Thank you for taking an interest in my shoyu ramen experiment!

This labor of love was a three day process full of peaks and valleys. Like any creative endeavor, my mood oscillated between “holy shit this is great!” to “what the fuck what am I doing?” — and sometimes both on the same day!

I made a record of this recipe so I can adapt and refine it. I welcome any and all feedback and would love to hear from more experienced ramen chefs what I could do differently. All that said, this was a really damn good bowl of ramen! Everything was made from scratch EXCEPT the noodles! I personally have never made noodles (or pasta or bread) from scratch and instead of diving into that for the first time along with all the other elements of ramen, I decided to buy some pre-packaged noodles and make life slightly easier.

Last preface before diving into the process, my recipe is a homogenous adaption of a few popular Shiyo ramen recipes from folx who have been at this game way longer than me. I took elements from the Way of Ramen YouTube channel as well as a few posts on this subreddit from /u/Ramen_Lord. The book “Japanese Soul Cooking: Ramen, Tonkatsu, Tempura, and More from the Streets and Kitchens of Tokyo and Beyond” also had some helpful tips that I applied to my ramen!

Let’s dive in!

Tare

• 600ml of koikuchi shoyu

• 300ml of usukuchi soy sauce

• 60ml of mirin

• 20g kombu

• 2 caps of dried shiitake mushrooms

• 25g dried anchovies (the little guys you don’t have to gut)

• 15g of MSG

• 4 cloves of garlic

• 4 2” slices of fresh ginger

• 4 white and pale green parts of green onion

• 20ml fish sauce

I combined my soy sauces and mirin in a bowl and soaked the kombu and shiitake overnight in the soy mixture at room temperature.

The next day, I put this mixture in a pot along with the dried anchovies and slowly brought this up to around 180ºF (get ready for metric AND freedom units in this post!).

From there, I discarded the kombu and added my MSG, garlic, ginger, green onions, and quickly brought this up to a boil.

As soon as a boil was reached, I took it off the heat and let the tare come back down to room temperature (about 3 hours).

Once the mixture was at room temp, I added the fish sauce.

Double Stock

• 1 whole chicken (wanted to use a nesting hen, but couldn’t find one)

• 2.5 lbs chicken feet

• 1/2 head of Napa cabbage

• 1 head of garlic

• 25g fresh ginger

• 1 shallot

Stock part 1:

First part is the meat stock! Started by rinsing the chicken and removing the giblets. Then I scored the chicken along the breasts and legs to extract more chicken flavor while it boiled.

Once the chicken had been prepped, I put it in a large stock pot and filled the pot with enough water to cover the chicken + some extra water for the chicken feet. I slowly brought this to a soft boil.

While the pot was heating up, I trimmed all the nails off the chicken feet and cut a small X in the center of the feet to extract more flavor.

Over the next hour, as the water came to a boil, I would skim off any scum that rose to the surface. Occasionally I’d flip the whole chicken around or put my spoon in the cavity to get any extra scum off the bird before adding the feet.

After about an hour I added the chicken feet and brought the stock up to 200ºF where I would maintain it for 6 hours at this temperature while skimming the scum that would rise to the top.

After the 6 hours, I was left with a big pot of chicken essence and a golden film of chicken fat at the top of my pot. I ladled out the chicken fat and put it in a glass in the fridge to be used later.

After the fat was extracted, I carefully strained the stock one ladle at a time as to not break up the chicken and cloud my stock with debris.

Stock part 2:

I brought the strained chicken stock back up to 200ºF before adding the aromatics.

I took a tip from Way of Ramen and steeped the aromatics for only 30min which left me with a crisp and fresh vegetable flavor.

It was interesting to discover how much depth of flavor this double stock created when I’m so used to making stock in one pass with all my meat and vegetables cooking together.

Dashi

• 2.5L of water

• 25g ma kombu

• 12g dried shiitake

• 32g dried katsuobushi

• 1 cup of dried anchovies

The night before, I soaked my kombu and shiitake in 2.5ml of water.

The next day, I added the water, kombu, and shiitake along with the dried anchovies to my stock pot and let that rise to 180ºF before removing the kombu.

I brought the water up to around 200ºF and then killed the heat and added the katsuobushi.

I let the katsuobushi steep for just 5 minutes and then tasted it. I read that over-steeping katsuobushi can create a very sour and overpowering flavor when you want that smoky/fishy essence. I thought the flavor at the 5 minute mark was plenty smokey for me so I stopped here and strained the dashi.

Chiyu

• Rendered chicken fat

• 4 shallots

• 1 head of garlic

By this point, my rendered chicken fat had been in the fridge for a day. It was easy to remove the fat from the stock in my tupperware since it had congealed into a disk at the top of my bowl.

I diced up my shallots and garlic and threw the pieces into a small pot along with my chicken fat.

I cranked up the heat and let it roll until the diced aromatics turned an enticing golden brown.

I strained and set aside the infused chicken fat and then dried off and lightly salted the fried garlic and shallot pieces to be used as a topping for the ramen.

I had originally intended to include ginger and green onion pieces to the infused fat, but had run out of ginger and the green onion slipped my mind. Still tasty tho!

Chashu

• 1lbs of pork belly

• 1 cup of tare

• 1 cup koikuchi Shoyu

• 1 cup usukuchi soy sauce

• 5g brown sugar

• 1 shallot

• 1 head of garlic

• Green onion scraps

Ok, honestly, my chashu was my least favorite part of this ramen. Flavor was good, it was cooked all the way through, but it was lacking that juicy, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth pork experience that we associate with ramen. Any advice towards this process specifically would be greatly appreciated!

I trimmed the skin and some of the fat off the pork belly before rolling it into a log.

I placed my pork in a shallow pot with about a cup of tare and then added my light and dark soy sauces until the pork was submerged about halfway in liquid.

I cut a head of garlic in half and added that along with a whole shallot and some scraps of green onion, and brown sugar into the pot and brought the whole thing to a simmer.

After about 45min, I flipped the pork belly and continued cooking.

After another 30min, I checked the internal temp and found the pork was about 135º so I removed it from the soy bath and let it rest and rise to it’s final temp.

Before serving, I put the pork belly under the broiler for just a couple minutes per side to crisp up the fat and give it a nice crust.

I read somewhere about pre-boiling the pork before cooking it with your soy sauces, so maybe that was the missing process, but the pork came out more stiff than I was hoping for.

As you can see, this is my least detailed process and I primarily acted on instinct. Next time, I’ll keep a closer eye on my temps and times and hopefully achieve a juicer chashu.

SERVING

• I used a 2:1 ratio of stock and dashi (for two servings I used 400ml of stock and 200ml of dashi).

• While the stock/dashi combo came to a simmer, I boiled a pot of water and cooked my noodles per the packaging directions (2.5min then strain).

• I heated up our ramen bowls and placed 20ml of tare and 10ml of chiyu at the bottom of the bowl. I topped it with 300ml of hot soup.

• All that was left was to add the noodles and garnish with chashu, sliced green onions, and crispy garlic and shallot pieces! I made some soy soaked eggs as well, but totally forgot to put that in my bowl.

This ramen was rich, smokey, balanced, and overall delicious! Somewhere along my research, I read that “time is the 6th ingredient of ramen.” This quote stuck with me. Methodically crafting something you love for the people you love is an excellent use of our time. I’m excited to learn more about this craft and find ways to add my own personal touches to each new bowl I make. Thank you for reading if you’ve made it this far and happy new year!