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Three fiery flavours of the Samyang instant ramen line are being withdrawn: Buldak 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken and Hot Chicken Stew.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.
When I lived in Denmark “Red bell pepper” was unironically the spiciest Doritos flavor they sell
Lightly salted Doritos?
It’s not even that spicy!
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.
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.
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.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.
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
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.
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.
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
"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.
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
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 be
To 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
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.
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.
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