Ivan Ramen
Page 9
6 Float the two pieces of menma in the soup. Place the chashu in the center of the bowl.
7 Slice the egg in half. (This is best accomplished with a taut piece of nylon fishing line. The egg yolk won’t stick, and you’ll end up with a perfect cut). Place the egg halves next to the chashu.
8 Pile the green onions in the center of the bowl. Serve or start eating as soon as possible.
Fat
SHIO RAMEN COMPONENT 1
Of all the ingredients that make ramen ramen, fat is the one that can’t be replaced or omitted. This is especially difficult for Western cooks to grasp, and judging from the many bowls I’ve eaten in the States, this is where American ramen cooks tend to miss the mark. In Western kitchens, we’re taught to painstakingly remove the fat from our stocks and soups, but in Japan, we painstakingly add it. At Ivan Ramen, I use different combinations of vegetable, chicken, and pork fat, although it’s most common to use only pork fat.
Fat is what gives ramen its mouthfeel, body, and a lot of umami. It’s what causes the soup to stick to the noodles. And if the soup doesn’t stick to the noodles, you’ve got nothing. Visit a tonkotsu ramen shop, and you’ll find a thick slick of pork fat floating on top of the soup. By the time you finish eating, your lips will be sticky with the stuff. That’s more fat than I like in my ramen (and the older I get, the less I’m able to handle gut bombs like that), but you really can’t overestimate the importance of fat, even in a light soup.
The quality of the fat is always going to depend on the quality of the animal. I go out of my way to find good free-range chickens and humanely raised pork here in the States. Fat made from industrial animals can have a certain off smell to it. What you get from good animals just tastes cleaner, and more like pork or chicken.
CHICKEN FAT
So here’s this Jewish guy from New York making ramen in Tokyo. If you’re Jewish, you notice that he’s slathering everything with schmaltz, and you laugh a little. They don’t call chicken fat “schmaltz” in Japan, but that’s what it is. Along with the rye noodles I make, it’s one of two little nods to my upbringing. No one in Tokyo gives a rat’s ass, but it pleases me to step back and see that some of the flavors and ingredients that I grew up with have become part of my food ten thousand miles away and decades later. The schmaltz is the first thing that goes into every bowl of shio ramen I serve.
Makes about 235 milliliters (1 cup)
450 grams (1 pound) chicken fat (or skin and trimmings, if you can’t find fat), chopped
1 Place the chicken fat in a heavy-bottomed saucepan or pot and cover with 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) of water. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to low to maintain a very gentle simmer.
2 Simmer gently, uncovered, until the fat has rendered and all that’s left is some shriveled meat or skin. This might take as long as 3 hours; add more water as necessary to keep the skin or fat covered.
3 Strain the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer and discard the solids. Refrigerate the liquid overnight.
4 The next day, remove the solidified fat and discard the liquid.
5 Melt the fat in a saucepan over low heat, then pour into a container. Store covered in the refrigerator for a week. (Alternatively, you can slice the solidified fat into small chunks and store in the freezer for 3 months.)
PORK FAT
In Japan, you can buy beautiful slabs of back fat for rendering; it’s a little harder to find the same in the States. Lately I’ve been asking my butcher for fat trimmings, which are dirt cheap and still yield a pretty flavorful fat.
Makes about 700 milliliters (3 cups)
450 grams (1 pound) pork fat back or trimmings
1 Cut the fat into square chunks measuring about 5 centimeters (2 inches) and place them in a heavy-bottomed saucepan or pot. Cover with 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) of water and bring to boil, then turn the heat down to medium to maintain a simmer.
2 Simmer gently, uncovered, until the fat is rendered into a layer of melted fat and the solids are very soft and tender—about 3 hours. Add more water as necessary to keep the pot from drying out.
3 Strain the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer. Refrigerate the liquid and softened chunks of fat separately overnight.
4 The next day, skim the layer of fat from the reserved cooking liquid and add to a saucepan along with the chunks of softened fat. Cook over medium heat until the skimmed fat has melted back into a liquid. Puree the mixture in a food processor until smooth.
5 Cool to room temperature, then store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for a week, or in the freezer for 3 months.
Shio Tare
SHIO RAMEN COMPONENT 2
Shio tare is the seasoning in shio ramen—the component that gives the ramen its saltiness. And even though shio ramen translates as “salt ramen,” it shouldn’t be overly salty. Made properly, it should give the dish the depth of flavor that good salt can provide, without overseasoning it. I find that using a combination of salts from Okinawa, Kyushu, and Hyogo gives the resulting soup a more complex flavor. More than likely you won’t find the three kinds of Japanese salt I use, so try salts from other countries—anything you particularly like. Taste salts individually and consider how their flavor might work in your soup, and taste them in combination. It will all begin to make sense as you start cooking.
Makes about 650 milliliters (2½ cups)
48 grams (4 tablespoons) sea salt (a combination of 3 or 4 varieties)
340 milliliters (1½ cups) boiling water
275 grams (1 cup) SOFRITO
1 Place the salt in a bowl and pour the hot water over it. Stir until it dissolves completely.
2 Mix in the sofrito. Shio tare will keep in the refrigerator for 2 weeks.
SOFRITO
When I first set out to create my bowl of ramen, I tried to do it the way I’d read about and seen other people doing it. I wasn’t happy with the results, and my wife told me it was terrible. So I decided that if I wanted to make a bowl of ramen that was personal to me, I had to approach it like any other dish I’d made. Good cooking is good cooking, regardless of whether it’s Japanese or American or Puerto Rican. I put aside everything I knew about ramen save for a loose outline, then I fiddled, and read, and ate lots of noodles and lots of French, Spanish, and classical Japanese dishes. Finally, I landed on the idea of using a sofrito as a base. Sofritos are part of many cuisines, especially in Latin America, Spain, and Italy. A sofrito is essentially just small-diced aromatics simmered slowly in oil, and it’s used as the basis for various dishes. It became the key component of my shio ramen—the canvas upon which all the other flavors are built.
This recipe makes more than you need for four bowls of ramen. Make the specified amount and reserve the extra for trying new recipes of your own. It’s incredibly versatile as a foundation for a dish, or even as a topping.
Makes about 690 grams (2½ cups)
325 grams (11½ ounces) Fuji apples, peeled
1.2 kilos (2½ pounds) yellow onions
160 grams (5½ ounces) garlic
65 grams (2⅓ ounces) fresh ginger, peeled
About 1 liter (1 quart) vegetable oil
1 Preheat the oven to 225°F (110°C).
2 Cut the apples and onions into a small dice. (Or, since everything is going to cook down for hours anyway, you could use a food processor: cut the onions and apples into coarse chunks, then process them separately, pulsing in short bursts to achieve a small dice without turning things into mush.) Dice the garlic and ginger very fine, close to a mince.
3 Put the onions and apples into a deep sauté pan or roasting pan that will hold all the ingredients in a 13-millimeter (½-inch) layer. Pour in the oil, set the pan over medium heat, and cook until the oil begins to bubble and the vegetables begin to sweat. Cover the pan, transfer it to the oven, and cook for about 3 hours. You want the onions and apples to cook very slowly, taking on color only toward the end of cooking. The cooking time will vary depending on how much water is in the onions
and apples. Stir the ingredients and rotate the pan regularly to prevent burning.
4 After the onions and apples have cooked down and begun to brown slightly, add the garlic and ginger and continue to cook for another 2 or 3 hours, stirring and rotating the pan from time to time, until everything has a uniformly light brown color and a soft, creamy consistency. Try to prevent the onions and apples from developing dark or crisp edges.
5 Cool the sofrito completely, then refrigerate. It should keep for at least 2 weeks in a tightly sealed container.
Katsuobushi Salt
SHIO RAMEN COMPONENT 3
Katsuobushi is the most commonly used fushi (steamed, smoked, dried, and shaved fish) in Japanese cooking. Along with konbu, it is the foundation of dashi, and by extension, myriad dishes. I love to add the same ingredient at different times and in different guises within a recipe. I find that it deepens the effect of the ingredient without making it too strong. So in addition to the katsuobushi in the dashi, I add katsuobushi powder to each bowl of ramen to really emphasize the smoky fish flavor. I blend the powder with sea salt (and sometimes Parmesan cheese at Ivan Ramen Plus) to create an umami-rich seasoned salt. The likelihood of finding katsuobushi powder in the States is pretty slim, but making it at home is easy. One last note: make sure you give the mixture a good shake before adding it to your ramen, as the salt tends to settle at the bottom of the container.
Makes 20 grams (about ¼ cup)
10 grams (⅓ ounce) katsuobushi (shaved dried bonito)
10 grams (⅓ ounce) sea salt
1 Preheat the oven or a toaster oven to 400°F (200°C).
2 Spread the katsuobushi on a small sheet tray and toast for 3 minutes. Cool, then grind to a powder in a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle (preferably a Japanese mortar, or suribachi, which is a textured ceramic bowl). You now have katsuobushi powder.
3 Combine the katsuobushi powder with the salt. The mixture will keep in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 3 months.
Double Soup
SHIO RAMEN COMPONENT 4
The only thing I knew for certain when I first began developing my ramen recipe was that it would be a double-soup ramen. I’d fallen in love with the bowl they served at a shop by my kids’ school—it was the first place I encountered the double soup upon my return to Tokyo with Mari and the kids. It was lighter than other broths I’d tried, but carried so much complexity and depth of flavor. The double soup literally takes the best of two worlds and combines them.
Chicken stock provides a meaty body to the double soup. I prefer my chicken stock simple and clean, with nothing to distract from the flavor of beautiful Japanese chickens. Dashi brings the umami. I became completely preoccupied with the flavors of dashi during my second stint in Tokyo. The classic dashi used in most Japanese restaurants is made of konbu seaweed and katsuobushi (finely shaved dried bonito). The dashi we make at Ivan Ramen has a great many more ingredients, all in service of an even deeper, umami-rich flavor.
Makes 1 liter (1 quart)
500 milliliters (2 cups) CHICKEN STOCK
500 milliliters (2 cups) DASHI
1 When you’re ready to serve the soup, combine the chicken stock and dashi in a saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, then turn down the heat to low.
2 Hold at a very gentle simmer, covered, until you’re ready to serve, but not for too long—you don’t want the liquid to reduce.
CHICKEN STOCK
Ivan Ramen chicken stock is made of whole chickens and water—that’s it.
Easy enough, but that also means you should skip those stinky, factory-farmed birds and look for free-range or pasture-raised ones. You’ll pay more, but if the only flavor component in this soup is chicken, it’s worth paying for chickens that taste good. Buy a whole chicken if you can manage it—meaning with head and feet attached. There’s lots of flavor in the ugly bits, along with collagen that gives body to the stock. If you can’t find a whole chicken, buy a couple of chicken feet, wash them thoroughly, and throw them in the pot along with the neck and any other parts that come with your bird.
Aside from the quality of the chicken, there are two crucial factors in the success of this soup. The first is maintaining the ratio of water to chicken: there should be twice as much water as chicken by volume, and the liquid level should be maintained over the entire cooking time. The second is temperature. Invest in a thermometer and be vigilant—try to keep the liquid around 176°F (80°C) for the first hour of cooking. This might seem fussy to Americans, and you can just keep it at a gentle simmer if you don’t want to monitor the temperature, but very specific temperatures are a hallmark of Japanese soups and stocks. I’ve made enough soup to tell you confidently that 176°F (80°C) is the right temperature for this stock.
Makes about 5 liters (5 quarts)
1 large (2-kilo/4½-pound) whole chicken (or 2 small whole chickens)
Water
1 Stick your hands into the cavity of the bird and scoop out the giblets and liver, if present. (If you buy from a butcher, you can ask them to do this.) Rinse the bird thoroughly under cold running water. Keep rinsing until the water runs clear. Then trim as much fat as possible from the chicken and reserve.
2 Put the chicken in a large stockpot, along with any giblets, livers, or hearts that came with it. Add enough water (about 5 liters/5 quarts for a 2-kilo/4½-pound bird) to achieve a ratio of about 1 part chicken to 2 parts water by volume. The chicken should be fully submerged in water. Note how far the water level is from the top of the pot. This pot sits on the fire for 6 hours, and you’ll want to keep the water at the same level the whole time to yield a light, clean stock.
3 Over medium heat, heat the water to 176°F (80°C); the water won’t be simmering or bubbling, but too hot for you to hold your finger in for more than a second. Keep the water as close to that temperature as possible for 1 hour. Add water as needed to maintain the water level.
4 After an hour, raise the heat to high and bring the liquid to a slow boil. With a slotted spoon or skimmer, skim all the scum that comes to the surface. When the liquid is clear, pull the bird to the surface with a pair of tongs and very carefully give it a good whack with a wooden spoon. Skim every bit of resulting scum until the stock is completely clear of detritus.
5 Once you’ve finished skimming, add the reserved chicken fat to the pot. Lower the heat back to a medium simmer and keep that simmer for the next 5 hours, stirring the pot every 20 minutes and adding water as necessary to maintain the water level. After about 2½ hours, the bird should begin to break down a bit. Press on it with a wooden spoon to help it fall apart. This will extract more flavor into the broth. After 5 hours, the bones and flesh will have mostly fallen apart. Turn off the heat.
6 Strain the stock through a fine-mesh strainer and discard the meat and bones. Cool the stock, then refrigerate. Once cool, skim the congealed chicken fat from the surface and reserve it for when you need schmaltz for your ramen. Store the stock in an airtight container until you’re ready to use it; it will keep for about 1 week in the refrigerator and 1 month in the freezer.
DASHI
There are two stages in this dashi cooking process. The first begins when we soak and simmer konbu (giant seaweed from Hokkaido), iriko niboshi (boiled and sun-dried sardines), and geso (dried squid tentacles) for sweetness. The second stage incorporates four varieties of fushi—fish that have been steamed, deboned, smoked, dried, and shaved extremely thin: mejika (mejika soudabushi), sardine (urume iwashibushi), mackerel (sababushi), and bonito (katsuobushi).
Sourcing ingredients and making this dashi can be a serious challenge, and your level of perseverance will determine how well this turns out. I use a special purveyor who gathers the highest quality ingredients from all over Japan. Although the availability of dashi ingredients overseas continues to improve, the likelihood you’ll find exactly what I use is slim to none. But this is a no-apologies recipe, meant to give you an exact replica of what I make in Tokyo, as well a
s to show you my thought process and provoke you to seek out the best available ingredients. Of course, I’ve also experienced firsthand how hard it is to find this stuff in the States. Often you’ll find packages of premixed sardine, mackerel, and bonito flakes—that’s fine. A lot of this stuff is available online, and in the worst-case scenario, I’m positive you’ll at least be able to find katsuobushi; you can use that in place of the other shaved dried fish.
The other nitpicky thing about this recipe is the temperature at which I instruct you to cook the dashi. The Japanese have been making dashi for a long time, obsessing over the specific temperatures that are ideal for extracting all the flavor from the dried fish without disintegrating it into the soup. I’ve tasted the difference and I agree that it matters. Too hot and the dish can become bitter. You could eyeball it, but I find that there’s a wide range of temperatures that people consider to be “simmering,” “barely simmering,” or even “boiling.” It’s actually easiest to just use a thermometer.
This recipe will yield around two liters—again, much more than you need for a bowl of ramen. But dashi is an incredibly versatile ingredient and can be used as a direct substitute for meat or chicken stock, as a poaching liquid, or as a base for a vinaigrette. It doesn’t freeze well, but once you have dashi in your arsenal, you’ll be amazed by how often you find yourself reaching for it.
Makes about 2 liters (2 quarts)
50 grams (2 ounces) konbu
75 grams (2½ ounces) iriko niboshi (dried sardines)