Strawberry Ramen Is Japan's Most Unexpected Spring Strawberry Season Treat

Looking for a new way to enjoy spring and all the fresh fruit that comes into season? Hoping to eat as many delicious Japanese strawberries as you can fit into your stomach while you travel Japan? Then this somewhat outrageous ramen innovation from Ibaraki is just the thing for you.

Ibaraki Prefecture boasts the second-largest output of fresh strawberries in Japan, and local Fukasaku Farm is where many of those strawberries have been grown for over 100 years―and six generations.

Looking for a way to let customers enjoy their strawberries as fresh as they get, Fukasaku Farm opened its own farmhouse cafe (which looks a little incongruously like a mcmansion castle) in 2015. Of course, as a strawberry farm, strawberries have saturated just about every part of the menu, including the ramen.

This isn't dessert ramen―the soup base starts with a soy sauce broth, one of the most common varieties in Japan. But to make it strawberry ramen, strawberry puree is added to the mix, giving the broth fruity strawberry flavor and a reddish color. The noodles are topped with chashu roast pork, a ramen staple, and mizuna greens, plus an additional thin-sliced strawberry. For that extra strawberry oomph.

The red strawberry soup permeates the noodles once they go into the liquid, leaving them with a pink tint undoubtedly popular with kawaii-loving food bloggers.

Whether these noodles are a new groundbreaking innovation in ramen, or an odd pink mess, you'll have to find out yourself. But with such a unique variety of flavors in one dish, and farm-fresh strawberries on top, it certainly sparks curiosity!