To me, an amazing bowl of ramen is a pleasure unrivaled by an amazing bowl of anything else. If it’s done right, it ticks off all the boxes: salty, fatty, umami, filling, warming, healthy (sort of) and quick, if you have all the core ingredients already made, which I tend to do in huge batches and freeze or refrigerate.
Ramen comes in almost infinite varieties, usually categorized by soup-type or tare-type. This recipe is a chintan (clear broth) style soup with a shoyu (soy-sauce-based) tare. If you don’t know what the hell those things mean, check out my post on different kinds of ramen. It’s a quick, easy cheat sheet for culinary luddites like me.
There are 5 major elements to a bowl of ramen:
- The soup (your base stock-chicken and pork in this case)
- The tare (concentrated flavor solution)
- The aroma oil (green onion aroma oil used in this recipe)
- The noodles (’nuff said)
- Toppings
Of these, 1-4 can be made in pretty big batches, as I do because they’re a well-worth-it pain in the ass and I like all my pain and effort concentrated in one day every few months or so.
There are lots of folks who say “Oh, you can’t freeze your stock, you lose flavor,” or “Hey, tare goes flat after a day.” If you have a palate refined to a razor’s edge they’re probably right. Me? I can’t tell the difference, and making that shit ahead of time means I get to eat ramen basically whenever I want without 2 days of planning. So you do you, but THIS recipe assumes you have followed my other recipes and have a lot of this stuff in your freezer or fridge.
Shoyu Ramen From Scratch
Course: MainCuisine: JapaneseDifficulty: Medium2
servings15
minutes10
minutes5
minutesThe recipe timing assumes you have many of the constituent parts pre-made. If that’s the case, this is a super quick-to-make recipe. If that’s NOT the case, making each constituent part will take several hours/days. But the assembly is still short AF. And the process is entirely, 100% worth it.
Ingredients
- Soup
1 quart frozen bone broth
4 tbsp Shoyu Tare
2 tbsp Green Onion Aroma Oil*
1 lb. fresh noodles**
- Toppings
4 oz thin-sliced slices of pork chashu
2 soft-boiled eggs (ajitama) marinated in the chashu cooking liquid. You can substitute plain old un-marinated soft-boiled eggs too. It’s still amazing.
1/2 oz dried, cut wakame
1/4 cup chopped green onion
- Prepared Shitake and Black Fungus
Four dried shitake mushrooms
1/8 oz. dried black fungus
Salt
A splash of peanut oil (or any other high-smoke-point cooking oil)
Rice cooking wine
Directions
- Prepping the Soup
- Thaw out bone broth and bring to a simmer. Cover while prepping other ingredients.
- Prepping the Chashu
- Heat a smear of peanut oil in a pan on high heat
- Brown your slices of chashu in the pan until slightly crispy
- Remove chashu from pan. Do not clean the pan! You’ll use it for the mushrooms.
- Prepping Mushrooms and Fungus
- Put the dried mushrooms and black fungus in a bowl and submerge in boiling water. Steep for at least half an hour. remove and cut out any tough areas (stems of the mushrooms etc.)
- Optional- reserve the mushroom-water and add a quarter cup or so of it to the simmering bone broth.
- In the same pan used for browning the chashu, heat a smear of peanut oil or other cooking oil and toss in the mushrooms in. Toss in a pinch of salt. Brown on one side and then add a splash of rice wine vinegar to deglaze.
- Toss in the black fungus and stir until the vinegar is more or less evaporated. Remove from heat.
- Prepping the Wakame
- Cover dry wakame in boiling water and soak for a few minutes until chewy and still a little crunchy. Rremove and dump the remaining steeping water into the simmering bone broth.
- Prepping the Ajitama
- If you have marinated the eggs, remove them from the marinade and allow them to come up to room temperature before slicing in half.
- If you are making new soft-boiled eggs, bring water up to a boil, add two raw eggs and stir gently for 2 minutes (to keep the yolks from sticking to one side) Then cook another 5 minutes for extremely soft boiled or another 6 minutes for a firmer yolk texture.
- Cool and peel in whichever way seems the least painful to you. This is an annoying step no matter what you do.
- Prepping the green onion
- Thinly slice up the white and green parts of at least 2 green onions.
- Assembly
- Get out two large bowls
- Boil the noodles till al dente.
- While noodles are boiling, add 2 Tbsp of Shoyu Tare to each bowl
- Add 1 tbsp of green onion aroma oil to each bowl
- Ladle in 2 cups of broth to each bowl
- When the noodles are done drain and put half in each bowl
- Lay the toppings gently on top of the noodles for maximum esthetic effect
- Drizzle with sesame oil, chilli pepper oil, sprinkle on sesame seeds, whatever the hell you want.
- Eat RIGHT AWAY before the noods get all squishy-like. Slurping is not optional.
Notes
- *Aroma oil is NOT OPTIONAL! Make some of this and store it basically indefinitely. It is super quick and freaking easy and worth it 1,000 times over. I use it in a lot of stuff.
- **Traditionally, low-hydration alkaline noodles are used here. I have been using Way of Ramen’s easy as hell recipe for these and I see no reason to re-invent the wheel on this blog since his are freaking perfection.
So there you have it. Ramen on demand, from the comfort (and recently safety) of your own kitchen. Below is a list of links to some of the potentially harder-to-find stuff that you can get on Amazon including the GORGEOUS Ramen bowl I used in this pic.
Product Links
- Totally gorgeous and awesome Ramen Bowl set (it’s so much prettier than their pictures of it.)
- Wakame
- Dried Shitake Mushrooms
- Dried Black Fungus
- Rice Wine
- Also if you don’t have time to make your own noods, here’s some great ramen noodles.
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