ramen

4 Articles

A hand holds a round disc of noodles wrapped in a translucent film with herb specs embedded in it.

Reimagined Ramen Comes In Edible Package

September 15, 2022 by 31 Comments

Hackers and college students alike reach for ramen when they want to fuel up on a budget, but, if you’re concerned about packaging waste, the plastic film and foil packets start to weigh on your conscience. [Holly Grounds] was sick of this compromise and came up with a way to have your packaging and eat it too.

[Holly] first experimented with different bioplastics until she developed a recipe for “an edible, tasteless starch-based bioplastic, that dissolves in contact with boiling water.” With that accomplished, she next integrated flavoring into the bioplastic wrapper so that there’s no foil packet. She found that herbs and spices worked, but larger solids like shrimp couldn’t be incorporated into the film.

For the finishing touch, she fashioned the noodles into a disk so they fit better in a bowl for cooking. To cook the noodles, you remove a puck from the wax paper sleeve holding multiple servings, add boiling water, stir, and enjoy. [Holly] says that her ramen packets are quicker to prepare than existing packets since there are fewer steps and the shape is optimized for cooking. That’s a win-win for the planet and convenience.

If you want to see another pasta packaging marvel, we’ve previously covered Flat Pack Pasta. Have your own project to reduce packaging waste? Submit it to the Save the World Wildcard round of the Hackaday Prize which closes on October 16th!

Ramen Pen Lets You Doodle With Noodles

November 6, 2019 by 25 Comments

Don’t write off your weird ideas — turn them into reality. For years, woodworkers have used pen bodies as a canvas for showing off beautiful wood. But what’s the fun in that? [JPayneWoodworking] made a pen out of Ramen noodles just to see if he could.

The process is pretty straightforward, as he explains in the build video after the break. He hammered the uncooked noodle mass into pieces small enough to fit a pen blank mold, but not so small that they’re unrecognizable. Then he poured in pigmented epoxy in orange, silver, and black. [JPayneWoodworking] chose those colors for Halloween, but rather than looking freaky, we think it makes the pen look like a bowl of beef broth-y goodness from a fancy Ramen place.

After adding the flavor packet pigments, he put it in a pressure tank to remove all air pockets. Once it sets up, the process is the same as any other pen blank — take it for a spin on the lathe, polish it up, ream it out, and fit it with the parts from a pen kit. We’d like to see the look on the face of the next person to ask [JPayneWoodworking] for a pen.

Want to get into woodworking just to make weird stuff like this? We don’t blame you. But how does a hardware hacker such as yourself get started? [Dan Maloney]’s got you covered.

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Making Instant Ramen A Bit More Instant

July 21, 2019 by 32 Comments

Instant ramen, the favoured repast of the impecunious would-be tech genius! It’s cheap, of dubious nutritional value, and it only takes a minute to cook. But what if you are in the creative Zone to the extent that five minutes to boil water is too much? For that you need an automatic ramen cooker, which is what [Mayermakes] has created from an upcycled electric filter coffee maker.

A filter coffee maker is a surprisingly effective instant ramen cooker without modification, in that it already contains a hotplate and water boiler to dribble hot water on some noodles. But it lacks any means of adding the seasoning or the essential hot sauce, so he created a 3D-printed rotating hopper driven by a stepper motor, and a servo driven syringe, while coffee maker itself is given a solid state relay to switch it on.

Controlling the show is an Arduino MKR board, which serves up a web interface with the option of ramen as it comes, or ramen with hot sauce. The result is an automated pot of $0.49 noodles that will set no gourmet’s heart a-flutter. Then again, fine dining is not why instant ramen exists.

This appears to be our first ramen-cooking coffee pot, but we have seen a guitar made from noodles!

Continue reading “Making Instant Ramen A Bit More Instant” →

Ramen Lamp Has Us Feeling Hungry

July 2, 2019 by 7 Comments

Ramen comes in many forms, and whether you’re eating the 10 cent instant packets during the school year, or dining out at a fancy noodle bar, it’s a tasty meal either way. [ramenkingandi] has long been in love with the classic Japanese fare, and decided to create a homage to the dish – in lamp form.

The lamp build begins, somewhat unsurprisingly, with a lamp – but not how you’d think. A Walmart floor lamp is harvested for its lampshade, which approximates the dimensions of a typical ramen bowl. It’s then fitted with warm yellow LEDs to give it a pleasing glow. Polymer clay is used to create fake ramen ingredients – including noodles, pork, and choy sum. Jewelery wire is used to suspend the chopsticks in mid-air, before resin is poured into the bowl and the ingredients arranged on top. For a final touch, the bowl is painted with an artistic stripe to hide the electronics inside, and the lamp is complete.

It’s a great example of fake Japanese food, which is actually a huge industry in that part of the world. We’d love to have this lamp on display in our own home, fully expecting ramen consumption to increase considerably over time.

Lamps are a common feature around these parts – and some of them have even learned to leap.