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We try new yakisoba noodles with chocolate sauce (Spoiler: it’s awful)

Mike Jan 21, 2016
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Food manufacturer Myojo recently released a special version of their popular Ippei-chan instant yakisoba noodles that includes a chocolate sauce topping. We tried it… so you don’t have to.

Presumably after a rousing night of hitting themselves over the head with mallets, executives at instant food manufacturer Myojo decided it would be a good idea to produce and sell a version of their exceedingly popular Ippei-chan line of instant yakisoba noodles that comes with a packet of thick chocolate sauce intended to be squeezed onto the noodles as a topping. Our interest piqued at the words “chocolate” and “noodles,” we decided to give a try.

We instantly regretted it.

It’s old news that some flavor combinations that don’t particularly seem like they’d work well together actually get along swimmingly (fried chicken and waffles, for instance), and perhaps no one knows this better than the people of Japan, where Japanese food manufacturers and retailers have spent the better part of a decade dedicating untold thousands of actual, paid man hours basically just coming up with wacky combinations of ingredients and seeing what sticks.

But listen, it’s also common knowledge that some combinations of otherwise very good flavors just fundamentally do not mix. No one’s in a hurry to, say, sandwich grilled salmon between two slices of chocolate cake, or, like, slather caviar on a Dorito. Likewise, yakisoba and chocolate sauce just seems like a flawed idea right out of the box. Standard yakisoba, you see, is already kind of salty-sweet and sort of wet and slimy. It’s made by frying ramen noodles (don’t let the name fool you) in a combination of soy, Worcestershire sauce and sugar. That’s not the type of dish you want to be recklessly adding chocolate sauce to.

Anyway, putting aside our already staggeringly low expectations, we whipped up a bowl of the new Ippei-chan Yomise no Yakisoba Choco Sauce and passed it around the office.

To no one’s surprise, almost everyone found the item to be completely unpalatable. In fact, the highest praise anyone at the office could muster was, “It’s edible.” As in, we presume, eating this won’t kill you. But, despite the fact that eating it won’t kill you, the same can be said about a lot of things you wouldn’t necessarily want to pay actual money for at the grocery store, and we, sadly, just this once, must recommend against trying Japan’s newest wacky novelty flavor combo.

If you absolutely must get your hands on this item, though, well… good luck finding it. We had a hard time tracking down a store that actually stocked it, and even after we did finally find a place with the gall to put this stuff on the shelf, we noticed to our amusement that the item had already been marked down from the manufacturer recommended 180 yen (US$1.50) down to just 128 yen.

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