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The Backstory

As you might have guessed, I grew up traveling a lot. Both of my parents had all summer off from their jobs (my dad was a professor and my mom worked for a school district as a physical therapist), so we spent every summer taking 6-8 week trips across the US, wandering through Europe, and exploring Asia. It was fantastic – and ultimately resulted in a rude awakening when I started my first job out of college and realized I was only going to get 2 weeks of vacation a year.

When I was about to start sixth grade, my dad was selected for a year-long visiting professor role at Seoul National University. He took a sabbatical from his usual job, my mom took an early retirement, I was homeschooled for a year, and we set off to Korea!

I have lots of great stories from that year, but for now – I want to talk about a specific food. We lived in an area with very few foreigners, so the local grocery store had lots of Korean food with labels entirely in Korean. My dad can speak and read Korean, so he helped translate for us, but there was a lot of guesswork in grocery shopping.

One thing we got while there as an experiment was something called “spaghetti noodles.” It was a type of ramen, and I can’t remember much about the packaging except that it had some colors of the Italian flag on it.

Once we returned to the US, we were occasionally able to find spaghetti noodles at Asian grocery stores, but it was pretty rare. Over the years, we stopped being able to find them. I do remember getting spaghetti noodles once in Korea about 10 years ago from a convenience store, but that was the last time I ate them.

The Noodles

I’ve thought about spaghetti noodles many times over the years, and have occasionally Googled copycat recipes and checked Amazon for the elusive noodles. No luck.

Let me try to describe these noodles to you. They use a good quality ramen noodle – like Shin Ramyun (if you know, you know…these noodles have THE BEST texture). They need to be drained (there’s no soup base), and instead there’s a sauce that’s made with a small amount of the noodle water.

The sauce really makes this recipe. It’s the perfect mix of sweet and tangy. A few of the Google results I found suggested adding ketchup to plain ramen noodles, and let me assure you that this is NOT it. The spaghetti noodle sauce is more tangy and less sweet than your average ketchup.

The Oracle

Recently, I’ve been using Gemini to help set up a new gaming PC (I refused to buy a Windows license, so everything is just a little bit harder in Ubuntu). I’ve since used Gemini to help with comparing products I’m looking at purchasing and with copyediting this blog (I still have a backlog on copyediting past posts – I’ll get there some day!).

Given how useful Gemini has been in other areas, one day, I decided to ask Gemini if it could find me a copycat recipe for the infamous spaghetti noodles. And Gemini delivered.

The History

In addition to giving me a recipe, Gemini also gave me the backstory on spaghetti noodles. Apparently, they’re actually called “Ottogi Spaghetti” and they were first launched in the 1980s. The noodles became a convenience store favorite around the 2000s, which corresponds with the time I was there. Here’s Ottogi’s website, in case you want to try out your Korean…

The Recipe

Before I jump into the recipe – let me add two caveats.

First up, the recipe mentions cheese powder a lot. I have no memory of cheese flavors on the O.G. spaghetti ramen, and I personally HATE the fake cheese powder flavor.

Secondly, this isn’t exactly the recipe that Gemini gave me – but it’s really close (and the same in every meaningful way). I experimented a tiny bit at first, and this version seems to work great.

Ingredients

• 1 pack of ramen noodles (I use a pack of Shin Ramyun, and toss out the soup base or save it for a future backpacking meal)
• 1 veggie packet (I use the veggies from Shin Ramyun)
• 2 tbsp tomato paste (not tomato sauce, definitely not ketchup)
• 1 (generous) tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• Optional: a bit of dried parsley to sprinkle on top

Instructions:

1. Boil the ramen and veggie pack according to the instructions. I generally prefer the noodles to be a little al dente, so I usually take 30 seconds off the recommended time.
2. Make the sauce by mixing together tomato paste, sugar, soy sauce, garlic powder, and salt. The sauce will be a bit thick.
3. Reserve a few tablespoons of the water and strain the noodles. Put the noodles into a bowl.
4. Add a bit of the reserved pasta water to make the sauce more liquid. Add the sauce to the noodles and mix them well, until the noodles are coated in sauce and glistening.
5. Optionally, you can sprinkle a bit of dried parsley on top (I usually don’t though).

The Sources

So after trying this recipe, feeling the nostalgia wash over me, and being thoroughly impressed with Gemini, I decided to ask Gemini for links. Most of the history appears to have been pulled from a Korean page on the history of this particular ramen. There’s also a link to a YouTube video (also in Korean), but that doesn’t seem to include the recipe either. There’s a few recipes linked that were similar-ish, but definitely not the spaghetti noodle receipt.

I’m actually not sure where or how Gemini came up with this recipe, but it definitely seems like Gemini inferred the recipe based on other ramen recipes, flavor profiles, and information about the original ramen. I’m impressed.