Ivan Ramen

by Ivan Orkin

  Mari’s parents left for Osaka, but we decided to stay. We were scared, but I didn’t feel right leaving my staff in the middle of a crisis. I couldn’t look them in the eye and say, “Look, we’re gonna leave Tokyo for a while—take care of the store.”

  I was in New York during 9/11, and the feeling was eerily similar. Everyone in New York was scared. But your average person can’t up and move just because they’re scared. People’s lives are tied to their cities. It’s the same way in Tokyo. The Japanese are a strong, resilient people. I’m proud of both of my cities—their stories of courage and sacrifice are equally indelible in my mind.

  We ended up leaving Tokyo nine months after the earthquake, moving back to New York. I count us as lucky: we have another place to go, with family and resources. Not everyone does. I tried to do my part raising money and making ramen for the displaced for the nine months we held on, starting the night of the earthquake, when we were packed with people who were walking home past the restaurant. We served as many as we could.

  Things are calmer these days. When I come to Tokyo, I look around sometimes and it almost seems like nothing happened. Everyone’s eating whatever they feel like without fear of radiation or pollution. They’re traveling wherever they feel like going, doing whatever they feel like doing.

  But the economic impact of the earthquake is undeniable—hundreds of billions of dollars of damage. Infrastructure was destroyed around the country. Whole rice fields were filled with saltwater and will never grow rice again. Many of the towns that were destroyed were already struggling—fishing villages and farming communities.

  But our restaurants in Tokyo are picking up again. Kyodo, the town where Ivan Ramen Plus is located, has turned out to be a little more challenging than I thought it would be, but we’ve got our regulars and our ratings on the Internet get better and better. Trying to sell a refined version of a simple food is a challenging proposition anywhere in the world.

  And being the hardheaded man that I am, I decided to try it again—this time in New York. As I write this, I’m in the process of building a ramen shop in Manhattan. Sure, there’s lots of ramen in America already, but I’ll just say it: it’s still nowhere near the level of what we’ve got in Tokyo. My chef friends tell me that New Yorkers will refuse to eat their soup as hot as I want them to, or that my customers will want to linger over cocktails and appetizers rather than messily slurp down a bowl of noodles and hit the road. They’re probably right, but hey, I’m an American and I fell in love with ramen the way it was meant to be eaten. There are undoubtedly more people like me out there.

  I feel torn about leaving Japan. On the one hand, coming back to America has opened up new opportunities for Ivan Ramen. But there was so much more work to be done in Tokyo, too. Japan was my first love and I can’t shake the sense that I let her down. Whenever I’m back to visit, every six weeks or so, I’m overcome with a feeling of being home. But my kids are adjusted to American life now (Ren is losing his Japanese skills at an alarming rate), and the prospect of moving back to Tokyo seems distant at best.

  I’m more of an outsider in New York than I was in Tokyo, a gaijin in my own country. I’ve never opened a restaurant in America, and the layers of bureaucracy are mind-boggling. I think like a Japanese person. I wait to get my hair cut until I’m back in Rokakoen, so I can have the guy three doors down from Ivan Ramen do it the way I like it. When I visit Tokyo, my wife and kids send me with a laundry list of things I’ve got to bring back—specific pencils and pens, pickled seaweed, plum wine.

  Before we moved to Tokyo together, Mari had warned me that I’d most likely never live in New York again. Once we left America and settled into a new life, I’d be too old to up and do it again. Imagine what that would be like!

  Imagine starting over yet again.

  Ivan Ramen’s Shio Ramen

  A diner walks in from the cold and puts his money into the ordering machine. He punches the button for shio ramen, and the machine spits out his ticket. He grabs a seat, and places his ticket on the counter. I give him a smile, say hello, and set to work.

  I grab a bowl and saucer from the shelf. The bowl is stark white and sloped on one side. It’s not exactly traditional, but it looks and feels like a bowl that’s meant to hold noodles. In front of me are square stainless steel containers filled with shio tare (salty seasoning), chicken and pork fat, katsuobushi (shaved dried bonito) powder, menma (bamboo shoots), negi (shredded Japanese green onions), chashu (pork), and soft-boiled eggs. Ladles jut out from the containers, each one sized to deliver the exact amount needed of each ingredient.

  On the burner is a roasting pan holding a thin soup in which I’ll warm slices of pork. Next to that is a large stainless steel pot with simmering chicken soup and dashi; in the rear is an extra gallon of soup waiting to replenish the stainless steel pot. Next to the range is the yudemenki, or noodle cooker, which is set for a low boil. A few wooden handles are barely visible through plumes of rising steam. On a wire rack next to the cooker are lidded rectangular aluminum containers holding coils of fresh noodles.

  The first things that go into the bowl are the building blocks of flavor: thirty grams of shio tare, ten grams each of freshly rendered chicken and pork fat, then smoky fish powder and salt. I peel back the lid from the container of noodles, and the aroma of fresh wheat rises into the humid air (the shop is small and perpetually steeped in noodle steam). I set a timer—even after all these bowls, I still time every order—and slip the noodles into the boiling water.

  Fifty seconds to go. Chashu goes into the roasting pan. I dip a large ladle into the soup and pour it over the seasoning components. As the soup swirls into the bowl, the fat melts and glistens, and the fish powder rises in dots to the top of the liquid. The moment the timer goes off, I lift the basket of noodles from the boiler and vigorously shake it, sending drops of boiling water flying. Then, using long wooden chopsticks, I lay the noodles into the bowl, lifting and folding them over themselves to separate and evenly distribute them.

  To finish, I slice an egg with a piece of fishing line tautly rigged across two pushpins, then gingerly separate it and place the two halves on top of the waiting soup. Cured bamboo shoots go next, before I pluck the chashu from its bath and lay it across the top of the noodles. To finish, a mound of bright white threads of negi.

  I wipe errant splashes of soup from the side of the bowl, set a renge spoon on the saucer, and swivel the dish so that the egg is facing the customer. I wait for eye contact, then I stretch out my arms, bowl held aloft, as the customer’s hands stretch out to meet mine.

  There goes another bowl of Ivan ramen.

  When I told Enamoto-san, the manager at Ivan Ramen, that I was going to include the entire, unaltered recipe for our shio ramen in this book, he was incredulous.

  “You really should reconsider,” he said with the tone of a disappointed dad.

  His reaction stems from this idea among ramen shop owners that you take your recipe with you to the grave. It’s not a completely foreign idea to Americans. We always hear about the guys with secret barbecue sauce or pizza dough recipes that they guard like leprechauns hoarding their treasure. If you ask a ramen chef about his methods or his recipes, the room generally gets really quiet, and Japanese ramen cookbooks are always maddeningly vague in how they list ingredients or describe their processes.

  When I started thinking seriously about making ramen, I would visit other people’s shops hoping to pick the chefs’ brains. I’d be sitting at the bar, inching closer and closer to the action, pumping myself up to ask a question. But at the last second, I’d always lose courage. I had a distinct vision in my head of the guy opening his eyes wide with rage, then assaulting me with a spoon.

  One day I said to Shimazaki-san—one of my close friends and proprietor of one of the most serious and respected ramen shops in all of Tokyo—“Man, none of these ramen chefs want to share anything with me.” He looked at me and laughed, “That’s because they don’t know any
thing. They learn how to make ramen from their master, and they can’t veer from that recipe.”

  There’s probably some truth to what he said, but whatever the reason, when it came to making my own bowl of ramen, I was on my own. To be frank, I didn’t really sweat it. I considered the flavors I like, the style of food I like, and I made a bowl of ramen to match.

  I like clean, sharp, refined flavors. My ramen is sophisticated and complex in the way it’s built—smoked fish and pork and chicken make multiple appearances in different forms—but I don’t think it has to taste that way. For me, a perfect bowl of ramen is balanced—not too salty, not too fatty. The soup sparkles with the taste of its ingredients. If it’s a fish soup, you can taste the fish. If it’s chicken, you taste chicken.

  But there’s no one formula for great ramen; that’s why it’s so fucking hard. Sometimes you want a light, bright soup to complement really delicate noodles. But certain noodles require more fat to ensure that the soup will stick to the noodle. Shimazaki-san uses chicken fat from specific chickens from Akita prefecture, and it’s the most delicious thing. But it’s only in the past ten or fifteen years that ramen chefs have really begun to think of their ramen with this single-mindedness (and even now, only 10 or 20 percent of us are making artisanal or kodawari ramen), though that focus and attention to detail has been a hallmark of other Japanese cuisines forever.

  Take something like tempura. In the States, we order tempura in combination platters—sweet potato, carrot, broccoli, onion, two pieces of shrimp. I don’t think there are any restaurants in America specializing solely in tempura. But go to a good tempura shop in Tokyo and all you’ll get is tempura. And when it’s done right, tempura is the absolute pinnacle of the frying arts. A good shop will switch out their oil every twenty minutes. They cook one piece at a time. The chef will put one little piece of shrimp or asparagus in front of you and tell you to eat it with a little sprinkle of this salt or that sauce. The menu is entirely dependent on the season. Certain times of the year, you’ll get mountain vegetables, other times it’ll be aromatic grasses and flower buds. Some things are only available for a week, or even a day. You eat one item at a time and you just rejoice in the flavor of that vegetable.

  I don’t say this to disparage American culture, or to say that Americans don’t understand this way of eating, or couldn’t go that far themselves. But we tend to like choices, and I don’t think we’ve fully been introduced to this idea of just sticking to one thing, and learning to appreciate that one thing for what it is. Americans have begun to understand sushi that way. What I am trying to do—along with other kodawari ramen makers—is elevate ramen to that same level.

  My fervent hope is to get Americans to enjoy ramen as a dish, along with all the rituals that surround it. Ramen must be eaten quickly, while it’s very hot. Ice cream doesn’t taste good if you wait till it’s dripping down your arm onto your pants. Brick-oven pizza doesn’t taste good after you drive it home and plop down in front of the TV and take a big soggy bite. Ramen’s the same way. You have to eat it while the fat is still smoking hot and the noodles are still chewy. You take a big airy slurp so that all the flavors come together as they enter your mouth. You get into a rhythm, and then, oh my god, it’s fucking gone. I always laugh when a cute girl wearing Chanel walks in and absolutely goes to town on a bowl of ramen. There’s fat splashing all over her fancy shirt and her face is glistening with beads of fat and sweat. She’s just like, “Fuck it, I’m eating ramen.”

  So this book includes the entire recipe for Ivan Ramen shio ramen, exactly as it’s made at the shop in Rokakoen. Shio ramen is the first ramen I ever made, and it’s the gold standard at my restaurants. It’s intimidating only in the sense that it’s time consuming to source all the ingredients and prepare the slowly simmered components. I designed the recipes with the idea that noncooks would be executing them at the shop. (There aren’t too many cooking-academy grads knocking down my door looking for work.) This means that anyone with a few basic cooking skills and a lot of patience can replicate my shops’ ramen.

  The inhumanely ambitious can try to make a bowl in one all-day marathon (you’d better get up early). The slightly less crazy will try it over the course of several days or a week. But the majority of you will start by making one or two components, buying the rest from the store. I recommend you start this way and work your way up to the balls-out approach. Sometimes I forget about how arduous a task it is to build a bowl of ramen from scratch. In Tokyo, I can just pop into the shop and hit the guys up for some noodles, shio tare, menma, or braised pork.

  Since I’ve begun planning my restaurant in New York, I’ve been making ramen from scratch in my home kitchen again. It hasn’t gotten any easier, but I’d nearly forgotten the rewards that come with it. It’s like putting together a puzzle. You have all these pieces spread out across the counter, and you have no idea how the whole thing will come together. Finally, you step back and see that you’ve got this beautiful bowl of noodles. Every time I make a bowl of homemade ramen, I fall in love with it again—both the process and the dish. It’s the epitome of slow food.

  To keep the process as straightforward and appealing as possible, I’ve ordered the recipes as follows:

  First are the instructions for assembling a bowl of Ivan Ramen shio ramen once you’ve got all the components lined up in front of you.

  Then come recipes for each individual component—chicken fat and pork fat, tare, katsuobushi salt, double soup, noodles, and so on.

  After that, I’ve included a few alternate-use recipes—nonramen ways for you to make use of the individual components. These are dishes I’ve served at the restaurant, or staples I’ve made over and over again for my family at home. Please experiment on your own. All of the individual ramen components are very versatile. Don’t get too caught up in this being a ramen cookbook. Make the chicken fat—make a liter of it. Put some in the freezer, and the next time you make chicken pot pie, use chicken fat in the crust and chicken fat to sauté the vegetables.

  After the shio ramen section are recipes for a few other ramen variations we serve at the restaurant. These are just as true to what we serve in the shop as the shio ramen recipe. Some of them are equally daunting, but they also share many components with the shio ramen.

  Finally, there are a few side dishes and a couple of ice creams we also serve at the restaurants. If you’re going to spend morning to evening making a bowl of ramen that your friends and family will slurp down in five minutes, you ought to consider serving some of these as appetizers and dessert. Don’t treat yourself like a ramen shop owner! Draw the meal out a bit with beers and sake and shochu. Make a whole Japanese evening out of it.

  A caveat: no matter how you approach the recipes in this book, accept that the quality of ingredients and equipment available to you will depend on where you live. You can get katsuobushi in California or New York or Iowa, but you probably won’t find the exact same custom-milled aromatic flours that I use in Tokyo. My dream is that you’ll read these recipes, get the outline in your head, consider your own tastes, and say, “I’m willing to fall on my face, but I’m going to try to make a great bowl with what’s available to me.” Finally, BUY A METRIC SCALE AND LIQUID MEASURE. I’m including both measurements, but frankly metric is more accurate.

  Maybe your first bowl won’t be exactly what you get at my shop, but I’m pretty confident it’ll be better than anything else you’ve ever had.

  Shio Ramen

  Shio Ramen

  THE COMPLETE BOWL

  Let’s say you’ve got all your ramen components prepped and ready, lined up on the counter. The chashu’s warm. The soup’s simmering on the stove. Appropriate ladles are matched to their respective sauces. From here, assembling a bowl of ramen is a cinch. (I know, I know, you’ve spent a week sourcing ingredients, boiling chickens, rendering fat, and braising chashu. Now you know how I feel—so when you come in to the restaurant, eat your soup while it’s boiling hot like I asked yo
u to!)

  It should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: have everything ready before you start assembling. You shouldn’t be flipping to page X halfway through a bowl of ramen. Recipes for each individual component appear in the pages following this recipe. Tackle them one at a time, then return here when you’re ready to assemble a complete bowl.

  Makes 1 bowl

  10 milliliters (2 teaspoons) warm CHICKEN FAT

  10 milliliters (2 teaspoons) warm PORK FAT

  30 milliliters (2 tablespoons) room-temperature SHIO TARE

  5 grams (1 tablespoon) KATSUOBUSHI SALT

  270 milliliters (1 cup) DOUBLE SOUP, simmering

  130 grams (4½ ounces) TOASTED RYE NOODLES

  2 pieces MENMA

  1 thick slice PORK BELLY CHASHU, warmed in its cooking liquid or in the noodle water as it comes to a simmer

  1 room-temperature HALF-COOKED EGG

  Finely shredded green onions or negi (Japanese green onions), for garnish

  1 Bring a pot of unsalted water to a boil for the noodles.

  2 In the bottom of a ramen bowl, combine the chicken fat, pork fat, shio tare, and katsuobushi salt.

  3 Keep the double soup simmering in a covered saucepan over low heat, but make sure it doesn’t reduce.

  4 Drop the noodles into the boiling water and cook until just barely al dente. The noodles at Ivan Ramen take exactly 50 seconds to cook, but yours will almost certainly differ. Experiment with a few threads and see how long they take. Just before the noodles are ready, ladle the simmering double soup into the bowl.

  5 Drain the noodles thoroughly, shaking them well in the strainer to remove as much water as possible, then lay them in the bowl. Lift them with a pair of chopsticks and fold them back over themselves so that they don’t clump into a ball.