Ashley and Matt, a newly married lovely couple, has recently spent their honeymoon for 1 1/2 weeks in Japan. Among many delicious dishes they have enjoyed in Japan, Ashley and Matt especially fell in love with ramen at Ichiran – ramen noodles served in a rich, porky broth and special dangerously hot sauce on the side.
Ashley and Matt attended my Ramen class recently and mastered the techniques of ramen broth, noodle making from scratch, chashu pork, ramen egg, crisp Brussels sprout, miso sauce and hot sauce. The broth, in which pork knuckles, knee bones, chicken bones and aromatic vegetables were cooked for 5 hours, produced rich and heavenly delicious, strongly porky-flavored ramen broth. Ashley and Matt tackled with kneading the ramen noodle dough and rolling it out thin. After much sweat they decided to use the pasta machine to cut the dough into noodles.
After over 5 hours of labor we produced shio-ramen, shoyu-ramen and miso-ramen, and happily sat for our lunch with a bottle of chilled Kikusui sake. Ashley commented that she never tasted such a good ramen before. You made it!!!
Here are some shopping tips for ramen production at your home. For porky ramen broth I went to Ottomanelli & Sons Meat Market (285 Bleeker, NYC) and got the whole pork arm and hand pieces (including knuckles). I asked the butcher to cut the whole arm and hand into pieces. I got pork belly from Whole Food for Chashu pork. For the spicy hot sauce as a main ingredient I used toban jiang, which came from Sunrise Mart, a Japanese food store in lower East side.
Here I want to share with you the recipe of ramen egg;
For easy peeling of the egg shell, egg should be 2 weeks shelf old.
Bring a plenty of water in a pot to a simmer at 194 degree F. Add the eggs into the hot water and cook them over low heat for 8 to 9 minutes. During cooking keep the temperature of the water at 194 degree F. Transfer the cooked eggs to a bowl of cold water with plenty ice cubes and let them cool for 20 minutes. Peel the shells of the eggs. When you cut the egg into half, the yolk should be slight runny. Here is the perfect result.
