What you didn't know about instant noodles
Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: the truth about (those irresistible) instant noodles.
Of course you can down a rabbit hole on the internet and watch videos where a camera shows someone who has been swept away with their Cup Noodles how those things are still not digested after four hours, and they never want to eat them again. You can also stick your fingers in your ears when someone suggests that instant noodles aren't good for you and stubbornly keep having them for lunch every day, but you can also just stick to that well-known truth like a cow: enjoy in moderation.
You might not want to hear this
Instant noodles are not good for you, we can be brief about that. That's quite a downer – just think about that improbably satisfying salty, warm, spicy broth from which those perfect chewy-but-still-soft noodles are so deliciously slurped down. And then that choice, that assortment! Those colors, those pictures, that price! Chef David Chang, of Netflix’ Ugly Delicious-fame, named his entire Momofuku empire after the inventor of instant ramen: Momofuku Ando; he loves it so much…
Bland
Unfortunately, as is the case with many things in life: if it’s made so easy for you, something is probably wrong. In this case: those noodles are first salted and then fried. They are not all laid out strand by strand in the sun to dry out nicely for hours. In many cases, that frying happens in palm oil, and palm oil is generally produced in a mega irresponsible way.
Nice
Then there’s that cozy little bag of powder, and often a greasy mess in a sachet that turns out to be impossible to tear open with your hands or teeth, at which point you just pull out the scissors and then forever have garlic-chili (palm) oil on the kids' crafts. The mentioned bag of powder contains salt, plus a variation on salt, and something to keep that salt salty for a long time. I know very well how all this sounds: DELICIOUS. However, many brands already exceed the maximum amount of sodium that an adult should consume in a day with just one such bag of powder (sodium is, besides 60 percent chloride, the most important element that salt consists of, for 40 percent).
Alt-salt
So if you regularly eat instant noodles, you could do a few things to make it a little less unhealthy: cook the noodles in water and then rinse them again with hot water and immediately throw away those bags and replace them with less processed flavorings. Like soy sauce for example: also high in salt, but there are certainly variants with less sodium (look in the toko for a bottle that says ‘low-sodium’), lime juice, sambal… All works.
Yeah but…
And what if you really don’t feel like that and have no intention of wasting a milligram of your bounty? Then we would, following nutrition professors, say: see this bowl of deliciousness as a schuldig genot, something you don’t indulge in a few times a week but just occasionally and then enjoy it fully. Pimped with some vegetables, an egg, some seaweed, and hot sauce is also our opinion: this stuff is irresistible!
