5 Ways to Reduce Spice in your Noodles

After hundreds of videos about instant ramen, this is one of the questions I get asked the most: how do I reduce the spice in spicy instant ramen? The Buldak bowl, the Shin Ramyun bowl, the tom yum bowl. We’ve all been there. Mouth on fire, throat tight, eyes watering, wondering if the rest of the bowl is salvageable. It usually is. Here are the five fixes I rotate through.

1. Load Up with More Ingredients

The earliest move. Most spicy ramen packets are calibrated for a wide audience, which means they tend to overshoot for casual eaters.

Toss in things like savory SPAM or fresh, crunchy beansprouts. Think cooked corn, extra plain noodles, blanched spinach, or even some plain, cooked chicken or tofu. Pick whatever you have on hand. Even a handful of plain noodles dropped into the bowl spreads the heat across more food.

• See it in action:

2. Control the Sauce Packet

The earliest move. Most spicy ramen packets are calibrated for a wide audience, which means they tend to overshoot for casual eaters.

Start with half the sauce packet, mix it in, and taste. Add more if you can handle it. You can always add more spice. You can’t take it out once it’s in. The half-packet rule has saved more bowls than any other tip on this list.

• See it in action: I show you how to manage the heat in my video: How to Make Spicy Instant Ramen Less Spicy

3. Add Cheese

The reason cheese works isn’t just that it tastes good with spicy noodles. The casein in dairy binds to the capsaicin molecules and stops them from reaching the heat receptors on your tongue.

Stir in a slice of American cheese (it melts smoothest), a handful of shredded cheddar, or a sprinkle of grated Parmesan. Let it melt into the hot noodles until you have a rich coated bowl. The more cheese, the less heat. The Korean corn cheese ramen and the Buldak Carbonara series are built on this exact principle.

• See it in action: Watch how cheese saves the day in my video

4. Stir in Some Milk

Same logic as cheese, different format. The casein in milk binds to capsaicin the same way.

After draining the noodles and adding the sauce, stir in a tablespoon or two of milk. Whole milk works best. Half-and-half works better. Heavy cream works the most. Non-dairy milks (oat, almond, soy) don’t have casein, so they can dilute the heat by volume but won’t bind to it the way dairy does.

• See it in action: In this video, I add soy milk to help dilute the spice.

5. Mix with Other Noodles

The move for when the bowl is already on the table and you don’t want to start over.

Cook a separate batch of plain unseasoned noodles. Once they’re done, stir them directly into the spicy bowl. The existing sauce spreads across more noodles and the heat per bite drops. Bonus: this often gives you a flavor combination you didn’t plan for, which is sometimes the best version of the bowl. Mixing Buldak with Chapagetti is the most popular example.

Which Move Lands First

If the bowl is already too spicy in the pot, hit the cheese or the milk first. They neutralize the heat instead of just diluting it. If you want to avoid the problem before it starts, control the sauce packet at the beginning. If you want a bigger bowl with less heat per bite, load up on extra ingredients.

Got another move I didn’t list? Tell me below.