Meal delivery services have done an admirable job differentiating themselves. Some help households of just one or two learn to cook, and others advertise ready-made meals for big families. Some specialize in soups and smoothies. And then there’s Ramen Hero, which delivers restaurant-quality ramen noodle soup that you can make at home. Each kit contains noodles to boil, and frozen packets of broth and toppings that you heat sous-vide. The menu could be bigger, and the meals are pricey compared to just about any other meal delivery service, but Ramen Hero doesn’t require a subscription, so you can buy a couple of kits when a craving strikes and not fuss with an ongoing commitment. If you’re looking for new at-home dining options, Ramen Hero scratches the ramen itch.
How Much Do Ramen Hero Soup Kits Cost?
Unlike many meal delivery services, Ramen Hero sells its soup kits in a one-off fashion, meaning you don’t have to subscribe to a weekly delivery. You buy what you want when you want it.
You must purchase boxes that contain at least four kits. Each kit contains one serving and costs about $18. You can either pick the flavors you want or order a box with predetermined flavors. For example, you can choose the Very Veggie Pack, which contains four vegan kits. At $72.96, the per-serving price comes out to $18.24. You can also subscribe to receive a monthly box, and the price goes down to $69.31, which works out to be $17.33 per serving.
Delivery costs $15 for shipments with four servings, $5 for shipments with six servings, and is free for shipments with more than eight servings. Ramen Hero delivers nationwide, except to Alaska and Hawaii.
What Do Other Food Delivery Services Cost?
The per-serving price of Ramen Hero’s soups is high compared with what other meal kit services charge. Most end up costing between $8.99 and $12.99 per serving. A typical meal kit delivery service requires you to sign up for a minimum of six servings per week, though a few companies only have a minimum of four. You’re looking at around $60 per shipment.
Most meal kit services also require you to commit to weekly deliveries. You can always skip weeks or pause your subscription, but if you’re forgetful, you could end up paying for meals that you didn’t want. With Ramen Hero, you don’t run that risk. All its transactions are one-time sales.
Two companies charge much less than all the others. They are EveryPlate ($4.99 per serving) and Dinnerly ($4.49-$4.99 per serving). We would describe their dishes as primarily American comfort food. They keep costs low by not doing much prep work and sticking to low-cost ingredients. You’re more likely to see mushrooms, zucchini, and meatloaf on their menus rather than truffle butter, quinoa, and dragonfruit.
The Menu
Previously when we tested Ramen Hero, the company was still getting many of its menu options to market, with setbacks due to COVID-19. More advertised flavors have since become available, but at less than ten items in total, the menu is still a bit modest. Fortunately, the quality is high, although it’s ramen, so the sodium levels are high, too.
The two vegan items, Miso Impossible and Hippie Van, are nearly identical but with different broths. Miso Impossible uses a miso-based broth whereas Hippie Van has a shoyu broth. Their packet of toppings includes a vegan meat substitute, roasted tomato, and a single slice each of seasoned and roasted bell pepper and zucchini. Each comes with nori, too.
When we tested the kits, Ramen Hero sent a Crying Samurai, too. The rich broth in this one uses chicken, skipjack shavings (a type of smoke-dried tuna), miso, and oil from caramelized onions. Pork belly chashu (also sometimes called char siu), spicy pork ragu, and bamboo shoots round it out.
Other flavors include a dashi-shoyu ramen, spicy tonkatsu, matcha shio, mushroom shoyu, and spicy miso tonkatsu. Ramen Hero also recently introduced seasonal flavors, experimental items only available for a few months. Users will eventually vote on which seasonal flavor becomes a permanent menu item. We tried the inaugural option Citrus Kick.
On the website, Ramen Hero tells you about possible allergens in each soup, and its FAQ page notes that some items “contain egg, soy, wheat, fish, and/or sesame” but that “none of our products contain shellfish, crustacean, or peanuts.” Still, the soup kits are made in a facility with possible allergens, so anyone with a severe allergy should avoid them. You can also now read a list of ingredients and nutritional information about each meal online, a welcome change.
Packaging
Most meal delivery companies have a web page dedicated to explaining what kind of materials they use to ship and how they can be disposed of, upcycled, or recycled. Ramen Hero has at least been somewhat transparent about its goals to shift to more eco-friendly packaging.
Everything ships frozen. Each soup kit comes in a bag that’s clearly labeled, and you can move them directly to your freezer until you’re ready to cook and eat.
The box we received seemed needlessly large for three little soup kits, but it was well insulated with what appeared to be post-consumer fiber padding. Inside, a bag of dry ice smoked gently. Dry ice certainly makes for easy clean-up, as it simply evaporates with time, but it’s very dangerous and must be handled carefully.
When groceries aren’t shipped frozen, they usually come with a frozen gel pack. That’s the norm in meal delivery services. The gel packs are a pain in the neck to deal with. They’re frozen blocks of non-toxic gel inside a heavy duty plastic pouch. You can reuse them if you have space in your freezer, or you can dump the gel in the trash (not down the drain) and then rinse and recycle the plastic, as long as your recycling center accepts it. Not everywhere does. It’s a messy and laborious process. Dry ice, dangerous as it may be, is a lot neater.
Cooking and Eating
When it was time to make the ramen, all we had to do was boil two pots of water. One pot is for boiling the noodles, which take about two minutes to cook, and the other is for heating the broth and toppings (except for the nori) sous vide style. In other words, you place the entire plastic pouch containing the broth and ingredients into the pot using tongs and let it heat up in the water bath. The pouches are BPA-free and are made to withstand this heat.
After a few minutes, you remove the bags using tongs and carefully snip open the broth pouch to pour it into a bowl. You’ll get the best results if you add the cooked and drained noodles next. Finally, you cut open the toppings and add those to your bowl.
Ramen Hero suggests that you might add a few extra toppings, and we found they were almost necessary. We added sautéed mushrooms, chopped scallions, and fresh grated ginger. To the non-vegan bowls, we topped it off with a soft-boiled egg. We also found that the broths were all extremely rich. Adding a quarter cup or so of the noodle water helped dilute it without sacrificing its flavor.
The Crying Samurai and Miso Impossible left two of us feeling a little bloated. Such is the sacrifice one makes for ramen. The shoyu ramen didn’t have the same effect, and we preferred that one in the end to the others. The Citrus Kick certainly lived up to its name, with a satisfyingly intense and complex spicy lemon broth, but the pork belly came out a bit rubbery.
Honkaku (Authentic)
If you can’t get to a good ramen shop, due to social distancing or because there simply isn’t one near you, Ramen Hero makes for a nice treat. It costs about the same as what you’d expect to pay at a restaurant, which might keep some soup-slurpers away. That said, it tastes worlds better than instant ramen noodles, and is much less of a time-suck than turning out a broth made from scratch. Despite the high cost, we’d order it again from time to time when going to a ramen restaurant isn’t possible. Seen as a treat rather than a food staple, Ramen Hero could be your new soup savior.
If ramen isn’t your thing (or you want to eat a more balanced diet) we have four meal delivery Editors’ Choice picks at the moment. Blue Apron is our favorite for people learning how to cook. Green Chef is best for those who like vegetable-forward menus. HelloFresh is a great pick all around and works well for people who eat a little bit of everything. If you need groceries just as much as meal kits, Hungryroot is your best bet. It suggests groceries based on your eating preferences and then suggests recipes you can make with them, without being a standard meal kit. You always get several standalone items with Hungryroot, such as a bag of mini tangerines, a packet of granola, a container of bean salad, and so forth.
