Bacon Ramen (Finally)

This is my destiny in life (OK, well I started this journey about a month ago, so luckily I have a back up destiny as well). Anyway, I finally got around to trying the bacon ramen. Mmm. I started off with, of course, bacon (see right). Nice fatty slices.

I used a shoyu base, and even a brand I haven't tried before (well, I've tried their miso, but I thought shoyu was less of a gamble).

I poured a little bacon grease into the bowl before adding the shoyu paste and hot water. Look at that awesome glisten. :)

So what are the results? Well, the bacon was good, of course. It's hard to go wrong with bacon, and ramen goes with pork like chocolate on cupcakes, so that wasn't much of a surprise. The noodles were good. You got a hint of bacon with each slurp, which is better than it sounds actually. So what about the soup? Well, it sort of made me a little queasy and smelled gross (like grease with a bland under-powering bean kind of taste mixed in). That's also what it tasted like. So, mediocre failure.
Hrm... What's that? Oh, I forgot the seasoning packet. Most refrigerated ramens don't come with seasoning, you just mix the paste / fat packet with water, so I naturally forgot it lying there on the counter. The instant I mixed the seasoning packet in, I got the intense sense of black pepper. Wow. There was also just plain salt (in fact, the first ingredient in the seasoning packet), and green onion. Once the seasoning was added, the ramen took on a incredibly different, amazing character. It was like I hadn't eaten in weeks and this was the first thing in my mouth. I devoured the soup. I am still a little light headed from the ramen high. It was a bit salty though.

Overall, it was pretty good, but very salty, and in fact I think I lucked out with the salty seasoning. The truth is, chashu is just the perfect pork form for ramen. It's basically bacon anyway, right? The fat will melt into the soup and the meat sponges up the flavor. I think ramen is the way it is for a reason. I'll stick to chashu, but it was a nice experiment. :)