Ramen: serious business

Serious business blud. Serious.

I finished my first round of ramen experimentation this week and am actually really happy with the results, without blowing my own horn. Ok so the broth could have been made with the right bones, but in the end that actually proved to be quite nice, especially when I made a proper shoyu base this week instead of the miso one I tested at first.

The other main thing I had to test was making chashu, the meat that accompanies any self respecting bowl of ramen. I used the same recipes I got for the broth and it actually turned out to be a lot easier than I’d thought. I got a piece of boneless pork shoulder from the supermarket, wrapped in fat. Cooked it in the broth for 1h30, and then in the shoyu mix for about 30mins. The result was beyond my expectations. Simply, and modestly, put it smacked it. The taste was right, the consistency was pretty much there too though it could have done with being tied tighter with rope and have more fat around it too.

The real test came yesterday though when I invited the homie Goth Trad for dinner alongside Dan, who is also a big ramen head. Goth ended up inviting another Japanese too, Go from Dokkebi Q, so I felt a little pressure – would it live it up to the expectactions of people who know what a good ramen is all about? The answer seems to be yes, though considering they’re Japanese I’ve got a feeling they wouldn’t tell me if it sucked, because well that’s not what you do if you’re Japanese. Seriously though they seem to dig it and I was pretty happy with it too, especially the presentation (see above) and the fact that I remembered to buy menma to go with it. What you see in the pic is a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, but the broth is beef bones instead of pork. Base is shoyu and the toppings are menma, steamed beansprouts and pak choi (a trick I picked up from Ramen Jiro) and the noodles are precooked egg noodles from the supermarket, which do the trick for now.

It’s not the easiest dish to make that’s for sure, but if you don’t mind cooking for a whole day to make the broth, base and chashu and you have enough containers and space to store everything in your fridge you can have some pretty good ramen at hand, ready to go in a short time when you fancy it. And it beats instant shit and wht passes for ramen outside of Japan. Next step in the ramen game is a proper tonkotsu broth, with more fat, and possibly making my own noodles. We’ll see. Fuck I’m hungry again.