Denmark has recalled several spicy ramen noodle products by South Korean company Samyang, claiming that the capsaicin levels in them could poison consumers.
Three fiery flavours of the Samyang instant ramen line are being withdrawn: Buldak 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken and Hot Chicken Stew.
Denmark’s food agency issued the recall and warning on Tuesday, urging consumers to abandon the product.
But the maker Samyang says there’s no problem with the quality of the food.
“We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy,” the firm said in a statement to the BBC.
“The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason.”
It’s unknown if any specific incidents in Denmark had prompted authorities there to take action.
The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said it had assessed the levels of capsaicin in a single packet to be “so high that they pose a risk of the consumer developing acute poisoning”.
“If you have the products, you should discard them or return them to the store where they were purchased,” it said in a statement.
It also emphasised the warning for children, for whom extremely spicy food can cause harm.
The notice has sparked heated discussion online with many amused reactions from lovers of spicy food. Many have made assertions about the Danes’ low tolerance for spice.
“I had a friend from Denmark who thought tasteless breaded shrimp with a little bit of ground pepper on it was too spicy. Not surprised they think this ramen is poison,” read one top-liked comment on the Reddit r/Korea group.
Samyang said it planned to “closely look into the local regulations” in Denmark and respond after that.
The noodles don’t appear to have been recalled before in any other country, nor have there been other safety warnings issued.
Capsaicin is the chemical compound in chilli peppers which creates the burning feeling.
When humans eat peppers, the capsaicin is released into saliva and binds on to receptors in the mouth.
Samyang is a major South Korean food manufacturer which brands itself as the first company in the country to create instant noodles, back in the 1960s.
I will say, the 2x spicy chicken was really fuckin’ hot
I can see it being lethal to people for whom the spiciest ingredient in their cuisine is whitefish
It’s just so weird because there’s a pretty decent culture for eating spicy food here as well. The usual go-to nighttime drunken dish is pita or durum, served with a large bowl of chili on the side so you can slather it yourself. There’s a large middle eastern population here as well.
It’s so weird. I’m legit pissed, the 2x spicy were perfect for me and now they’re gone because of someone screaming “won’t somebody please think of the children?”
Why not get rid of dairy products? A lactose intolerant child might eat them. What about meat? Eating it raw is bad for you, so that’s a danger as well.The usual go-to nighttime drunken dish is pita or durum, served with a large bowl of chili on the side so you can slather it yourself. There’s a large middle eastern population here as well.
So is that who the chilis are for? I see this situation in germany and it’s not the white people going for chili, usually
Really? I see white people go for the chili often, but I agree its more often people from the middle east. Either way they’re both danish, so (some) Danes like chili
Oh, so it’s an excuse to be racist
Makes sense
I would assume, but I don’t think ramen is more popular with the middle eastern segment than anyone else. Its at least not a stereotype. This decision is just genuinely baffling. It’s as if someone in the FDA ate the too spicy food, had a reaction and on that basis decided to ban it, instead of just saying “not for me”.
If “too much for some” is a criteria now, then we can’t really sell anything people are allergic to.Danish peanut connoisseurs on notice
When you say Chili I can only think of the stew but I assume that’s not what you mean.
Yeah I mean chilis like Habanero and so on
Like paste or individual peppers?
Individual, otherwise it would be chilipaste
True. Thanks
FOUND THE DANE!
What’s your favorite rotten fish paste to eat in a bog?
Goddamn you people are fucking annoying
Yes
That’s Sweden, you’re thinking of Sweden.
The slander of Smørrebrød I saw in the other thread did get under my nerves thoughSweden, Denmark.
Potato, potato.
You’re all still Nordic frost people who eat gross fish.
Edit: Hey I wanted to apologize, I really shouldn’t be dragging Scandinavian cuisine. You guys have a rich and beautiful culture.
I gotta be honest, this is the one bit I just find plain boring and disappointing. It stems from being misinformed and incurious about other places and cuisine. I don’t mean to denigrate you, I’m trying to explain why I’m not really playing along.
Okay, sorry, I’m sure Denmark is a lovely country.
Oh yeah no worries and no need to apologise. Its a pet peeve of mine and it’s really just me being a crotchety old complainer. It doesn’t have anything to do with Denmark it’s just more general a thing about people mocking culinary traditions they don’t really know or understand. But I get why it’s done and it’s completely fair, it’s really just me being negative, so no need to apologise. But thanks
The store I first encountered these sold the 2x for less than the regular. So that’s how I tried the 2x first lol
Priced to move… your colon to the toilet
Yeah the heat these are packing is legit lol. I enjoy spicy food most of the time, but the one time I had the Hot Chicken Stew I struggled to finish it.
I sweated through a t-shirt after eating the 2x spicy ones
I would have probably been hospitalized if I ate the 3x spicy
I’ve had samyang ramen before I can confirm it’s really spicy, jokes aside I can see it being too much for people who get bothered by spicy mayo.
Yeah, I used to think I could handle pretty much anything in terms of spiciness, and those noodles kicked my ass
Calling it poisoning is a bit melodramatic though
yea i don’t think i’d ever try the 2x (or 3x god forbid) because the regular one (or the other flavors like quattro cheese or carbonara) are spicy af i wouldn’t be surprised if ‘experts’ told me i shold wear special gloves when preparing the 3x one because i could blind myself if i rubbed my eye wrong
I once got like 20 packets of the 3x one for about 6 dollars. I got really creative
When I lived in Denmark “Red bell pepper” was unironically the spiciest Doritos flavor they sell
Lightly salted Doritos?
Denmark has Taffel branded snacks too? And the logo and styling are completely different from what it is in Finland
"I had a friend from Denmark who thought tasteless breaded shrimp with a little bit of ground pepper on it was too spicy.
Oh white people
Ground pepper spicy? I get that we all have different level of tolerance for spicy food but this is genuinely the first time ive heard of ground pepper being spicy for others.
One of my friends legit can’t handle black pepper, she says it’s just overwhelming
She also lacks a sense of smell, so it probably has something to do with that
Black pepper is spicy. However, I only realized this like 15 or so years into my life when I made a Norwegian dish that called for copious amounts of whole peppercorns. In 99.9% of meals, you’re not using enough to make it spicy.
Black pepper is known for irritating your nose.
I thought it wasn’t a real thing until at a recent family gathering when food talk came up and I found out one of my cousins apparently cant stand too much black pepper, her baby nieces have a higher tolerance for spice than her.
Plain bizarre to even conceive of.
I have a friend who considers Tomatoes spicy. YMMV on whether she has a mild allergy or something but y’know
Allergy is possible, esp if your friend has similar reactions to other nightshades like eggplant. Speaking for myself, I notice a reaction when I eat smaller tomatoes that have more peel to flesh, like roma or cherry. Not spicy but more like itchy/prickly. Still eat them tho
Allergy is possible, esp if your friend has similar reactions to other nightshades like eggplant.
Huh, no. Favorite Veggie, never described as spicy at all
Interestingly piperine actually does have a sensation of heat similar to capcaisin, and it works on a different enough pathway that a capcaisin tolerance doesn’t impact it. It’s much, much milder, but it is there.
So with my level of capcaisin tolerance something like a habenero pepper is roughly as mild as a whole peppercorn, and I’ll toss a half dozen or so whole peppercorns into my ramen that’s also spiced with red pepper and then mixed with ghost pepper in the bowl, because the peppercorns provide their own little distinct bursts of bitterness and heat when one crunches on one, which stands out from the background warmth of the soup.
I see you never met my mother-in-lawIf you use fresh ground peppercorns, eventually you will get a larger spicy bit stuck in your teeth or otherwise notice it on your tongue.
That guy must have been over exaggerating, people here put too much pepper on their food. My grandmom serves plates that are completely black. On the other hand I do have a friend who can taste if chili flakes have been near the plate…
I mean that one anecdotal guy may exist without contradicting your anecdotes.
Impossible! I have anecdotes that are different!
Yeah I was just trying to chime in, but I can see the way I did was silly
lol, the Wikipedia says Denmark’s national specialty “dish” (smørrebrød) is a piece of bread with cold cuts on it.
that’s what people “make” when they are too tired to figure anything out. like exhausted single parent or low-tier conference fare.
literally half a sandwhich, lmfao
for real. I thought it had to be a distortion. the wiki on danish cuisine is brutal though:
Historian Søren Mørch has characterized the Danish cuisine as a “garbage kitchen” of insipid, sweet and unspiced “baby food” where the tastes of milk and sweetness form the key elements. He believes that it arose because the export policy of the Danish food sector was to use the Danish home market as a “gutter” for left-over products, after high-quality bacon and butter had been sold abroad. Skimmed milk, meat scraps only suitable for chopping up, and the replacement product margarine are all products which Søren Mørch describes as residue products.
Soren, unlike the rest of the Danes, cooked
Cold cut on bread is literally the type of food Chinese people were dunking on a few months ago.
Smørrebrød isn’t just cold cuts on bread. It really is a whole dish and it is really quite good. It saddens me when people meme it to be “lmao bread lol”. I also think it’s sad that we don’t give baking the credit it deserves. Danish bread is fantastic, it’s some of the best in the world. Is it a hot meal? Kind of, you can put warm stuff on top, but no it is not a large stew. It’s supposed to be a really nice lunch, and lunch in Denmark is generally cold.
We can overthrow the Danish with mustard and peppercorns.
Sounds like mostly a social media panic type thing, this is the stuff that has been memed about all over twitter and tiktok right?
I think I saw a post in Danish also that was really really heavy handed on the danger to children thing, claimed that it was being recalled due to kid(s) in Germany eating it and starting to puke or getting high blood pressure.
Like, the package shows you a chicken breathing fire on it
I know media literacy is at an all time low, but chicken on fire should be a universal warning
Like, the package shows you a chicken breathing fire on it
Yeah but in Nordic countries we put similar imagery on products that have a homeopathic amount of capsaicin in them
homeopathic amount of capsaicin in them
I mean if this does end up being a “protect the children from social media dares” type panic then that’s just plain irrelevant to the people deciding this shit, cause it would just egg on whatever kids are buying it to try out the epic spicy tiktok ramen.
Yeah, as a former child, I can say with confidence that a ban would just make me want it more
I did get a bunch of Jolt Cola after most stores stopped carrying it after it was blamed for giving some kids heart attacks
chicken breathing fire on it
Oh look it’s godzilla!
And Godzooky!
Yeah, I learned from these noodles that “cartoon character breathing fire” means they’re serious about the warnings.
Yeah that was the food administration’s post. They say that “too much capsaicin has had kids in Germany admitted to the ER” but they dont specifically talk about samyang or even just ramen. Just some vague product with a lot of capsaicin. They also mention that its marketed to kids and that it’s hard to know how it will affect their children, which is like???
The stuff in Germany was one kid sent to the ER after eating one of these carolina reaper chips on a dare in school - you know, the ones where it’s just one chip in the entire coffin shaped box, that are intentionally marketed to people who want to brag about how much spice they can handle. The scoville on buldak aren’t anywhere in the same ballpark as that and honestly i think all of this is kinda ridiculous when there’s hot sauces where one drop too many can be enough to make an entire pot of chili too spicy for most people. Capsaicin is a thing that just exists in nature and in an untold number of preparations that are more powerful than a sauce package in instant ramen. I’m not familiar with buldak noodles myself because they aren’t vegan afaik, but a friend of mine said that the 3x ones “are tasty”. Granted, she once made a ramen place in our town run out of chili oil, but it was really weak chili oil.
The 3x ones ARE tasty. I just need to add a bunch of fat to the broth to deal with the spicyness
The child marketing claim is why I assume this is about social media and tiktok shit, where the Food Admin can’t tell the difference between viral memes and company marketing.
The ER thing I have to imagine is just parents taking their kids there after finding out they puked and/or felt ill after eating spooky foreign food.
Yeah apart from eating a Carolina reaper, I’ve never heard of anyone who ACTUALLY needed to be admitted to the ER. An upset tummy can hurt a lot and be scary for a child, but its not dangerous. Especially not with ramen because if its dangerous then you wouldn’t be able to finish a bowl of it, right?
The ER thing happened at a school, i could imagine that a teacher just decided they need to call an ambulance to avoid liability when they saw one of their students have a strong reaction to the stuff.
Apparently the 3x is only around 13 000 Scoville units, but the high volume of chili and the mixture of the sauce with the noodles makes it taste much, much hotter than that. At least that’s what friend who tried some told me.
We haben en serious problem wit der spicy ramen!
That’s clearly a German phonetic accent but these are Danes we’re talking about! They talk like Swedes with hot potatos in their mouths
that’s clearly a Dutch accent and Danes sound like Dutch people, so it’s closer than whatever an American ideas of a Swedish accent would beTo me Dutch sounds like if German fucked Danish
I once had a Dutch guy come up to me and do weird guttural sounds, then he burst out laughing and said “That’s you! That’s what you guys sound like!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought he was just speaking Dutch…I die a bit inside every time someone makes fun of Finnish people by putting on a stereotypical comedy Scandi accent. Thick Finnish accents are very distinctive and very goofy and I wish they were more widely known
Honestly same with danish. People just do the swedish, German or Dutch and none of them work. There’s something powerfully bureaucratic, yet dorky, about heavy denglish https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Jt-XVaTGSw&pp=ygUfZ2FtbGUgbcOmbmQgbnllIGJpbGVyIG1lYXQgcm9vbQ%3D%3D
I was about to link you to a series of sketches about a Danish character in an old Finnish sketch comedy show but I believe subjecting people to Finnish TV is classified as a crime against humanity
The accent of the Toussaint region in the Witcher games is actually based off Danish because the studio thought that using French or Italian accents on the voice acting (which would be the most obvious fits for the area) were both so overdone and widely ridiculed that they wouldn’t work.
denglish
Damn they must consider a Sichuan hotpot to be a weapon of mass destruction.
Probably just is not actually accessible in Denmark outside of specialty asian market stores or online order.
You’re probably lucky to find dirt tier sichuan peppercorns in the regular grocery store.
Isn’t the spice packaged separately. Like you can’t just add a warning on the container?
The container already says it’s super spicy and you shouldn’t use the whole packet of spice
The 3x and 2x’s spice packet is the soup base. The second packet is like sesame seeds and some seaweed flakes. Stew type has a second powder packet that makes it thicker.
oh shit I didn’t know they came in 3xI want to try the 3x now
Rlly funny from the country that eats rotten eggs and fermented fish lmao
That’s sweden
Rotten eggs is like a Chinese thing anyways, all this shit is just “our underrated offal vs their subhuman slop”
皮蛋 is more like preserved? i.e. explicitly not rotten. That’s like saying jerky is rotten meat
Main point just being that we don’t eat any eggs more exciting than boiled or fried over here.
Yup makes sense 👍
For people doubting that Samyang 2x is unbearably hot, watch the woman’s reaction in this video. I’ve ate whole raw ghost peppers and enjoyed it. I enjoy super-hot hot sauces, 100k+ scovilles. Samyang 2x is just unpleasant to eat. Samyang’s other spicy noodles are really good.
People realize they don’t need to put the entire spice pack in right? Holy
.You can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into. We have three bombs, a character crying and breathing fire, several angry peppers, and it says 3x spicy right there. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it.
Expecting KKKrackers to read and understand their surroundings is much to high a bar
It’s not even that spicy!
