Ramen Meal Prep – $20.39 | $4.08 per Bowl

It’s the second week of meal prepping for 2019 and I decided to ramen meal prep. If you recall from last week, I just bought a set of glass jars in order to make ramen meal prep. I’ve been thinking about it all week, excitedly and trying to figure out how I’m going to do it. This will be my first time with ramen meal prep.

This should be doable for plenty of people out there too if you have a way to heat up water at your work. I have a water heater at my desk that I use to make tea every morning. Any type of water heater works since we’ll be heating water up to boiling. Coffee makers usually have a hot water option too.

Ramen Meal Prep Ingredients

I purchased all my ingredients from a local HMart near my house. I’m sure these ingredients can be found at many international markets if you have them in the area. We also have a Great Wall Supermarket and LA Mart here that sells similar ingredients. I usually prefer the international marts since the vegetables are cheaper.

Purchases:

• $1.99 – Baby Spinach
• $4.49 – Choripdong Fresh Noodles (The Yellow bag since it had lower calories and lower sodium)
• $7.91 – Sliced Pork Belly
• $1.29 – Mushrooms
• $0.83 – Scallions
• $1.79 – Pork Bouillon
• $2.09 – Eggs

Total Cost: $20.39. This equates to around $4.08 per serving. 

Preparing the Ramen Meal Prep

The preparation stage of ramen meal prep this was very simple and took no longer than 10 minutes. Unpackage the baby spinach, wash them, and set them aside. Wash the scallions and chop them up. Wash the mushrooms and chop them up. I left my vegetables on the cutting board until I was ready to put them into the glass jars to prep. Oh and be sure to wash your glass jars too. They had a funky packaging smell when I took them out. Then again, it’s always best practice to wash everything before meal prep.

Pre-Cook Everything

Don’t forget that with ramen meal prep, everything should be pre-cooked. The only exception is the vegetables. I can usually eat spinach without cooking it. So leaving them raw here is fine since we will be pouring hot water over them. Cook the ramen noodles in boiling water and then strain it. Let it sit out for a while to cook down.

Pre-cooking the pork belly is the most important. I threw mine on the stove for a little bit until it turned brown. This way I was also able to drain out the excess fat and grease.

Once everything is done, I put half a bouillon in each of the jars first, along with any spices and flavoring so its at the bottom of the jar. When you pour the hot water in, the water will go to the bottom first and then rise up. The flavors will hit each layer of the jar which is what we’re looking for. After that, I put the ramen in (make sure it’s cooled down). And then the vegetables. Finally, the meat and egg went on top and that’s the whole ramen meal prep. Let it air for a while before

I left the egg in its shell. I’m going to crack it into my ramen with the boiling water when I’m ready to eat it.

Bonus Ramen

Additionally, I had some leftover ingredients so I decided to test a serving for myself. I packaged everything into a normal bowl as if it were a jar. Bouillon first. Then the ramen, vegetables, meat, and eggs. I poured hot water over everything and tried it. It actually wasn’t that bad. The ramen lacked a little bit of flavor so I scavenged the house for some chili oil and soy sauce and mixed those in there. The soup base tasted a lot better afterwards.Throw in some Sriracha for spice too if you like noodles with Sriracha.

This was my first time with ramen meal prep and first time using jars too. I’ve found that a lot of other people also use these jars for kimchi and soup. I will definitely be experimenting with more types of foods. The jars were a great steal costing less than $1 per jar. And ramen meal prep was a great way to start the year.

Final Thoughts

I have friends who saw this on Instagram and Facebook and were like “WTF?”. They never thought that ramen meal prep was a thing but I’m glad that it has inspired some of them to at least think about meal prepping. Eating out all the time can be a drain on the wallet. And also takes extra time out of the workday if you have to drive somewhere to get food.

Also, I realized that these jars are a lot smaller than I thought when it came time to packaging all the food up. The amount of food in each jar is probably the same as a Cup Noodle cup. There are less noodles which came at the expense of having more variety. The noodles are a lot thicker than I expected. I’m not even sure if I bought the right kind since I spent 20 minutes standing in the noodle section Googling on my phone what sort of noodles to buy. However, the next time I do ramen meal prep, I will probably look for thinner noodles.

Update (1/7/2019):

Putting in the chunk of bouillon at the bottom was a BAD IDEA. By the time I got to the bottom of my lunch, I accidentally took a huge bite out of what was left of a bouillon cube. 

GROSS

In the future, I’ll be sure to dice up the bouillon before adding it in and spread it around. Alternatively, using a paste instead of a bouillon cube would have gotten around this problem of saturation. 

Also, once the boiling water filled up the jar, the water’s temperature dropped drastically. This was due to the cold noodles from refrigeration. So be sure to microwave the entire meal a couple extra minutes.