Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy | Hacker News Reader

Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy

bbc.com

43 pointsphantomathkg87 comments

Primary source: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/nyheder/pressemeddelelser/2024...

I few more details there. Apparently there was a trend on ~The tok~ with children eating spicy chips in Germany that got them hospitalized, and as a precaution the Danes took these noodles with are more spicy of the shelves.

A bit more understandable now but still .. wut? If kids eat tide pods we don't remove tide pods.

Kids huff paint and we restrict sales of spray cans.

Wait, what? They inhale the paint? I thought it was restricted because of tagging and such.

How do you inhale paint? Why am I so old?

I think it is very old thing, like 80s or before old. Various paint thinners can give drug like effects when inhaled. And then some products might contain nitrous oxide as pressurising gas.

Spray inside a paper bag and breath into it. Never seen It's always sunny in Philadelphia? That's how Charlie composed his musical Day Man...

Oh... ahh....

I don't think its got anything to do with you're age, huffing glue/paint/gas has been thing for decades. Maybe just a little out of touch.

Is this some kind of "asking for a friend" question? /s :-)

in that case the product was also not really intended to be eaten as food. it was one single tortilla chip in a plastic bag sold for 10 euros (IIRC).

More specifically, a consumer asked the authorities if they should be legal, and then they investigated.

> Apparently there was a trend on ~The tok~ with children eating spicy chips in Germany that got them hospitalized, and as a precaution the Danes took these noodles with are more spicy of the shelves.

Yeah, so called "Hot Chip Challenge": https://www.thelocal.de/20231110/bavaria-bans-sale-of-hot-ch...

These are legitimately hot. I’m the idiot who orders their curry “native extra spicy” and I have half-used bottles of ghost pepper sauces in the fridge. I love ludicrously spicy food.

The 2x ramen nearly beat me. The first fork was merely volcanic. Drinking the last of the broth in the bottom was infernal. It’s hot.

I second this. I’m a Lifelong extra spice eater and these ones made me sweat and nuked my taste buds.

A few years ago I was really into spicy food. I would cut up entire ghost peppers or habaneros and put them in almost every meal. I was at the point where physically it made we sweat but i could actually enjoy the flavor.

Eating the 2x spicy ramen two days in a row destroyed my stomach and also had me in tears as that oil makes it linger. When I say destroyed i mean it took over a month for it to get back to normal and even after that it wasn’t like it was before.

I don’t eat any spicy food anymore. I could see why you might pull these.

Yikes. It wasn’t that bad for me but I fully believe it could do that to someone.

I don’t find it hot at all. I like the taste.

Do a substantial number of your recent ancestors have feathers, by chance?

Then I missed out if they could fly. That would be nice. Just feathers seems useless.

Definitely avian with that response to capsaicin. ;)

The packet specifically in the BBC image - I was at the Chinese supermarket in London Chinatown, when some Korean students walked in and one of them saw those packets and said ‘oh yeah that’s the one that completely beat me.’

I was curious, so naturally I bought five packets.

I was unable to finish a single whole packet. Tried five times. Failed five times. Got very close but never quite made it.

Same here, I eat spicy food all the time but these are on another level. I will eventually finish a bowl, but my lips and throat were always sensitive for a few hours afterwards. Using a half or a third of the sauce sachet is more than enough for me. I stopped buying them because as much as I enjoy spicy food this flavour was just pure extreme self-torture.

I don't know if "acute poisoning" is gross exaggeration or some medical classification but having tried them and know people who really shouldn't have tried them fuck up their stomach for week+, these should be behind the counter purchase. I can see kids too audacious to know when to quit.

From browsing around it seems small children can be poisoned by amounts of capsaicin that are perfectly safe for adults (if unpleasant), and that Denmark might've been using the metric of "what if a small child consumed the entire sauce packet".

To add a bit more context directly from the Danish Food Agency:

> The amount of hot chili is even higher in the investigated noodles than in chili chips, which have previously led to poisoning injuries among children in Germany. That is why it is important that parents are aware of the extreme noodle varieties and avoid them, says Henrik Dammand Nielsen.

https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/nyheder/pressemeddelelser/2024...

Without clicking the link I knew they were talking about which Buldak Ramen noodles. I grew up eating extremely spicy food and these ones were really high up on the spice scale.

But what’s the need to recall them? It seems like an overreach to me.

Agreed. I have a hard time believing anyone who could have serious problems from eating this stuff would be capable of eating enough of it to cause the problems.

I have seen people try to eat these to one up others. It almost always ends up in a disaster. High Scoville chillies are no joke and should be handled with care.

So because some idiots might want to give themselves ulcers over a competition nobody can buy this now? Hardly seems fair

My bad, I don’t condone this bureaucratic overreach. This is plain and stupid to ban them outright.

Recalling seems kind of extreme but I can confirm that these particular noodles give nuclear fuel a run for its money.

Nowhere near close to killing you though. Crazy it's considered poison there.

I'm not sure "poison" (or really, whatever word is being translated to "poison") necessarily means the spices pose a serious risk of death. There are less severe consequences that can still warrant intervention.

> Crazy it's considered poison there.

Primary source does not say the product is poison, but more about preventing "poisoning injuries" which apparently happened in Germany. Some kids got hospitalized.

I hope they use this in their marketing. * * BANNED IN DENMARK * *

I know someone who considers canned tomatoes too spicy. But labeling the products as “poison” seems a bit of a stretch in any context.

Have you considered that the Danish food authorities might kind of know what they're doing? They're not going to label food as potentially harmful because they don't like the taste.

Yes, but then again there doesn't seem to be any Danish restriction on Fugu (pufferfish). Hard to see how this isn't a subjective policy (which is fine, but call it what it is).

A quick internet search suggests that the '2x' one recalled is 8800 Scoville units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville_scale

Absolutely ridiculous, what a joke. That’s comparable to El Yucateco sauce. Tabasco which is barely perceptible as hot is around 5000 scoville. Not to mention, isn’t capsaicin completely harmless and only activates your pain receptors without actually causing any direct damage (there may be damage from the inflammatory response in extreme cases).

But you don't eat these sauces on their own.

I do, no problem

...why?

Not gp but I like the taste.

Yep, same. It’s nice. I don’t suffer until over 500k Scoville. Youth eating Madame janette was good training.

I don’t think it can cause direct damage in the way lye or a poison would. I could imagine it causing so much pain in someone that it triggered a seizure or something else awful.

Although I think almost anyone not trying out for “Jackass” would stop eating it well before they got to that point.

The primary source[1] says kids in Germany have been hospitalized by weaker chips. Something something tik tok challenge.

It does seems these ramen are hot.

Still weird they take it of the shelves though.

[1] https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/nyheder/pressemeddelelser/2024...

I wonder if this is accurate because I love tons of that El Yucateco on my food (and frequently eat other spicy stuff almost daily), but the Buldak ramen I tried was was so spicy that I couldn't take it and didn't get close to finishing my bowl.

It’s accurate

https://www.shopelyucateco.com/pages/faq#:~:text=Green%20Hab....

As a comparison, one habanero (not the crazy ghost/chocolate cultivars, but the plain jane habanero) is 150k Scoville units. Serranos top out at 25k.

That seems unlikely. It felt waaaay hotter than jalapeño, like many times hotter, not just 1.5x hotter. If true, maybe it’s just the volume of it. Tabasco doesn’t register as hot at all to me, but I don’t make a habit of drinking it by the pint.

Scoville is weird scale as it is about dilution. So the amount really does matter. And I doubt it is often even properly measured and tested.

Logically taking spoon full of raw sauce has one amount of units and then mixing it in food 10 or 100x should have 10th or 100th of Scoville units.

This seems off. It tastes much spicier. I'd guess it's in 20-40k range.

But it doesn’t. I try a lot of chilis and hot spices; this is 10k maybe; I find 300k getting warm-ish; I eat that with a beer though.

I see a lot people agree with you. I wonder if they lie on the packaging for some reason like import laws. https://www.reddit.com/r/spicy/comments/8ayf60/finally_tried...

Scrolling down that page I see Resiniferatoxin is 1000x hotter than pure capsaicin. Seeing as it's a scale of concentration, I wonder if you can dilute it down to a mild hot sauce.

Someone [0] mentioned that the spice package itself is closer to 250k SHU and only the final dish, noodles and all, is 10k. Since the oil from the spice package will be on the surface it will probably taste way hotter than for example a 10k sauce.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spicy/comments/8ayf60/finally_tried...

The 2x spicy noodles are too spicy for me, even as a lover of spicy food. It's literally like lava traveling through my stomach and intestines. The 1x, on the other hand, are freaking delicious. Very spicy but just absolutely incredible flavor, and it doesn't seem to destroy my stomach. I'm actually kind of addicted to the 1x, I have one of the little cups practically every day.

Banning these ramen is ridiculous, but very low spice tolerance is a thing. Used to work with a someone who could legit detect 3 black peppercorns in a gallon of chicken soup. It made the soup "a bit on a spicy side". It was so bizarre that we did an AB test to confirm it and it was true.

We had some neighbors growing up who my dad referred to as “meat boilers”, not intended complimentarily. They were surprised to see standard issue salt and pepper shakers on our kitchen table: “Ooh, you like your food spicy!”

The stew style, which seems to have been recalled as well, is my favorite instant ramen since it's very rich in flavor and has thick noodles. I usually add a couple of fresh Thai chilies (Prik Kee Noo) into the broth, it's not that spicy - though it's usually too much for people who can't handle capsaicin at all. Can't speak for the other ones though.

This feels like an overreaction by some bureaucrats which could have been handled with a warning sticker instead.

Edit: Per https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2024/06/281_376457.h..., the 3x has 13000 SHU, the 2x 10000, stew type was not mentioned, but a quick search claims ~4700.

The official recall: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/nyheder/tilbagekaldte-foedevar...

They don't really specify what the acceptable capsaicin threshold is, just that it was too high.

A bit more details here about the reason, but also not anything about capsaicin: https://foedevarestyrelsen.dk/nyheder/pressemeddelelser/2024...

I wonder if this will have the same effect as the "parental advisory" sticker on music, where the demand for these noodles among Danish spicy food lovers will skyrocket. Since buldak noodles are already so much more expensive than regular noodles (at least in Northern Europe) and are sold as more of a novelty item, they might justify the extra cost of shipping or private import from another EU country.

A colleague who lives in Korea recommended these to me before. I stopped eating them because of the insane amount of salt in them, not the spice level!

Natural hot spice curry usually contains natural chilli pepper like bird's eye. It's hot but not chemical hot as these noodles. Proper chilli provides slowly expanding hot taste that starts not in mouth or throat, but somewhere deeper, in stomach maybe. It also tastes great. Chemical hot does not.

I've had these and they were fine (I also grew up eating spicy foods).

These might be too much for the Danish palate though.

As a south asian who grew up on hot curries, these Korean spicy ramens are at another level of spiciness.

Extreme torture both on the ingress and egress.

I assume Denmark considers US ghost pepper hot sauce producers terrorist cells?

Aren’t ghost peppers Indian? Nitpick aside, they’re legit weapon grade stuff:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_grenade

They indeed are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_pepper

Ha, what do you know!

I was dead sure that they were bred by that crazy mad dude from Carolina, Ed Currie, but apparently he just improved on nature's existing work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Currie

> they were bred by that crazy mad dude from Carolina.

It’s a circle of life Americas -> India -> Americas

Danes (not all) will happily dig in to fermented fish variations like Surströmming though:

    A newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world, even stronger than similarly fermented fish dishes such as the Korean hongeohoe, the Japanese kusaya or the Icelandic hákarl.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming

so it's a case of dancing with the devil you know.

That's a Swedish food. It's generally not sold in Denmark, and Danes do not eat it.

There is no tradition of eating fermented fish in Denmark.

Pickled (not fermented!) herring is common.

Surströmming is not a danish thing, and I don't think we have a huge tradition or kitchen for fermented fish, it's a thing at the Faroese Islands, part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

It's mostly a swedish thing, and it's also my understanding that surströmming is a very northern Sweden kind of thing, so not common for southerners of Sweden either (which you might classify Denmark as, depending on your optics ;)).

> Surströmming is not a danish thing

Indeed. If you read carefully you'll note that not only was that not claimed a link was provided that identified Surströmming as a Swedish dish.

That said, I've eaten it in Denmark and am friends with a crowd of ex-pat Danes who all seem to enjoy fermented fish dishes and all manner of other "crazy European" (I'm Australian, so ...) food.

There's no claim here that all Danes love fermented fish, just the assertion that they've felt the need to ban | recall tins of rancid fish - just peppers of exceptional spice.

Darn typos:

> just the assertion that they've NOT felt the need to ban | recall tins of rancid fish - just peppers of exceptional spice.

I like this stuff and have to add chilis to make it spicy. Ah well.

Good marketing for how big Danish market is for these noodles.

Does this agency name strike anyone else as an odd pairing? `The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration`

It's all agricultural: farms require animals, and most people use animal food sources as the bulk of their dietary intake.

Dairy and various dairy products are big component of Nordic diets. Eggs are too common. It make sense to regulate the whole chain of production by single agency.

Take my money!

Meh, those are spicy but not that spicy...

This is the same country that basically threatened to leave the EU when rules to limit the contents of ammonium chloride in food were proposed [0]. Source: am Danish.

[0]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/regul...

Back in reality, one or more of the Danish, Swedish, Finnish and German representatives asked for an exemption to be included for traditional candy etc, and it was quickly added to the draft proposal.

As Finn. I also oppose any restrictions. Then again, I might be ready to give up it when it is used in marinades... Like why...

This is what ends up happening with an overbloated public sector, idiot bureaucrats have to invent problems to justify their cost

Reply on news.ycombinator.com