7-Eleven Japan now has Milk Miso Curry Ramen, but is that too much for one cup? [Taste test]

A special kind of regional ramen makes its 7-Eleven instant noodle debut, with help from the makers of Sapporo Ichiban .

Nothing else has such a fundamental effect on the quality of ramen as the broth.

Get the broth right, and you’re going to have at least an overall-good-tasting meal.

If the broth is bad, though, it won’t matter what sort of noodles and toppings you have, since they’ll be soaked in subpar flavor.

With that in mind, 7-Eleven Japan is taking on a tough challenge with its latest instant ramen offering, since there’s a lot of complexity, and so also a lot of potential places to screw up, with the broth of the Milk Miso Curry Ramen .

This ramen didn’t come about by 7-Eleven just grabbing random things from around their kitchen and tossing them in the pot, though.

Ramen with a mixed broth of miso, curry, and milk is a local specialty of Aomori Prefecture , located up at the northern tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu.

This regional version hasn’t really spread to the rest of Japan, though, so 7-Eleven’s cup ramen version, which just recently went on sale, is going to be many people’s first encounter with milk miso curry ramen.

There’s an argument to be made, at the granular level, that the idea isn’t so strange .

Ramen with miso-based broth has been popular for generations, and it’s a style especially loved by people in northern Japan.

Ramen with a curry-based broth is less common, but not unheard of (though you’re more likely to run into curry udon noodles on restaurant menus than curry ramen).

The island prefecture of Hokkaido, just north of Aomori, is known for “soup curry,” a variation with a more liquidy consistency than the thicker roux ordinarily used for Japanese curries.

Some Japanese home chefs also like to add bit of milk to the pot when cooking curry or reheating leftover roux, to give it a richer flavor.

However, is 7-Eleven trying to be too clever by combining all three of those ingredients, miso, curry, and milk, in a single ramen broth? At the very least, it sounds like something that would require a delicate touch in balancing the flavors, but “delicate” isn’t usually a quality we associate with instant noodles.