Ryujin's Ramen Recipe (ITZY): The Childhood Bokkeum Ramyeon She Cooks for Her Members

K-FOOD · RECIPE

Ryujin's Bokkeum Ramyeon — The Childhood Ramen ITZY's Resident Cook Makes for Her Members

KPulse Daily

There is one specific kind of idol food content I will drop absolutely everything for. Not the sponsored kind. Not the brand collab kind. The kind where an idol makes the thing they ate as a nine-year-old, badly lit, no measuring cups, narrating it like they are talking to a cousin.

On February 5, 2025, ITZY's Ryujin walked into Chef Sso (스타!요리방) — the cooking show (G)I-DLE's Soyeon hosts on the Pixid YouTube channel — and did exactly that. She made bokkeum ramyeon (볶음라면, stir-fried ramen) and gyeran bokkeumbap (계란볶음밥, egg fried rice). Two dishes. Both straight out of her childhood. And the show billed her, without irony, as ITZY의 요리사 — ITZY's cook.

▶ 스타!요리방 Season 2 Episode 4 · Pixid (YouTube), Feb 5, 2025

The Story: How Ryujin Became ITZY's Cook

Here is the thing about Ryujin that gets flattened in English-language coverage. She is the leader. She is the one with the deep, almost androgynous rap tone that people build entire fancam compilations around. She is the WANNABE shoulder dance. And apparently, in between all of that, she is also the member who cooks for everyone.

That is not a fan theory. It is how the show introduced her: the member who often cooks for the others, arriving with a dish carrying childhood memories. The episode title was "3세대 여자 아이돌 대표주자들의 고품격 라면 요리" — roughly, "high-class ramen cooking by the flagbearers of the 3rd-generation girl groups." Which is a very funny way to describe two people making instant noodles in a pan.

Ryujin was the show's fourth guest, following ZICO (who made ganjjajang) and (G)I-DLE's Yuqi. And the ramen thing tracks. In a 2023 GQ Korea bag-contents video, Ryujin admitted she keeps wooden chopsticks in her bag at all times — because delivery orders hand out so many of them, and she loves cup ramyeon enough that she wanted to always be prepared. This is a woman with a ramen contingency plan. I respect it enormously.

What Actually Happened in the Episode

Look — I want to be straight with you here, because a lot of "idol recipe" posts are not. Ryujin genuinely cooked both dishes on camera. What I am giving you below is the standard Korean method for the dishes she made, plus the substitutions you will actually need outside Korea. I am not going to invent exact gram measurements she never said on screen. The episode is embedded above; watch her do it, then use this as your shopping list and safety net.

What I can tell you about the vibe: Soyeon spent a chunk of the episode fixated on how Ryujin talks. She said ITZY's whole speech pattern comes across as unusually refined — she compared it to something out of the 70s or 80s. Ryujin's response was to shrug and say she is not much of a talker and that people tell her she puts them to sleep. Soyeon, who was recording in the morning, immediately went: oh, so it was not just that I was tired.

Then Ryujin told a story I had never seen translated anywhere. Back when ITZY was barely debuted, they did a year-end stage collab with (G)I-DLE, who were already seniors. And at a Gayo Daejeon a couple of years back, the two groups were assigned tent-partitioned waiting rooms in one big hall — the kind where you hear everything. Ryujin said ITZY are quiet in the waiting room, conserving energy. Soyeon apologized on the spot, pre-emptively, and admitted (G)I-DLE had been noise-complained about more than once. Two of the biggest 3rd-gen girl groups, and the actual dynamic is "sorry, we were the loud neighbors."

Ingredients (with US/EU Substitutes)

This is the part every reposted idol recipe skips, and it is the only part that actually matters if you are shopping at a normal supermarket in Ohio or Manchester. Two dishes, one shopping list.

For the bokkeum ramyeon (볶음라면)

What you need	No Korean version? Use this
1 pack Korean instant ramyeon (Shin, Jin, Neoguri — any soup type)	Any instant noodle brick with a soup sachet. Avoid pre-made "stir-fry" packs — you want the soup powder, you just will not use all of it
Half the soup sachet	This is the whole trick. Full sachet with no broth = a salt lick
1 egg	Same everywhere
Green onion (대파), sliced	Scallions work; leek whites in a pinch
Sesame oil + toasted sesame seeds	Any Asian aisle carries both. Do not substitute regular oil — the sesame is the finish
Gochugaru (고춧가루), optional	Aleppo pepper or mild chili flakes. Korean chili is fruitier and less aggressive than generic "red pepper flakes"
Slice of cheese, optional	Any melting slice. Kids in Korea do this. Adults in Korea also do this and pretend they do not

For the gyeran bokkeumbap (계란볶음밥)

What you need	No Korean version? Use this
Day-old cooked short-grain rice, 1 bowl	Sushi rice, or any short/medium grain. Cold and dry beats fresh and warm — fresh rice steams into mush
2 eggs	Same
Green onion, garlic, cooking oil	Easy everywhere
Soy sauce (진간장), 1 tsp	Any Japanese or Korean soy sauce. Not dark Chinese soy — too heavy
Gim (김, roasted seaweed), crumbled on top	Sushi nori, torn up. Or the snack seaweed packs — those are literally the same thing

Step-by-Step: Bokkeum Ramyeon

Boil the noodles in less water than the packet says — about 300ml instead of 550ml. You are not making soup. Pull them at roughly 3 minutes, still slightly firm.
Drain, but save about 4 tablespoons of the noodle water. Do not skip this. It is the sauce.
Heat a pan with a little oil. Toss in sliced green onion and let it sizzle until the oil smells like onion. That is your flavor base.
Add the noodles, the reserved noodle water, and half the soup sachet. Stir-fry hard for 60–90 seconds until the liquid goes glossy and clings to the noodles.
Push the noodles to one side, crack the egg into the empty half, scramble it loosely, then fold it through.
Off the heat: sesame oil, sesame seeds, a pinch of gochugaru. Cheese slice on top now if you are doing that.

Step-by-Step: Egg Fried Rice

Beat the eggs. Get the pan properly hot — hotter than feels sensible.
Oil, then minced garlic, then the eggs. Scramble until just barely set and immediately scoop them out. Overcooked egg is rubber and you cannot undo it.
More oil, then the cold rice. Press and break it apart with the back of your spatula until every grain is separate. This takes longer than you think.
Return the egg, add green onion, drizzle the soy sauce around the hot edge of the pan — not on the rice. It caramelizes on contact and that is the whole difference.
Toss for 30 more seconds. Crumbled gim on top.

The combo move: Koreans do not treat these as two separate meals. You eat the ramyeon, and the fried rice is what happens next in the same pan. Which is exactly why a busy idol would default to it.

🇰🇷 THE KOREAN SIDE

Bokkeum ramyeon is not a recipe in Korea. It is a reflex. Every Korean household has a version, and none of them are written down. It exists because of a very specific domestic problem: you want ramyeon, but you also want it to feel like a real meal instead of a sad bowl of broth. So you cut the water, cut the soup powder, throw it in a pan, and suddenly it is dinner.

The egg fried rice sits in the same drawer of the Korean brain. It is what you make with yesterday's rice at 11pm. Nobody in Korea would call either of these dishes "cooking." When Soyeon's show framed them as 고품격 (high-class), that was the joke — these are the least fancy foods imaginable, being made by two women who headline arenas.

And 맛없없 — the show's word for Ryujin's menu — is Korean internet shorthand meaning roughly "there is no version of this that tastes bad." That is the entire pitch. It is not impressive. It is unfailable. That is why it is comfort food.

🌍 THE GLOBAL SIDE

International MIDZY reacting to this clip mostly landed on one thing: Ryujin being quietly, unglamorously competent. No panic, no flailing, no producer coaching her through it. She cooks like someone who has cooked before, because she has — for four other people, repeatedly.

The other reaction was the leader thing. Ryujin's public image abroad is built almost entirely on stage presence: the rap tone, the stare, the fancams. Watching that same person casually stir noodles and mumble that she is boring to listen to reads as a genuine reveal to fans who mostly know her through 90-second performance clips.

📊 THE GAP

The gap here is not the food. It is what "an idol cooking" means in each place.

In Korea, idol-hosted cooking content is a mature, almost worn-in genre — 냉장고를 부탁해, 편스토랑, and now a rotating cast of YouTube kitchens. Soyeon running her own show is not a novelty; it is a career move roughly as normal as launching a photo book. Korean viewers watched this episode for the conversation — the Gayo Daejeon waiting-room story, the speech-pattern bit, the senior-junior dynamic.

Global fans watched the same 20 minutes and read it as intimacy. Because most international K-pop consumption is choreographed: teasers, stages, edited variety with subtitles. Unscripted footage of an idol standing at a stove, slightly bored, feels rare and precious. In Korea, it is Wednesday.

Jamie's Tips (I Have Ruined This Several Times)

Half the soup packet. Half. I know it feels wrong to throw powder away. Use the whole sachet with almost no water and you have made a salt brick with noodles in it. There is no rescue.
Cold rice or nothing. Fresh rice has too much moisture and will clump into a paste no matter how hard you fry it. If you only have fresh rice, spread it on a plate and stick it in the freezer for 15 minutes first.
Do not walk away from the pan. Once the noodle water hits the soup powder it goes from sauce to glue in about 40 seconds.
Soy sauce on the pan edge, not the rice. This is the one tip that separates fried rice that tastes like rice with soy sauce on it from fried rice that tastes like fried rice.

Want It in Seoul?

You cannot order this at a restaurant, and that is sort of the point. But if you want the closest commercial version, any 분식집 (bunsikjip — the cheap snack-food joints on basically every block) will do you a 라볶이 or a 볶음밥 for a few thousand won. For the full at-2am experience, walk into any GS25 or CU, buy a cup ramyeon and a triangle kimbap, and use the hot water station by the window. That is the actual national dish and nobody will tell you otherwise.

📋 RECIPE CARD

Time	~25 minutes for both dishes
Difficulty	Beginner — genuinely hard to fail
Serves	1 hungry person, 2 polite ones
Spice	Mild — controlled entirely by the soup sachet
As cooked by	Ryujin · ITZY, on 스타!요리방 (Feb 5, 2025)

FAQ

Is this the exact recipe Ryujin used on the show?
She made bokkeum ramyeon and egg fried rice on camera — that part is confirmed. But she did not read out gram measurements, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What is above is the standard Korean method for those dishes plus the substitutions you need abroad. Watch the episode for her specific moves.

Which ramyeon brand should I buy?
Any Korean soup-type instant noodle works. Shin Ramyun is the default and the easiest to find outside Korea. Neoguri gives you a chewier noodle if you can find it.

Can I make it vegetarian?
The fried rice already is if you skip nothing. For the ramyeon, most Korean soup sachets contain meat or seafood extract — check the packet, or swap in a vegetarian brand and add a spoon of gochujang for depth.

Is it very spicy?
Not really, and you control it. Half a Shin sachet is a warm background heat, not a challenge. Skip the gochugaru and it is genuinely mild.

Why is cold rice better than fresh?
Refrigerating cooked rice dries the surface of each grain and firms up the starch. Fresh rice releases steam in the pan and glues itself together. It is the single biggest variable in fried rice, everywhere, in every cuisine.

💬 Jamie's Take:

"I keep thinking about the fact that the show called Ryujin ITZY's cook and she just... accepted it. Seven years in, four members to feed, and her contribution to group life is that she is the one who makes the pan of noodles. That is not a content strategy. That is just a person. Make the ramyeon, make the rice in the same pan afterward, eat it standing up. That is the recipe. Everything else is garnish."

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