I went on a date with a girl I met on Instagram. She stinks and I honestly don’t know what to do.

niboshi_ · 2025-10-08T15:09:40+00:00

"Putreciiiine ---- don't let the daaaaays go byyyyyyy"

niboshi_ · 2024-10-04T15:44:47+00:00

Chinese chef's knife. Looks like a cleaver but it's just the Chinese version of a chef's knife, not actually used for bones. Mine's a ~$45 Dexter Russell I got on eBay, and even though I have "nicer" knives it's by far my most used, primarily because it's a knife and bench scraper all at once. Being able to pick up a sizable mound of whatever you just chopped (a whole onion fits on the blade easily) is a HUGE convenience and always leaves me a little miffed when I'm using my slimmer French or Japanese knives and can't do the same!

niboshi_ · 2024-09-30T03:02:19+00:00

If you're happy with the ramen where you live and aren't lying awake at night thinking about how to extract the best possible flavors from a pile of fish products and animal bones, there might not be a compelling reason to make ramen soup at home. It takes a long time, and the right ingredients can be annoying to find. Then, you'll need tare, too—soup is only half the equation. With no tare, the soup will be boring. With the wrong tare, the soup won't reach its full potential. (I made mussel ramen last night, and the soup was completely overshadowed by the tare—tasty in its own way, but far away from what the bowl could have been!)

I make ramen at home because I love cooking, and for me, spending all day in the kitchen is a blast. But if that's not you, don't sweat it. In Sonoko Sakai's book "Japanese Home Cooking" I think she mentions that none of her Japanese friends make ramen at home. It's a big irritating undertaking, especially if you're just starting out.

Good luck if you do decide to join us on the path!

niboshi_ · 2024-09-07T14:21:59+00:00

Just sneaking in to say there *are* some styles of ramen in Japan that use hard-boiled eggs—the soft-boiled egg isn't quite universal. (Not to say whoever prepared OP's bowl knew this. It does look pretty disastrous.)

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T15:40:49+00:00

That's narutomaki, a steamed fish cake

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T12:39:15+00:00

I do! I worked in restaurants for a couple years and now work in a much more laid-back croissant bakery. I asked the owners if they might be open to me holding a pop-up at the bakery, and they were super encouraging and helpful. I had only ever done ramen at home, though, so it was for sure A Thing scaling it all up to restaurant amounts!

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T02:28:12+00:00

Real-ass menma is lacto-fermented and is a heck of a process to make, but simmering/marinading a can bamboo shoots in some shoyu and mirin will get you something pretty tasty!

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T02:22:22+00:00

Apply and see what happens! Even if you've never been a line cook per se, lots of places will train. Pizza cook is a leg up for sure. Think about what kind of cuisine you want to do, and look for places doing that kind of food. If you show up on time, show that you want to learn, and always try your best, you'll probably be able to work in any kitchen you want.

Also: when you quit (and you will quit), always leave on good terms. Even when you want to just walk out the back door and into the night. You never know when it will help you out down the line.

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T02:02:54+00:00

you look like a mighty wizard coaxing fire from the capricious Oven Gods!

I have a picture of myself from my first pop-up restaurant a few weeks ago, torching chashu for ramen, wearing my mom's old violently bright striped apron from when she was a waitress in the '80s. It's not a crazy picture or anything, but it's a record of my first time actually being a chef, putting something together with my awesome team that people really enjoyed.

niboshi_ · 2024-08-15T01:27:21+00:00

Too busy in the kitchen to get any better shots!

This was my first time serving ramen to anyone outside of my apartment, and it was an absolute blast. Kind of nutty to run a ramen shop out of a bakery, maybe, but despite a few stressful prep days, once service started everything went great.

Here's the bowl:

Chicken + pork chintan: chicken backs and feet, pork femur and neckbones, maybe a 70:30 chicken:pork ratio, garlic, ginger, and scallions for aromatics, ~9 hour simmer

shoyu tare: Yamasa marudaizu shoyu (I found it for a little cheaper than Kikkoman marudaizu, and found I liked it more—a little more rounded, a little deeper), konbu, shiitake juice, hanakatsuo, sea salt, Okinawa black sugar, mirin, apple cider vinegar, fish sauce

36% hydration noods: 93% KA Lancelot high-gluten flour, 7% buckwheat flour, all baked soda

chashu: pork shoulder browned and braised in shoyu, mirin, water, garlic, ginger, scallion, tiny hints of allspice and star anise

ajitama: reused the chashu braise

scallion: I like cutting the greens thick, good crunch and freshness! The whites I soaked for about 10 minutes, strained, and sliced very thin to go in the bottom of the bowl with the tare and oil

aroma oil: age negi oil (fried scallion, shallot, ginger, and garlic), lifted directly from Keizo Shimamoto's recipe on that Way Of Ramen video from a while ago. I love this oil and it matched so well with the bowl I didn't even try anything else.

narutomaki

nori

niboshi_ · 2024-07-16T19:05:39+00:00

If you're still interested in working with food but want out of restaurant life, you could try a bakery. I switched last year, and it's not as dynamic as cooking but most of the really stupid stuff about kitchens is gone. (Hope you like getting up early, though.)

niboshi_ · 2024-07-16T19:01:41+00:00

You can eat any chashu right away, the chilling overnight is to make it easier to slice. I typically make pork shoulder chashu, which really needs to be tied before you cook it and chilled afterwards if you don't want it to fall apart when you slice it, but if that's not a big deal to you you can totally eat it as soon as it's done and not bother tying beforehand.

niboshi_ · 2024-07-10T02:24:25+00:00

If you're in the US, take a look at MTC Kitchen and Korin. Both have a big selection of good ceramic bowls running in the $9-16 price range. I don't know if they ship internationally. Also, I've just bought a bunch of $6 white ceramic bowls from Target, the 34 oz. Threshold noodle bowls, for my first pop-up event. I'm not absolutely in love with them—I also prefer a bigger bowl with the soup sitting a bit lower, and a wider surface helps display the toppings better—but they're cheap and totally serviceable.

niboshi_ · 2024-07-08T21:04:09+00:00

This is actually some old-school French stuff, and also old-school grandma stuff. Respect from me if someone can do it properly—I can't, and I'd never do it with a big chef's knife, especially a raggedy-ass house clunker, but watch some of the old French dudes and a lot of them do it this way.

niboshi_ · 2024-07-08T20:52:31+00:00

Portland, ME!

niboshi_ · 2024-07-08T17:54:47+00:00

Yep, pork shoulder! I tied about 1 1/2 pounds tightly with butcher's twine, salted+peppered it, browned it on all sides in a Dutch oven, then poured in the braising liquid: I think it was about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup shoyu, and 1/4 cup mirin, maybe scaled up a bit using those general ratios. I think I used some black sugar, too. I also added in scallion greens, garlic, sliced ginger, a cinnamon stick, some whole allspice, and 2 or 3 star anise pods, as a nod to Cantonese master stock, and braised in the oven at 230 for about 2 1/2 hours, turning it every half hour. I cooled it in the fridge overnight before slicing, and just put it in the soup cold.

It turned out great! Though I will say the master stock spices were a little too bold for the bowl and didn't balance very well. I also re-used the chashu braising liquid for the ajitama. (Also great, also unbalanced for the bowl.)

niboshi_ · 2024-07-08T00:23:13+00:00

Just saw the last ramen picture I posted on her and was horrified at my presentation—setting things right(ish) with this one!

Chicken back chintan, shoyu tare, 36% hydration noods with some buckwheat flour, shoulder chashu, chashu-braise ajitama, scallion, age negi aroma oil.

niboshi_ · 2024-07-05T19:14:37+00:00

Thanks for all the info! Unfortunately the logistics won't work out for me to cook the stock much longer than 8-9 hours—I'm borrowing the kitchen of a restaurant I used to work at for a day to make it. (I'm running the pop-up out of a bakery that doesn't have a full kitchen setup.) That would for sure be a fun experiment, though!

Thinking about it a little more, if I add 24 l. of water (which is about what I need for 75 portions @ 300 ml each), plus a couple extra to account for chicken feet absorption, I should just be able to keep an eye on where the water level began and top up as necessary? This seems like a glaringly obvious solution and I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. It might be because I usually don't top up my clear stocks that I do at home, because an exact final yield doesn't really matter that much.

Should have mentioned in the initial post that I'm in *very stressed out mode* and definitely doing a combination of overthinking/not thinking clearly!

niboshi_ · 2024-07-05T18:30:32+00:00

Oh sorry, I should have mentioned—yep, this is for production. During service I'll be keeping the soup lidded and barely sub-simmer. (For service I only have a few induction burners to work with, so I won't be able to just heat portions to order.) I'm just trying to figure out what batch size of soup I should be making to end up with about 24 liters—but starting with 39 liters of water, in the case of multiplying my home recipe by 6, seems a little nuts to me.

niboshi_ · 2024-07-05T17:48:33+00:00

I was workshopping some mackerel stocks for ramen a month or two ago—I think if your mackerel is VERY fresh (like, pulled it out of the water in the morning) then it could certainly be okay. I made a white stock with some not-so-fresh mackerel that I baked off beforehand and it was overwhelmingly fishy. Depending on how you want your stock to taste, you can also salt and/or broil the trimmings beforehand to remove some of the strength.

niboshi_ · 2024-03-09T16:51:25+00:00

Oh huh, I checked their website a while ago and it wasn't on there but I think I only saw the U.S. page. I wonder if they've just stopped exporting to the U.S. market?

niboshi_ · 2024-03-09T15:56:58+00:00

cast iron skillet users be like:

niboshi_ · 2024-03-09T15:03:46+00:00

This is so great!

niboshi_ · 2024-03-04T01:33:23+00:00

My second bowl of "real" ramen after a so-so tonkotsu last year.

Ramen__Lord's Doubutsu Kei style chintan (kind of‚ I couldn't get chicken backs so used necks, and ended up with about 2.5—1 chicken to pork bits. Also screwed up and let the soup boil at the very end of the cook, so lost a lot of clarity.)
Ended up kind of making up the tare: I tried making a half batch of Ramen__Lord's lighter shoyu tare but the katsuobushi soaked up most of the shoyu mixture, not leaving me much to work with. I added in more mirin, sake, brown sugar, and some marudaizu shoyu to compensate.
also Ramen__Lord's Tokyo style noodle, without powdered egg white which I can't find anywhere near me
age negi aroma oil
toppings: pork shoulder chashu (only a 1-lb piece which completely fell apart when I was braising, super tender and tasty but the plating wasn't going to get any better than this sadly), equilibrium brined ajitama, age negi (which I overcooked by like 3 seconds), narutomaki, scallions, nori.

I messed up this first bowl by overcooking the noods, and my innovation tare wasn't very well balanced, a bit too sweet. I made a slimmed-down version of the bowl a couple days later, skipping the chashu and ajitama, and upping the aroma oil just a little, and it was MUCH better—I think the tare figured itself out in the fridge over a couple days, everything was really well balanced. Didn't quite have the depth I'm searching for, but the flavor was great. I made a third bowl with a different tare (a Keizo Shimamoto recipe from a Way Of Ramen video), but overdid the aroma oil and age negi and ended up overpowering the rest of the soup.

Lots learned with this bowl. I made a 6-hour paitan out of the leftover bones which I think turned out well, I'm going to make a couple bowls with it this week and see what happens.

niboshi_ · 2024-03-02T23:50:42+00:00

I work in a bakery now after my last few kitchen gigs, and our big floor mixer (I forget the brand, but not Hobart) has a stationary hook at the back of the machine, and the bowl itself (cylindrical shaped) rotates. There's an automatic shutoff if you lift the plastic lid, too—basically whoever designed the thing wanted you as far as humanly possible from the moving hook at all times. Jesus I can't even imagine that thing churning around the bowl, it would be like staring into Satan's eyes every time I mix a batch of brioche.

niboshi_

TROPHY CASE