こんにちは! Hello there!
If you ever have visited Japan and spent your time at ramen places (which would be very likely), you know that there's lots of different types of ramen with lots of variations. There is no perfect ramen, because it all depends on your taste and what you like. But if you ever had this steamy bowl of flavor, you just can't get enough. There's fatty ramen like Tonkotsu to more umami style ramen like Miso ramen. This is my take on creating the "perfect" ramen.
Ramen's origin is presumably Chinese, as it was called Hina Soba (Chinese Soba) and early 1900's it started becoming its own thing in Japan. From that point, Japanese started experimenting with lots of different flavors, where every area in Japan developed its own style of ramen.
Although the many different variants, it all consists out of 4 elements: broth, flavoring, noodles and toppings. The one I've been focussing on is Shoyu ramen. Where ramen, as you might already understand, is the dish type (noodles) and Shoyu defines the flavour base you use, which in this case means soy sauce.
This dish is one of the most traditional types of ramen and probably one of the easiest ones to try out yourself.
My first result:
Ok, so, you probably expect some kind of tutorial here. Although I hope you get some information out of this article, I really hope you can give me feedback on how to improve the techniques I'm using. However, if you do want use this as your source of making your own ramen, I would really recommened looking up some actual recipes (see links below).
First off, the ingredients:
Check out this recipe, which really helped me out at first. I've provided some extra information based on this recipe below.
Dashi is a basic broth, but in my experience has a lot to offer. There are tons of resources that explain a lot about dashi, because it's also used for another traditional Japanese dish: misosoup. Therefor there are lots of different ways to prepare it. As far as I know, it's always made using dried ingredients. At is core, kombu is used. This is a type of seaweed (and these are different per region), which are mostly sold as thick dried pieces. But you can experiment by adding other flavors to give it a more umami punch, for instance: Niboshi (dried sardines) and/or dried shiitake.
I've started out simple and prepared a Kombu dashi using the cold water technique. This basically means cleaning the kombu and putting it in cold water and letting it soak overnight (8 - 10 hours). If you're interested in trying out different methods, check out this super interesting article.
Traditionally, Katsuobushi is skipjack tuna that has been smoked and sometimes fermented for a very long time. This is a pretty expensive process and sometimes hard to get. Most of the time you can easily get your hands on Bonito flakes, which also give a very fishy taste which is needed to add to your dashi once you start to boil it with other ingredients. However, the story behind Katsuobushi is pretty interesting:
I've tried several different parts of the pork, but in my experience, pork belly is the best. The more fatty it is, the better. Eventuelly you cut it up into thing slices, so that is super nice, as the fat also holds together the meat better when cooking with the soup. Otherwise I would recommend the shoulder, which has also a pretty decent amount of fat in it. Sometimes you can get it as a roll, otherwise you'll have to do it yourself.
You can also throw in some chicken carcasses, legs or whatever. I threw in everything to really get a meaty flavor (and reused the chicken flesh in another dish).
From what I've seen, scallions and carrots are mostly being used. But you can throw in any vegetable that you have lying around if you ask me. So I threw in some zucchini too. You also need to add ginger and garlic.
Noodles WIP
As mentioned, there are many types of flavoring. This is the exciting part, because this really influence the end result of your ramen. Shoyu, which is a tare based on soy sauce, is in my opinion a simple but very taste flavor.
I've used this recipe, but I really needed to add a lot to a bowl to really make the flavor stand out in the ramen.
A good tip is to warm up the tare before serving it, that way you make sure when serving the ramen everything is extremely hot (the way it should be).
Toppings WIP