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Episode 15

Why Are Instant Noodles Wavy?

The waves in instant noodles are made on purpose by a machine. They stop strands sticking, help the block come loose, and keep brittle noodles whole.

12 November 20267 min readVideo 8:13

Instant noodles are wavy because a machine bends them on purpose, right after they are cut. Straight strands tend to stick to each other on the production line, and fried noodles are brittle. The bends keep the strands apart so they come loose quickly in hot water, and, according to one noodle machinery maker, a wavy heap presses into a tighter brick that breaks less on its way to you.

Watch the episode: Your Cup Noodles Are Floating 8:13

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How big is the instant noodle habit?

The world ate 123.07 billion servings of instant noodles in 2024, about 336 million a day. China, including Hong Kong, ate 43.8 billion of them, about 36% of the world's total and the most of any country. Per person, Vietnam came first at 81 servings a year, more than one every 5 days. South Korea was close behind at 79.2, and Japan, where it all started, ate 47.

And most of those blocks are bent. I'd always assumed the waves were for the soup, something for the broth to cling to. They aren't a look. They're made by the factory, on purpose.

How does a machine make the waves?

A noodle starts as a flat sheet of dough. A cutter slices it into strands. Japan's instant noodle makers measure this with a count: a dough sheet 30 mm wide cut into 20 strands gives noodles 1.5 mm wide each. The wave itself comes from a wave-forming device and a helper conveyor as the noodles leave the cutter.

The trick is a speed difference. A Sanyo Foods patent spells it out: the conveyor under the cutting blades runs slower than the noodle strips coming off them. The strands can't lie flat, so they pile up and fold. It's a traffic jam, built in on purpose.

Who invented instant noodles?

Nissin calls its Chicken Ramen the world's first instant noodles. It was made by Momofuku Ando, who founded Nissin. Years before, just after the war, he had watched people line up in the cold at a makeshift stall near Osaka Station for a bowl of ramen.

In 1957 a credit union went bankrupt, and Ando lost nearly everything except a rented house in Ikeda, Osaka. In its backyard he built a shed. He set himself five conditions: the noodles had to be delicious, keep in a household kitchen, be quick and easy to prepare, be inexpensive, and be safe and sanitary. Then he worked alone for a whole year, with no day off, sleeping about 4 hours a night, making trial batches day after day and throwing them away.

You'd think the trick is just drying the noodles. But some of his early noodles wouldn't soften in hot water at all. Pour hot water on dry pasta and you get warm, hard pasta.

The fix came from his own kitchen. His wife was deep-frying tempura, and the batter bubbled as it threw its water out. That gave him the frying method. Frying drives the water out of the noodles and leaves tiny holes; when you pour on hot water, it soaks into the holes and the noodles soften, ready at once. With so little water left, the noodles also don't spoil and keep for a long time, which took care of another of his conditions.

The process has stayed close to that idea. The noodles are steamed at 100 °C for 1 to 5 minutes, which cooks the starch so it can be digested. Chicken Ramen's noodles are steamed, seasoned and dried, then fried in oil at about 160 °C for 2 minutes, which drives the water out and leaves many holes.

Chicken Ramen went on sale on 25 August 1958. Ando, born in 1910, was 48. At 35 yen a serving it was somewhat pricey for the time, and it sold out anyway.

Are the waves older than instant noodles?

Yes. One Japanese account of instant noodle history begins in 1953, five years before Chicken Ramen, when Yoshio Murata, head of the Murata noodle works, invented a method of bending noodles by machine. It was a method for ordinary noodles, not a fix for frying. Murata patented it, and the noodle maker Miyakoichi says the wavy noodles in bagged instant noodles are based on that patented bent-noodle method.

So why did instant noodle makers keep the bend? Because it solves two of their problems.

What do the waves actually do?

The first problem is sticking. Japan's instant noodle industry association gives its own answer to why the noodles are wavy: the waves stop the strands sticking to each other during processing, and help them come apart when you cook them. The Sanyo patent places that sticking at the steamer, where soft, warm strands meet. Bent, they stay apart, and in your pot they come loose.

The second problem is breakage. A noodle machinery maker, Dongfang Naomu, quoted by The Takeout, gives two more reasons: wavy noodles press into a tighter block, so more fits in a smaller pack, and because fried noodles are brittle, the waves make them resist breaking during packing and transport. Your dinner is built to survive a delivery.

Straight noodles turned out to be the hard way. In 2009, Nissin said that making cup noodles straight had been hard because of the production process, and it made the noodles in its Yakisoba U.F.O. straight with a new method it had applied to patent. The Sanyo patent goes further: it says no practical process for producing straight instant noodle strips had ever been proposed.

Why are Cup Noodles filled upside down?

In 1966, Ando toured Europe and the United States to sell Chicken Ramen. At an American supermarket chain, the managers broke the noodles into pieces, put them in paper cups, added hot water and ate them with forks. Ando realized that eating habits differ between cultures.

He wanted a cup you could hold in one hand, one container that would be the package, the cooking pot and the serving bowl. It took nearly 40 prototypes. He chose a polystyrene foam container shaped like an enlarged paper cup.

Then he had to get a brittle block into it. Ando made the block bigger than the bottom of the cup, so it would hang in the middle, held firmly and kept from breaking in transport. But when he dropped the blocks into the cups, they tilted or tipped over. So the factory does it backwards: the block is turned upside down, the cup is put over it like a hat, and then both are turned back the right way up. Nissin says that counterintuitive idea is what made mass production possible.

Until you add water, the block floats above an empty space at the bottom of the cup. Japan's noodle makers call it the middle-hold structure. It protects the noodles from shaking in transport, and it lets them cook evenly.

Year	What happened
1953	Yoshio Murata invents a method of bending noodles by machine
1957	Ando loses nearly everything and builds a shed in Ikeda
1958	Chicken Ramen goes on sale, 25 August, at 35 yen
1966	Ando tours Europe and the United States
1971	Cup Noodles goes on sale, 18 September
1975	Japan makes 1.1 billion cup noodle servings
2005	Space Ram flies on the Space Shuttle Discovery

Cup Noodles, which Nissin calls the world's first cup-type instant noodles, went on sale on 18 September 1971. It was so new that shops didn't know how to stock it, so at first it sold mostly at department stores, station kiosks, leisure spots and to Japan's Self-Defense Forces. Then it caught on. Sampling sales in Tokyo's Ginza from November 1971 sold 20,000 servings on good days. Cup noodle output in Japan grew from 100 million servings in 1972 to 1.1 billion in 1975.

The noodles built to survive a delivery truck later survived a rocket launch. Space Ram, space ramen made by Nissin with Japan's space agency JAXA, flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in July 2005. Ando was 95. He died on 5 January 2007, aged 96.

Why do instant noodles take 3 minutes?

There's one more number in the cup, and it isn't about the waves. Make the noodles thinner and they could be ready in 1 minute, but they lose their firmness and bite. Japan's instant noodle makers say that after research putting taste first, noodles that take 3 minutes were found to be best. So 3 minutes isn't the fastest a noodle can cook. It's how long the makers decided you should wait.

What to notice next time

Next time you make a cup, tip it and look for the middle-hold, the gap under the block. Then, in the water, watch the brick fall apart into strands. That's the waves doing their job.

So, do you wait the full 3 minutes, or do you eat them early?

Sources

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