Ramen is actually of Chinese origin, with most historians agreeing that it was brought to Japan by Chinese immigrants living in Yokohama in the late 19th century. Today, ramen restaurants offer a variety of styles and toppings, but early iterations of ramen were simpler—wheat noodles with Chinese-style roasted pork.

Soon, enterprising immigrants set up portable ramen stalls. This boosted its popularity among both fellow expatriates and the Japanese, who referred to the noodles as “Shina soba,” with Shina being an archaic Japanese word for China and soba being a blanket term for noodles at the time.

By 1900, Japanese restaurants were serving their own versions of ramen, typically a simple dish of noodles, some toppings, and a broth flavored with salt and pork bones. The Japanese cut the noodles instead of pulling them by hand as the Chinese did, but they kept one aspect of hand-pulling: The word “ramen” is a variation of the Mandarin term for “pulled noodles.” (The original moniker, “Shina soba,” quickly came to be seen as offensive.)

The adage about necessity being the mother of invention comes into play in the postwar years. A Taiwanese-Japanese man named Momofuku Ando, who had spent years watching his community struggle with hunger, decided that someone should create noodles that could be easily made at home. Ando decided that someone should be him.

He spent months experimenting with how best to flash-fry wheat noodles in a laboratory he built before perfecting his method. Ando realized that boiling fried, dried noodles would rehydrate them, and that adding seasoning powder and dehydrated toppings could make countless flavor combinations possible.

On August 25, 1958, Ando began to market his instant ramen noodles. He chose chicken as the debut flavor, as people saw chicken soup as rich in nutrition—and very American. All consumers had to do to make what he named “Chikin Ramen” was add boiling water.

Ramen can be classified in different ways, but generally speaking, there are four principal types of ramen, characterized by seasoning: shio, shoyu, miso, and kare.

Shio, meaning salt, is the oldest of the four variations and is typically pale and yellowish when added to the broth. Shoyu, or soy sauce, makes the broth salty and savory. Curly noodles, not straight ones, are traditional in shoyu ramen. Miso has been described as “uniquely Japanese,” since it was developed in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan. The broth features an abundance of miso blended with oily chicken or fish base. Last is kare, the newest flavor of the four, which is reminiscent of a curry soup made with pork bones and vegetables.

There are other types of ramen, such as champon (which sees the noodles cooked along with the other ingredients) and tsukemen (in which the noodles are served separately from the broth), but shio, shoyu, miso, and kare are the main four you’ll see.