by Ivan Orkin
Makes 4 servings
175 grams (1 cup) mayonnaise
30 milliliters (2 tablespoons) DASHI
15 milliliters (1 tablespoon) SHIO TARE
15 milliliters (1 tablespoon) lemon juice
Zest of 1 lemon
520 grams (18 ounces) TOASTED RYE NOODLES or store-bought ramen noodles
4 thick slices ripe tomato
4 halves SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES
1 head iceberg lettuce, cut into 4 wedges
12 slices thick-cut good- quality bacon, cooked crisp
Sea salt and pepper
Katsuobushi (shaved dried bonito)
1 Bring a large pot of unsalted water to a boil for the noodles.
2 In a small bowl, combine the mayonnaise, dashi, shio tare, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Set aside.
3 Cook the noodles until they’re a little past al dente, about a minute. (Because these noodles will be served chilled, you should cook them a touch softer than you would if they were being served hot. There’ll be no hot soup to continue cooking them, and the noodles will firm a bit when chilled.) As soon as they’re cooked, plunge them into an ice bath to chill them, then drain them thoroughly, shaking the strainer well to get rid of as much water as possible.
4 In a large mixing bowl, toss the noodles with three- quarters of the mayo-tare mixture until the noodles are well coated.
5 Divide the dressed noodles among 4 chilled ramen bowls and arrange the two types of tomatoes and the wedges of iceberg lettuce and bacon on top. Drizzle the remaining mayo-tare mixture over the top, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and finish with a small handful of katsuobushi.
Sides and Sweets
When I opened Ivan Ramen, I felt strongly that my customers should get a real, full dining experience. Too often I’ve gone for a bowl of ramen and been done with my bowl after seven or eight minutes, and felt like I hadn’t even gone out to eat yet.
Likewise, you may find it anticlimactic to spend days preparing Ivan Ramen from scratch, only to have your guests slurp it down in a few minutes and look at you as if to say, “That’s it?” A few side dishes can make the occasion a little more festive and draw out a good experience a little longer.
Most ramen shops have a very limited side menu if they have one at all—usually just gyoza (aka potstickers) and maybe some dishes consisting of leftover chashu chopped up in rice and doused with a sweet soy-based sauce. Some places chop up negi (Japanese green onions), mix it with sesame oil and salt, and serve it over rice. I wanted something both a little more substantial and a little more unique.
What I came up with were a couple of different rice bowls based around two simple toppings: roasted tomato and pork. The pork is different from the chashu we serve with our noodles. It’s slow-cooked, then shredded, and it’s the basis for two pork-crazy side dishes in this chapter—one that I’ve been serving at Ivan Ramen Tokyo forever, and one I developed for Ivan Ramen New York.
As for sweets, the very few ramen shops that serve dessert might offer almond tofu or pudding from a mix—nothing memorable. I really felt that I needed to offer dessert for a complete dining experience. I got an ice cream maker and started tinkering. I discovered that the problem is that it’s hard to taste certain flavors after all that salt and fat. I made a delicious chocolate sorbet that tasted fantastic on its own, but after a bowl of ramen, the subtleties of the chocolate just vanished—everything was muted. I needed something tart and refreshing. Inspired by a David Lebovitz recipe, I landed on lemon sherbet. With a little salt and a lot of lemon, I ended up with a dessert that was the perfect foil to a bowl of ramen and also happened to really fit the flavor profile Japanese people love: sour, salty, and only mildly sweet. The sherbet cuts through the salt and fat taste left on your palate after slurping a bowl of ramen, but it still has the creamy mouthfeel of ice cream. We’ve toyed around with a few different flavors through the years, but this one always stays on the menu.
Steamed Rice
A BASIC RECIPE
If you have a rice cooker, more power to you. I have the latest, greatest nanotechnology rocket-ship doohickey that makes super fantastic special rice, but you can make it the traditional way, too. A cup of uncooked white rice will yield about 2 cups of cooked rice.
Makes as much as you want
1 part Japanese short-grain white rice
1 part water
1 Rinse the rice several times under cool water until the water runs clear. Drain the rice well.
2 Combine the rice and the water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Cover, turn the heat down to low, and cook for 18 minutes—no need to add fat or salt.
3 Uncover and fluff with a fork. Leftover rice can be wrapped in plastic and frozen in small portions.
Pork and Tomato Meshi
Pork and Tomato Meshi
STEAMED RICE BOWLS WITH TOPPINGS
When I first started coming up with side dishes for my shop, I thought of roasted tomatoes. I had been roasting tomatoes at work and at home for years—slicing them in half, sprinkling them with oil, salt, and pepper, and popping them in a low oven until they become semidried, chewy flavor bombs. I’d served them in every conceivable way: on toast, in pasta, as steak garnish, or with slices of mozzarella cheese. I figured, why not serve them on rice? Tomatoes are loaded with umami, which would fit with everything else in my umami-overloaded ramen shop.
This is really two recipes in one. We serve the roasted tomatoes alone with rice; same with the pork shoulder. But the best way to eat this is as one combined dish. I’m proud to say that that dish has graced the covers of magazines in Japan. (Of course, if you’re serving fatty pulled pork with slow-roasted tomatoes, and people don’t love it, you’re doing something wrong.)
These side dishes are known as meshi—small rice bowls—but there are endless other ways to utilize the tomatoes and pork shoulder. Always make more tomatoes than you need; submerged in olive oil, they’ll hold for a few weeks. Fatty pork freezes well and can be used to goose up tomato sauce or make awesome sliders.
Makes 4 servings
720 grams (4 cups) warm STEAMED RICE
Warm SHREDDED FATTY PORK
SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES
Green onions or negi (Japanese green onions), sliced, for garnish
1 Spoon 1 cup of the warm rice into each of 4 bowls and flatten it down.
2 Top with a generous helping of pork. No rice should be visible. Stack 2 roasted tomato halves on top of each serving. Garnish with green onions for crunch.
SHREDDED FATTY PORK
Makes 795 grams (1¾ pounds)
1 (140 grams/3-pound) piece of boneless, skinless pork shoulder
8 cloves garlic, peeled
Salt and pepper
1 Preheat the oven to 250°F (120°C). Cut the pork shoulder into roughly 5-centimeter (2-inch) chunks and place them in a roasting pan that can hold all the meat in one layer while leaving a bit of room around each piece. Add enough water to come one-third of the way up the sides the meat pieces. Toss in the garlic and sprinkle everything with 1 teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper.
2 Cover the roasting pan tightly with plastic wrap and then with foil. Put the pan in the oven and leave it alone for 2 hours. The plastic wrap creates a tight seal that efficiently traps in the heat. Don’t mess with the seal. After 2 hours, check the meat every 30 minutes or so. When it falls apart when pressed with a fork, it’s done.
3 Remove the meat and garlic cloves to a bowl and smash with a fork until the pork is shredded and the garlic is well incorporated. Add in spoonfuls of cooking liquid to moisten the meat to your liking. Season to taste with salt.
SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES
Makes 8 tomato halves
4 medium or large tomatoes (or more)
Vegetable oil
Salt and pepper
1 Preheat the oven to 225°F (110°C). Slice the tomatoes in half and core them. Place them cut side up on a sheet tray, brush them lightly with oil, and spri
nkle with salt and pepper.
2 Put the tomatoes in the oven and cook until shriveled but still juicy looking. This should take about 3 hours, but it’ll depend on the tomatoes, so be patient and check regularly after the first 2½ hours. You’re looking for the tomatoes to be soft and a little leathery, but still moist.
Roasted Pork Musubi
Roasted Pork Musubi
WITH PICKLED PLUM AND ROASTED TOMATO
This is my homage to the pork bun. David Chang, God bless him, took a Chinatown staple (the roast duck bun), added pork, and put it on his menu at Momofuku to incredible acclaim. It deserves all the praise it gets—it’s delicious. But now it’s on every ramen shop menu in America. What Dave did with the bun is to me the essence of good noodle-shop business. The noodles are the heart and soul of the restaurant, but nothing beats having a solid appetizer that every person just has to order with their noodles.
When I began planning the menu for my New York restaurant, I came up with this humble answer to the pork bun. It’s a riff on musubi, a seasoned Japanese rice ball. A little scoop of rice goes on a triangle of toasted nori, then is topped with a pile of warm fatty pork, wasabi, and umeboshi (pickled plum). (When buying umeboshi, look for the larger, softer ones, and avoid the hard, small, dark red ones.) It looks like a piece of pork sushi. I doubt people would bang down the door to order “pork sushi,” though.
Makes 4 small servings
4 medium-sized umeboshi
15 to 30 milliliters (1 to 2 tablespoons) wasabi paste (from a tube is fine)
Honey, optional
1 sheet nori
135 grams (¾ cup) warm STEAMED RICE
170 grams (¾ cup) SHREDDED FATTY PORK
2 halves SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES, each half cut into 4 pieces
1 Remove the pits from the umeboshi and chop the flesh finely. Add to a small mixing bowl and add an equivalent amount of wasabi paste. Mix together thoroughly. If the resulting paste is too spicy for your liking, add ¼ to ½ teaspoon of honey to the mix.
2 Quickly pass the nori sheet back and forth about 6 inches above an open flame or a hot gas burner. Use tongs if you’re afraid of burning your hands, but don’t let the sheet linger. You just want to wave it over the heat so that it gets a tiny bit crisp. Nori burns easily, so be careful. Cut the toasted sheet into quarters, then cut each quarter in half diagonally, resulting in 8 small triangles. Lay out the pieces on a platter.
3 Scoop up rice with a round spoon and nestle a mound (about a golf ball’s worth) onto each nori triangle. Divide the pork among the rice balls.
4 Carefully top the pork with wasabi-umeboshi paste and a piece of tomato. You can fold the points of the nori triangle up to mimic a little piece of sushi, or just leave them flat for your diners to fold up and devour.
Lemon Sherbet
WITH A TOUCH OF SALT
I’ll be quite plain: this sherbet kicks ass. It’s a good balance of sweet, sour, and salty. And while it might not be the best thing to eat on the boardwalk at Coney Island, it’s perfect for dissolving some of the fat left on your palate after a hefty bowl of ramen. It surprises everyone, and has gotten much more attention than I ever thought it would. Something about simple things, I guess.
Makes 1 liter (1 quart)
100 grams (½ cup) sugar
Zest of 2 lemons
300 milliliters (1¼ cups) whole milk
300 milliliters (1¼ cups) heavy cream
150 milliliters (⅔ cup) lemon juice
7 grams (2 teaspoons) kosher salt
1 In a food processor, process the sugar and lemon zest together until the sugar takes on a yellow hue.
2 In a mixing bowl, whisk together the milk and cream, then stir in the lemon sugar until it dissolves. Stir in the lemon juice, then the salt. Mix until the salt is fully dissolved, about a minute.
3 Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
4 Let the sherbet fully set in the freezer for at least an hour or two before you eat it.
Tomato Sorbet
Tomato Sorbet
WITH SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES
Massoud was an Iranian cook who worked for us at Ivan Ramen for two years. He’s lived in Tokyo for the better part of twenty years, and is effectively Japanese. When I wasn’t in the shop, everyone assumed he was me, because, you know, all foreigners look alike. After a while, we stopped correcting them. Anyway, he came up with this sorbet as a special, and it quickly became a hit. I assure you it doesn’t just taste like frozen tomatoes with sugar.
Makes 1 liter (1 quart)
Zest of 2 lemons
120 grams (½ cup) sugar
4 medium-sized ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped
4 halves SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES
150 milliliters (⅔ cup) lemon juice
7 grams (2 teaspoons) kosher salt
1 In a food processor, process the sugar and zest together until the sugar takes on a yellow hue.
2 Puree both the fresh and roasted tomatoes with a hand blender or in a food processor until smooth. Add the lemon sugar and continue to puree until the sugar is completely dissolved. Stir in the lemon juice, then the salt, blending until the salt dissolves.
3 Churn the mixture in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
4 Let the sorbet fully set in the freezer for at least an hour or two before you eat it.
Acknowledgments
How do you give thanks for forty-nine years of success and failure, and to whom? So many people have been there for me throughout the years, and who reads these things anyway?
Endless gratitude to my wife Mari, who was the only person to ever look me square in the eye and say, “You will succeed at anything you do!” I had no idea what she was talking about, but as usual in our very successful marriage, I did whatever she told me to do. What can I say? I’m a good Jewish husband.
Thanks and love to:
My boys Isaac, Alex, and Ren, who give me constant joy and purpose.
My mom, whose strength since my dad’s death has been inspiring to all of us. Thank you for not returning me to wherever I came from in those turbulent childhood years.
My sisters Jenny and Tricia and my brothers-in-law Ken and Marc. Thank you for being there for me over and over again, through death and birth, and thank you for finding me a house. What a great family to be a part of.
The Kaplans, Aunt Alice, Seth, Isabel, and Caroline, who are as close to me now as ever. Uncle Alan, you’re sorely missed.
David and Leslie, for supporting me through everything, with David during the darkest days, to the first Ivan Ramen, and the creation of Ivan Ramen New York.
Taro and Shochan for making Ivan Ramen possible.
My neighbors in Rokakoen. How wonderful to be treated like family.
All my customers, who gave Ivan Ramen a chance.
Shimamoto-san for teaching me how to make noodles.
Shimazaki-san for showing me how it’s done.
Matsumoto-san, who runs my restaurants like they were his own.
Ken, Naka, and George at Sun Noodle, who share my vision.
The whole crew at Ivan Ramen and Ivan Ramen Plus, who always make me look good.
Mike, Jeff, Marcelo, Doug, Peter, Danny, and Marci, my high-school chums who always had faith in me.
Eric and Ayako, who took me in when all seemed lost and have always been there since.
Kim Witherspoon for believing in my story.
David Chang and Peter Meehan for taking me seriously.
Noriko for taking awesome pictures.
Daniel Krieger for handling the New York photos and doing it with his usual style.
Gregory Starr for getting Kodansha to do the original book project.
Ted, Ako, Max, and Amy—my first “.”
What does “with Chris Ying” mean anyway?
When I think of Chris, I imagine the multi-headed creature from the 1960s Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three
-Headed Monster. Chris wore so many hats in the process of creating this book. He took what I wrote or said, smoothed it out, fit it together, and molded it into a story. He preserved and nurtured my voice, which let me speak directly to you. No easy feat. At the same time, he helped design everything, searched through archival photos, oversaw photo shoots, and did anything else needed to produce a book that would bring value and pleasure to our readers. This is my book, but only because Chris made it so. Domo arigato gozaimasu!
Additional thanks from Chris Ying to the following people for their help, patience, nurturing, and in-your-face physicality:
Walter Green. John Heindemause. Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn. PFM and Dave. Kim Witherspoon. Jenny Wapner and Dawn Yanagihara and Sarah Adelman and Aaron Wehner at Ten Speed. Mom and dad and Michael and Louise and Andrew and Emma and Matthew.
And Ivan for letting me into your life, mind, restaurants, and tiny Tokyo apartment.
And of course Jami.
And Huck—I wish you could read.
A Few Words about Sourcing Ingredients
When I first began obsessing over cookbooks twenty-five years ago, I’d often find myself up against a wall when seeking out the more specialized ingredients called for in Asian recipes. I’d drive all over town to buy subpar stuff. And I lived in New York. I can only imagine and sympathize with the hair-pulling frustration of trying to make a passable bowl of mapo tofu in Iowa in 1988.
Way back when, cookbooks would list plenty of shops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Manhattan, and Queens, and a few in Ann Arbor, Austin, and Chicago. Things are dramatically different these days. There are now small Asian grocery stores all over America. Anywhere there’s a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Southeast Asian community, there’s bound to be at least one place where you can get decent Asian ingredients.