19 July, 2025

We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur It, of course.

Framegrab from Jet Lag: The Game, showing Adam Chase, a young white man, sitting in a South Korean urban centre, blindfolded, holding chopsticks and preparing to eat from three bowls of instant noodles, captioned Buldak, Buldak Stew, and Carbonara. — The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.

In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go¹.

In a kitchen, a hand holds a purple foil packet of Samyang Buldak noodles, "Habenero Lime" flavour. — Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens (닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of *the noise a chicken makes*?²

So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn³, and a soft-boiled egg.

It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.

So now I’m keen to try some of the other flavours (some of which we’ve got). But perhaps not the one that was so spicy it got banned in Denmark last year.

Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.

Footnotes

¹ I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of noodle-centric pop culture .

² Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?

³ I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.