Everyone can be a superhero with this mega food challenge! Well, at least you can try. I love One Punch Man, it’s one of my favorite anime this season. So, the minute I saw a trace of food (besides Saitama’s ubiquitous leek in his shopping bag), I was determined to re-create it to the best of my abilities.

Under the assumption that any restaurant willing to give away $500 to the winner and take $100 in penalties for losers, I determined that there wasn’t going to be much more to the OPM udon challenge than your basic soup. Noodles and liquids are pretty filling by themselves without adding in extra vegetables and proteins. Thus, I decided to make a fairly simple recipe for this blog post.

Udon is pretty delicious, filling, and amazingly simple to make. It requires few ingredients, and can be easily adapted to add more ingredients if you wanted to add a protein or perhaps more vegetables. Even if you can’t consume an entire pot of soup like Genos and Saitama, sharing this meal with friends, while perhaps watching the next episode, is definitely an easy, fun, and affordable option.

The Ingredients

For 2 GINORMOUS servings or 4 moderate servings:

6 cups water

2 inch piece of kombu

packet of bonito flakes

5 green onions

pack of fresh udon noodles (mine came in 3 individual serving packets)

4 tbs sake

4 tbs soy sauce

5 tbs mirin

splash of salt

1/8th tsp cayenne powder

1/4th tsp Sriracha

Make the Mega-Monster Udon!!!

First things first, make the dashi stock. Throw water, bonito flakes and kombu strip in a big pot. Let heat up slowly, and remove kombu strip just before it comes to a full boil.

Once it comes to a boil, turn the heat off, and let sit for about 5-10 minutes. Then, strain out the bonito flakes.

Throw the dashi broth back in the pot, and add in sake, soy sauce, mirin, and salt to taste. Season with cayenne pepper and Sriracha carefully. The amounts I have listed above actually don’t make the soup too spicy, but I kept it light because by Japanese standards, it would probably be way too spicy. The Japanese taste palate does not seem to favor spicy foods, which probably explains why eating a super spicy mega-monster udon bowl is the challenge. Allow it to heat back up to a boil.

As it’s heating back up, chop up your onions thinly.

Once the broth reaches a boil, turn off the heat and throw in the onions.

Meanwhile, portion out your noodles. Either portion them out according to how many bowls you’re serving or if you want to be super hard core, like me, put all your noodles in a blue bucket, similar to the one they eat out of in the anime. I got a little on at Party City for .99 cents.

Then, pour your soup over the top, and loosen up the noodles with chopsticks.

And that’s it! Now your udon is done 🙂

Enjoy with friends, or, ideally, as part of a competition to determine who has superior strength. Hope you enjoyed this post, and I’ll see ya around. Or not. Like this post if you like One Punch Man! If you do, let me know in the comments below who your favorite character is. I am pretty partial to Genos, as he’s so adorably clueless. Leave a comment if you have any questions, concerns, or ideas for what I should make next. 🙂

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