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Our reporter eats the new “apple pie” flavor yakisoba noodles, so no one else has to

Katy Kelly Sep 26, 2020
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P.K. Sanjun bravely faces down notorious noodle company Peyoung’s latest concoction. Can yakisoba really taste like apple pie?

First, a little backstory.

Peyoung is a company that produces instant yakisoba noodles. A noble feat, you might think; it takes numerous companies to form an industry, and Nissin and Super Cup can’t keep the market running by themselves. The thing is that Peyoung doesn’t just make regular noodles… they also make weird noodles.

▼ Behold, Peyoung’s Chocolate Yakisoba.

With variants ranging from the relatively weird cilantro yakisoba to the meta yakisoba-flavored yakisoba to the decadent yakisoba topped with actual gold dust, no one can accuse Peyoung of sticking to the basics. Even their more regular flavors tend to attract attention for wild and whacky reasons, like how their ultra spicy noodles are so spicy people would rather eat literally anything else.

Thing is, these weird flavors are kind of a hotly-anticipated event in themselves. Our reporter P.K. Sanjun was stunned to realize a brand new whacky flavor had hit shelves, and one that made about as much sense as any other flavor in their back catalog: Apple Pie Taste Yakisoba.

▼ You know, apple pie, that seasonal September dish in Japan?

P.K., a scholar of Peyoung’s bizarre offerings, had noticed a surprising lack of sweet options in their line-up. There hadn’t been any at all since the infamous chocolate version, and so, he couldn’t help but be intrigued by this ominous sparkling apple design and its promise to provide him with “apple pie taste” in noodle form.

So P.K. bought some. You can prepare Apple Pie Taste yakisoba like any other Peyang noodles; boil the water, let the noodles steep, drain it and then mix in the flavoring. This version came with some dried apple to sprinkle over the noodles to really pump up the apple pie factor.

▼ P.K. thought he saw a distressed face in the apple shards, but it must have been his imagination.

The noodles made their presence known immediately, namely in that they produced a cloying aroma of sickly sweet butter. Rather than the inviting aroma you might catch when walking past a bakery, this was like having a McDonalds apple pie jammed in each nostril.

P.K. braced himself for this inevitable, incongruent eating experience. Chopsticks shuddering in his shaky hands, he lifted a generous portion of noodles to his mouth.

Ah.

Salty.

Wait, salty?

Yes, despite the rich, saccharine smell of sweetened butter, the noodles only possessed the slightest hint of sweetness. Instead, they were as salty as any instant noodle you might purchase in a cup. Processed noodles do tend to be salty, after all. However, these were no regular processed noodles.

They tasted really bad.

▼ We don’t know what he expected.

Yes, yakisoba needs a generous amount of salt to taste like yakisoba. However, P.K. couldn’t help but feel that in doing so, they had significantly reduced the apple pie taste promised by the packaging. It smelled sweet and buttery, but tasted salty and savory. It was an ill-fitting match, and decidedly not a delicious one.

It doesn’t do well to waste food, though, and P.K. still had a significant amount of noodles to get through. He felt it would be tough for anyone who wasn’t four days deep into fasting to finish the plate before him. Still, he had one weapon in his arsenal: the power of imagination.

“You’re eating a real, fresh-baked apple pie from Europe,” P.K. told himself sternly. “In Europe they love to bake their apple pies with lots of salt.”

▼ He told us he forced himself to picture this (though it’s actually an American pie baked in Nara).

He bolstered this powerful thought with others, like “Japanese desserts are far too sweet, anyway” and “This is what real apple pies taste like”, and…it worked! P.K. managed to eat the entire serving of apple pie noodles. He doesn’t recommend eating them without exercising similar mind-over-matter methods; it’s unlikely you’ll be able to finish these weird noodles without them.

Imagination is truly a remarkable thing.

Never take your imagination for granted.

If you’d like to flex your imaginary muscles, Peyoung’s Apple Pie Taste Yakisoba can be found in supermarkets across Japan for 205 yen (US$1.90). If you’d rather spend your money on something that you can enjoy without envisioning something else, you could do much worse than the edible Eevee apple desserts served up by the Pokémon Cafe.

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