While we specialize in frozen food reviews here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, we do occasionally review foods that are found outside the freezer aisle. Since we’ve reviewed the Trader Joe’s brand before — and we’ve also reviewed ramen and dry noodle cups — we figured it’s probably okay to check out the Trader Joe’s Chicken Ramen Soup. It can be assumed we have an audience who likes microwavable food, and this definitely falls into that category!
When you pop the top off your ramen cup, you’ll find three components inside: a nest of dry noodles, a packet of seasoning, and a tiny little packet of oil, as shown below.
This cup of ramen is easy enough to heat in the microwave if you don’t have boiling water on hand. Simply follow the directions on the cup (we included the directions at the bottom of this article in case you need them). Note that there’s a fill line inside the cup, but it’s really hard to see. It’s a faint broken line that goes around the entire inner portion of the cup. If you fill it properly, it should be about 3/4 filled with water.
Now, don’t expect there to be chunks of chicken in this ramen; it’s just a chicken-based broth. And this broth is the vast majority of this meal. We emptied the contents of our cup into a bowl to show what these portion sizes look like (shown below).
The broth has more flavor than we were expecting from a dry ramen, which is maybe partially due to the added sesame and sunflower oil, but the flavor isn’t especially great. It doesn’t even taste that much like a chicken broth — the majority of the flavor actually comes from the garlic powder.
Our noodles ended up with an al dente consistency after the recommended six minutes of sitting time. It’s a nice consistency for these noodles, though the noodle portion is really, really small here (as we mentioned earlier). There just aren’t enough noodles for this to feel like it has any substance. You can add an egg, as the package suggests, but we’re not sure that even that would help this feel like a meal (though it sounds like a great idea).
This package of ramen contains 180 calories. That doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but consider how empty those calories actually are. This certainly won’t fill anyone up — it will hardly do more than to warm your belly a little bit. In fact, we think we might have been hungrier after eating this than we were when we started. On top of that, this also contains 810 mg of sodium, which is nothing to scoff at.
We wanted to love the Trader Joe’s Chicken Ramen Soup, but we found it to be mediocre and unsatisfying. It also left us with a hardcore craving for real ramen, which we hope to enjoy at a Japanese restaurant soon.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this dry ramen, check out our package scan below.
