Historical Origin and Development
It is said that the first person to make instant noodles was the cook at the home of a prefect named Yi in Yangzhou, my country. He added eggs to the flour, rolled them into thin slices, cut them into thin strips, boiled them in water, and immediately fried them in oil to dry. The noodles processed in this way can be soaked in hot water at any time and are very convenient to eat. Unfortunately, this invention was not patented, and foreigners took the lead in mass production of instant noodles, which first became popular in Japan.
1. The birth of instant noodles and its development in Japan
Noodles are a traditional food of the Japanese. Although the Japanese are famous for cherishing their time, even when they are at work, they would rather queue up in a long queue in front of a restaurant just to get a bowl of hot noodles. This phenomenon was noticed by a company manager Momofuku Ando (Japanese-Taiwanese, formerly known as Wu Baifu, died in Japan due to heart problems on January 6, 2007, at the age of 96). He thought: "Making noodles is too time-consuming, why not make it easier? Then people don't have to queue up." With this idea, Ando Momofuku immediately started trial production of instant noodles.
He set five conditions during development:
1. It must be simple;
2. It must be delicious and nutritious;
3. It must be able to be stored at room temperature for a long time;
4. It must be hygienic;
5. It must be cheap.
However, this kind of noodles is not ordinary noodles. Momofuku Ando makes a shelf-stable food that can be mass-produced in a factory. He bought a dough rolling machine and started trial production. What comes out of the noodle rolling machine is not noodles, but foam-like clumps. After repeated tests, the reason was clarified: the protein in the flour lost its stickiness when it encountered salt. So he first made ordinary noodles from unsalted flour, steamed them, and then soaked them in miso soup, which gave the noodles a salty taste. This little trick is tantamount to a revolution in pasta technology. The next step is how to dry the noodles for long-term storage. Initially, he adopted a primitive method of drying noodles using sunlight, but this was too time-consuming and required manual operations, making it unsuitable for factory-scale mass production. He tried the oil method and it worked well. After frying, the water evaporates immediately, and many pores appear on the noodles. This causes the noodles to absorb a lot of water when soaked in hot water and quickly become soft. Moreover, over-oiled noodles are more elastic and taste better than ordinary noodles. The first batch of instant noodles is known today as "chicken instant noodles", which was first put on sale in August 1958.
Just as Momofuku Ando expected, it immediately caused a sensation and exploded in sales. In April 1959 alone, 13 million packages of "Chicken Instant Noodles" were sold. This caused other Japanese dry noodle manufacturers to also intervene in the competition in the instant noodle industry. In January 1960, Kiyosumi Okui, a dry noodle manufacturer, entered this emerging market by using the method of adding external seasoning bags to create instant noodles that diners could season as they wished. So two kinds of instant noodles appeared on the market: one is instant noodles without seasoning bags, and the other is instant noodles with external seasoning bags. At first, Momofuku Andeng's instant noodles sold well because of its patent rights, but soon consumers began to favor instant noodles with added seasoning bags. Because it can adapt to the different needs of many consumers for flavor intensity, it is welcomed by the market. However, mass production of additional seasonings is a problem, and a Tokyo food company interested in developing this field has overcome this problem. Starting in 1962, they used the spray drying method to make instant coffee to produce seasoning powder, and achieved very ideal results. Since then, instant noodles with added seasonings have occupied a dominant position in the market. In view of the fact that instant noodles have been manufactured on a large scale by many companies, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Japan has formulated JAS specifications for instant noodles and issued them to the Japanese food industry. In this way, instant noodles have grown from an early infant product into a popular and standardized product with a stable market.
2. The development history of instant noodles in my country
The development of instant noodles in my country began in 1970. China's first bag of instant noodles was "born" in Shanghai Yimin Food Factory No. 4. The machines used to make instant noodles are made in China, with an annual output of only 20 tons. In the 1980s, more than 100 production lines introduced from Japan and other countries and regions quickly "bloomed" across the country. By 1989, there were 280 instant noodle production lines nationwide, with an annual production capacity of 700,000 tons.
Six years later, in 1995, the production capacity surged to 7 million tons. Due to the blind expansion of production in the past few years, the growth rate of instant noodles production has been slow in recent years
We hope to adopt it.