bounce. I followed this recipe from Red House Spice. Because my pasta machine doesn’t have a spaghetti cutter, I ended up hand-cutting and ended up with reasonably thin, flat noodles.

Part of me really wanted to go full industrial-tech and further process my noodles into the kind of dry block you get in the packets. I think this is probably achievable by drying them out in a low oven or via deep frying. I would have loved the aesthetic, but I think I’d have needed to spend a lot of time experimenting to get it right and in the end. I don’t have a food dehydrator, so my vision of a little packet of dried vegetables to sprinkle into my noodles also seemed a bit impractical. So I compromised: Freshly cooked noodles in a glass jar with all my mix-ins. This does also make this taste a bit more like real food than deliciously hyper-processed trash, but you can’t have everything.

A glass jar with a hinged lid sits open on a wooden surface, filled with neatly layered ingredients: sliced mushrooms on top, a middle layer of chopped green vegetables, and beneath them a mix of noodles and small tofu cubes. The clear jar shows the contrasting textures and colours stacked tightly together.

Along with my noodles, I included some homemade chilli oil, fried tofu cubes, mushrooms (mostly shiitake and golden oyster), fresh chilli, spring onion and a concentrated paste made by frying soy sauce, sugar and five spice powder. With everything in the jar, the aesthetic was giving Pinterestable meal prep more than instant ramen, but I was happy with the look.

Having made everything from scratch in a process that took significantly more than fifteen minutes, I was now ready for the cooking process to begin:

Boil a kettle
Pour water into jar
Close lid
Give her a little shake
Wait five minutes
Enjoy!

The flavour was fantastic. I’m not going to pretend this tasted like instant ramen, because it absolutely didn’t. It was just a really tasty little bowl of noodles served in a jar. The broth was nice a savoury. The chilli oil helped keep the noodles from sticking together, but also worked as a flavour element. I loved my mix of tofu and mushrooms. It was a deeply satisfying thing to eat. I’d made two of these jars and I was excited to eat the second one for lunch the next day.

An open glass jar with a hinged lid sits on a wooden surface, filled with flat noodles, diced tofu, sliced mushrooms, red chilli pieces, and green herbs. Condensation clings to the inside of the jar, making the layered ingredients look warm and freshly prepared.

This was definitely ready in fifteen minutes or less. Why are you looking at me like that? These noodles are instant.

Niamh's Food Matters

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