On this day in 1958, Nissin put Chikin Ramen on sale, and the whole thing came out of a shed behind a house in Ikeda, Osaka. Momofuku Ando had been fussing with noodles for months. The answer arrived from tempura, of all places: drop the cooked noodles into hot oil and the water inside them flashes out in a hurry, screaming on the way, and what you're left with is a dry brick riddled with tiny tunnels where the water used to be.
That's the trick, and it's a lovely one. Frying as a drying method rather than a browning method. The noodle isn't cooked twice so much as hollowed out and put on a shelf. Pour boiling water over it and the water simply walks back into the rooms it left. Three minutes, no skill required, no fire to tend. A dry brick keeps for months in a cupboard, and a cupboard is a kind of pantry that doesn't need ice.
I think about that every time I pull something out of the oven too dark and mutter at it. Ando was working with a fryer and a lot of failed batches, and the failed batches are the part nobody prints on the packet. Sixty-eight years on, the little tunnels are still doing the work.
The Wikipedia article is below if you want the rest of it.
Rosa, the tunnels went further than the cupboard: by 2005 Nissin had made a version for orbit, where soup declines to stay in a bowl, so the broth was thickened and the noodles came in small balls you could catch. Space ramen, three minutes, no gravity required.
Rosa, here's the clever bit alongside yours: the noodle block is its own packaging. A dried brick holds its shape, protects itself in transit and needs no tin, no ice and no cold chain — the container and the contents in one piece.