20 Fresh & Flavorful Ramen Noodle Recipes to Try Now

Ramen ‘n’ Cheese

Enjoy two go-to convenience foods in one with this bowl of ramen. Rather than using the powdered flavoring it comes with, make this quick sauce to disguise your ramen as mac ‘n’ cheese.

Begin by mixing melted butter and flour together, stir in the milk, and then slowly add your favorite kind of shredded cheese. Stir in salt and other seasonings like Sriracha to taste, and dig in.

Ingredients

Mongolian Beef with Ramen Noodles

When you have a hankering for beef, the suggestion of meat flavor from the ramen seasoning packet is not going to cure the craving.

Thinly slice some flank steak, coat in cornstarch, and brown it in a hot skillet. The same pan can be used to sauté the bell pepper and make a spicy garlic soy sauce while the noodles cook

You’ll get dinner on the table in about a half hour with this recipe, not much more time than it takes to go out for Chinese food. And like takeout, these are monster portions, so you may end up with leftovers.

Ingredients

Kimchi Ramen

With only 15 minutes in the kitchen, you can have this awesome Korean take on ramen. With spicy kimchi, it’s flavorful enough to replace the seasoning packet, or to use just half to cut back on the sodium and MSG.

To make, slice the mushrooms, tofu, and green onion first. Then put it all in a pot of boiling water to cook for less than 5 minutes. Serve with extra kimchi.

Ingredients

Spicy Beef Noodles

This ramen is perfect for a chilly or rainy weekend when you want to curl up with a comforting bowl of soup.

This beef brisket will take some patience to prepare, but it’s worth the wait. And once you get the brisket in the pot to braise, you’ll be able to leave it to do its thing for two to three hours.

You can get this on the stove to cook all afternoon, but the soup is even better when prepared the day before. Just reheat, and add the noodles for just a few minutes until they’re cooked through.

Ingredients

Easy Vegan Ramen Bowl

To make a filling vegan ramen dinner, you don’t have to do much different except leave out the meat and soft-boiled eggs. That leaves plenty of delicious ingredients to choose from.

This bowl of noodles is packed with broccoli, kale, tofu, and seaweed. And to cut out the need to make a labor-intensive ramen broth, a little miso paste is mixed with water to make the soup base.

Ingredients

Budae Jjigae

This Korean stew has it all, including ramen. That’s because it was first cooked up on U.S. army bases, so there’s a mix of familiar ingredients like hot dogs and spam combined with kimchi and Korean rice cakes.

If you can’t find packaged rice cakes, called garaetteok, in an Asian grocery store, you can make a dough from rice flour and steam them. The other option is to leave rice cakes out of the stew altogether, which won’t affect the flavor.

Ingredients

Zucchini Noodle Ramen Soup

This veggie-packed bowl replaces instant noodles with zucchini, but even if you’d rather use the original thing, this has great toppings to round out any ramen soup.

The star of the bowl is a quick tofu, which is baked and then quickly pan-fried to a crisp.

While it’s in the oven, you can sauté veggies like bok choy and get everything simmering in a saucepan. Just as the zucchini noodles go in the broth to cook, add the crispy tofu to a hot skillet so they’re ready to serve at the same time.

Ingredients

Ramen Burger

It might look like the noodle “buns” of a ramen burger are uncooked, crunchy bricks, but they’re actually pan-fried – similar to how you’d cook the burger patty itself.

Although you have to boil the noodles first, the extra effort to make a ramen burger is worth more than the novelty.

Believe it or not, this is a low-carb option compared to the typical baked hamburger bun.

Ingredients

Cold Ramen Noodle Salad

Ramen can be a great cheap meal. But what about when it’s too hot out for soup?

Prepare a ramen salad with cold noodles, and fill it up with cabbage, carrots, and other toppings that you’d add to the soup like sesame seeds or seaweed.

If you want more protein, almost any kind of meat will be tasty including shredded ham, diced chicken breast, crab meat, or prawns.

Ingredients

Cleansing Ramen Noodle Soup

Ready for a bowl of ramen that’ll help you get in your veggies? Leave the plastic-wrapped packages of noodles behind at the grocery store, and head to the produce section for some zucchini to make this miso soup.

If you don’t have a mandolin slicer or spiralizer to turn the summer squash into noodles, use a sharp knife to slice them into thin, long matchsticks. They won’t twirl on the fork the same way as ramen noodles, of course, but the hand-cut technique will make it easier to practice your chopstick skills.

Ingredients

Breakfast Ramen

Ramen isn’t just good for an easy dinner. Turn it into breakfast with this bowl of bacon, egg, and cheese ramen. Altogether, it’ll only take about 15 minutes out of your morning.

The hardest part of making this quick dish is the most rewarding – cooking bacon. After that, toss the boiled noodles in the hot skillet with the bacon drippings, and coat the ramen is with the cheesy egg mixture before it’s transferred to a bowl.

Ingredients

Healthy Ramen with Rice Noodles, Tofu & Veggies

Instead of filling up on noodles, pack your ramen bowl with vegetables, tofu, and mushrooms. A flavorful broth can be made from simple ingredients like soy sauce, hot sauce, and mirin rice wine.

And you’ll also need miso paste, a must-have for ramen lovers, which can be ordered online if you aren’t located near an Asian grocery store.

Ingredients

Healthy Chicken Ramen Bowl

Chicken is the original instant ramen flavor. Those powdered flavorings may taste great enough to have created a global demand, but it’s better to toss away the seasoning packets and doctor the bowl of ramen yourself.

It won’t take as long as you think to boil chicken breast in broth and soy sauce, about 10 minutes, and then it can be sliced or shredded for the soup. That’ll get you about as much protein per serving as carbs – plenty to maintain a high-protein diet.

Ingredients

Miso Ramen

Upgrade miso soup into a full meal with this bowl of ramen, which is delicious for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

The hard-boiled egg provides a bit of protein, the noodles will fuel you up, and cabbage offers nutrients like vitamin C, antioxidants, and fiber.

No matter what ingredients you want to put in your ramen soup, this miso broth will make it extra delicious. Instead of soy sauce, this ramen is flavored with chili bean paste and rice wine.

Ingredients

Basic Ramen Broth

If you want homemade ramen ready in a hurry, prepare this broth ahead of time.

Whenever you make a whole roast chicken, save the bones after they’ve been picked over for meat, and throw together this ramen broth in a stockpot. Then on even the busiest weeknights, you won’t have to chow down on instant ramen.

Boil the broth to cook the noodles, and add any sliced veggies and greens that you have in the kitchen. Keep your freezer stocked with not only this broth, but also shredded chicken, and can make a quick high-protein ramen anytime.

Ingredients

Miso Pork Ramen

Adding flavor to the included ramen seasoning packet can be easy and requires just a few ingredients.

To start, add ground pork to the pot to brown, which will boost the macros by over 20 grams of protein per bowl.

Then mix in a spoonful of miso or, if you don’t have any, try sesame paste like tahini. To garnish, try dried seaweed and – for something slightly different than chives – sliced leeks.

Ingredients

Stir Fried Ramen Noodles with Fish Cakes

Replacing the seasoning packets that come with instant ramen doesn’t have to be hard.

This recipe relies on familiar ingredients: garlic, onions, and a mix of light and dark soy sauces. The difference between the two sauces is how long they’re aged, giving the darker one more time to develop a slightly richer, sweeter flavor.

So if you just have one kind of soy sauce on hand, don’t stress buying another bottle. And instead of hunting down fish cakes, called kamaboko in Japanese, you can use another protein like sliced chicken breast, pork loin, or tofu.

Ingredients

Slow Cooker Shio Ramen

The different names for ramen, like shoyu for soy sauce and miso for fermented bean paste, refers to the broth.

In this case, shio simply means the main seasoning is salt – can’t get simpler than that. In fact, this easy chicken ramen is so convenient that you can make it in a Crock Pot.

This recipe also includes instructions to make chili oil. Once you have the concept down, it’s a no-brainer to make some whenever you’re having ramen.

Heat oil with some red chili pepper flakes, and after letting it simmer with the lid on for five minutes to infuse, strain out the pepper pieces. Extra chili oil can be kept in a bottle or jar at room temp.

Ingredients

Ramen Cabbage Salad

Next time you need something easy to prep for a potluck, toss together this ramen salad with shredded cabbage, almonds, and sesame seeds.

You don’t even have to cook the noodles. Crush them in the instant ramen bags and throw them into a bowl with everything else, but leave the seasoning packets in the trash.

The salad only needs a quick vinaigrette with shoyu, AKA Japanese soy sauce, and rice vinegar.

Ingredients

Homemade Ramen Noodles

Making your own fresh ramen noodles isn’t hard, although it certainly helps to have a pasta maker to roll it out and cut it into thin strands. The pasta dough itself is simple, requiring just three ingredients. And one of them is water.

What gives the noodles a yellow color and springier texture compared to something like spaghetti is the kansui, an alkaline solution.

If you can’t get your hands on that, simply use baking soda instead. Since it’s powdered sodium bicarbonate, one of the two minerals in kansui, it’ll affect the dough in a similar way.

Ingredients