This Ramen Hack Transforms One Dorm Room Classic Into Another

One cliché that's been around a good long while — at least since I was in college (which was not yesterday) and possibly a lot longer — is that of the starving student scraping by on meals of instant ramen. The cheap kind, that is, not the pricier specialty stuff that's been available since gourmet ramen became a trend. College students are also reputed to enjoy pizza because a) who doesn't? and b) college towns usually have their share of late-night pizza delivery places, making it a convenient meal option when students have a few extra bucks to spend. Of course, someone managed to fuse the two to make a ramen crust pizza.

Ramen pizza crust can be made from nothing more than cooked, drained noodles pressed into a pan and covered with sauce, cheese, and any other desired pizza toppings. (Pepperoni, pineapple, sliced bananas, squid ... Jamie Oliver puts grapes on his pizza, so pretty much anything goes.) Some recipes, however, call for mixing the noodles with extra ingredients like eggs, cheese, and spices. Oddly enough, not many seem to call for using the ramen seasoning packet, but it would be a waste to throw it out. At any rate, the pizza is then baked, solidifying the noodles to the point where they form a rather thick, if oddly-textured crust.

So is ramen pizza actually any good? We haven't asked any college students, but in the words of J. Kenji López-Alt, commenting on a long-ago Reddit thread that he started: "I don't think anyone takes stuff like this seriously. At least, I don't. It's just a fun joke that happens to taste ok."

Using ramen noodles as pizza crust isn't that radical of an idea, since people have already been using ramen as sandwich bread and squishing the noodles into waffle makers. If you want to know who's to blame for the madness, though, you might be able to lay some of it at the door of a chef called Keizo Shimamoto.

In the summer of 2013, Shimamoto started selling what he called ramen burgers at his Brooklyn restaurant. As Brooklyn was the center of the hipster-verse back then, trends were being birthed on every street corner, but his was bigger than most. The ramen burger, which consisted of, you guessed it, a burger between two buns made of ramen noodles, had hundreds of people lining up to buy it. Social media was all over it, and even those millions of miles away from Brooklyn (like Martians with Instagram accounts) were bombarded with images.

The ramen burger spawned numerous knockoffs, including a menu item at Red Robin, but eventually fell out of favor. Fickle faddists may have decamped to snap selfies with Unicorn Frappuccinos, Fruity Pebble freakshakes, and all that other stuff people were into back in the 'Teens, but as witnessed by the ramen pizza, its influence clearly lives on.