From the Kitchen :Lockdown Bootleg Shoyu Ramen, Part 1

Hello everyone. I hope you are doing well despite the travel restrictions and the crazy things that are going on nowadays. With that in mind, it can be very difficult to make something comforting, and to me, is a good bowl of hot soup and noodles! That is right. Ramen!

Oh dear me to all that is holy!

I know it can be very difficult to get a lot of the ingredients for classic ramen nowadays. However, my cravings and hubris got the better of me. And as such, I attempted to make a decent bowl by using things that I had in my house. Granted, I already have some of the said ingredients way before hand as I do make oriental dishes most of the time. But as I want to try to go for a legitimate bowl as far as I can, this bowl will have all 5 elements in ramen.

For starters as mentioned, ramen has 5 elements : soup, noodle, tare (which is seasoning sauce), abura (seasoning oil) and toppings. Each element can have a recipe of its own. In order to make reading this a bit more digestible, I will split the recipe into two parts(one of the soup (broth, tare and abura) and noodles and another will be on the toppings and final assembly).

With limited access of ingredients in mind, lets get cooking shall we?



Lockdown Bootleg Shoyu Ramen (part 1)


Broth:

What is ramen without soup eh? 

Ramen broth is split into 2 types, chintan (清湯) and paitan ( 白湯) . Chintan is for clear broth and paitan means "white soup". Tonkotsu is a popular variant. So for shoyu ramen, chintan is a better choice as a clear soup has a cleaner flavour profile, which does not clash with the shoyu that I will add in later. If you really need to know the name of this broth, it is called tori chintan. (鳥 清湯)

Ingredients:

Soup base:
1.4 kg chicken bones
1 liter of kombu infused water
400 ml of shiitake infused water
1 liter water.

Aromatics:
2 onions
5 garlic cloves
1 knob of ginger

Bones are from left overs from many many chicken dinners. Why leave it to waste? 

Steps:
1. Wash your chicken bones well. It is best you let it soak in water for about 10 mins before rinsing. This is to get rid of any blood that could "pollute" the soup later on.

Hot mess. 

2. Add all your soup base ingredients into a pot and leave it to simmer for 6 hours (!!!!) Let it simmer under low-medium heat. Check the pot from time to time remove any scum and fat that floats to the surface. Make sure when you remove the fat that you leave it in a clean pot or bowl as we will need to use it later.

See how clear this is? This is the half way mark. 

3. Halfway through the cooking process, add in your aromatics. You can leave it to boil for longer if you can, but if you cannot wait that long 5 hours or 4.5 at the bare minimum.

Pro tip:

Smells like the ocean!

• To make kombu infused water, add 2 sheets of kombu into 1 liter of water and leave it to soak overnight. Use the same technique for the shiitake infused water. Do note I used 3 mushrooms for 400ml water for this recipe.
•  If you do not have any kombu, you can replace the kombu infused water with more shiitake infused water.  
• If you do not have shiitake, then any dried mushrooms will do. Porcini will do just fine, especially if you are from a European country where shiitakes are not that easy to find. 

Tare:

Look at that sheen!

Tare directly means seasoning sauce and it is where alot of the seasoning from a ramen bowl comes from, as the soup has almost zero salt. There are 3 common variants (shio for salt, shoyu for soy sauce and miso for miso flavour, obviously). Since we are making a shoyu bowl, this is recipe for shoyu tare.

30gm dry anchovies, soaked over night in 200 ml water
3 cloves garlic
5 shallots
100 ml soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tbsp fish sauce


Steps:

1. Place the anchovies with the water into a pot and put it under a low simmer. This yielded 100ml of anchovy broth for me.

Flavour bomb, in the process. This tare can also be used to marinade meats or used for fried rice. 

2. After 20 mins, add the remainder ingredients and cook it low and slow for another 20 mins.

3. Strain everything and the liquid is your tare, at the ready.

Pro tip:

• If you do not have dried anchovies, you can use tin salted anchovies. However, you might want to scale down on the soy sauce because as depending on the brand, tin anchovies can be very salty. 
• If you do not have any anchovies at all, then you can replace this with, you guessed it, shiitake infused water and add abit more fish sauce. 

Abura:

Looks like margerine!

Steps:

Just like the tare, the seasoning oil is a vital component in the soup as it adds an additional flavour profile and some texture too. Imagine butter or truffle oil in Western style soups and you get the picture. As this recipe is built under 'lockdown circumstances', why not use what we already have? Take your chicken oil that your scooped up and place it into another pot under a low simmer and cook off any access liquid. Once you get just only the oil, then you get "chiyu" which literally translates to chicken oil. And this will be your abura. For more complexity in flavour, I will add a second abura in the form of sesame oil during assembly.

Protip:
As you are basically working with water and oil at the same time, be prepared to have everything sputter everywhere. So, place a lid on it before turning on the gas when it comes to removing the liquid.


Noodles:

Now this is where the bootleg really come in. This is because we are not using actual ramen noodles. You can, but I think getting fresh noodles will be pretty hard and making one from scratch is too much effort. So here is a shortcut!

Steps:
Just add in 2 tsp of baking soda into some water while cooking some noodle like pasta does the trick! It does not go 100%, but is a good enough substitute. Just cook it a minute longer than your packet and you are good to go! I used angel hair pasta for this.

That is all for now folks! Stay tuned for part 2 that will be up really soon.