A blend of various recipes and techniques that I’m still perfecting. It’s not perfectly traditional by any means, and is heavily adjusted toward my own tastes and preferences. I’m stealing heavily from Serious Eats, Just One Cookbook, a random food blog, and a book on Japanese street eats my girlfriend got me for Xmas last year, mixing and matching. But, in short, it’s something like this:
Armando’s Definitely-Not-Trying-to-Pretend-I’m-Even-Kinda-Japanese Ramen Recipe
This recipe makes 1.2 imperial fucktons of ramen; adjust as needed. Sorry, I don’t have the metric measurements.
Tonkotsu-Style Broth Ingredients
- 3lbs Pork Trotters/Pig’s Feat, ideally split and chopped to expose the marrow
- 1.5-2lbs Chicken Wings (or Chicken Carcass, if you can easily get that)
- 3" length of Ginger, thinly sliced
- ~10 cloves Garlic, peeled and smashed
- 1 Bunch of Scallions, cut in half lengthwise
Chashu Braise + Ajitsuke Tamago Ingredients
- 2lbs Skin-on Pork Belly
- Oil
- 1/2 cup Soy Sauce
- 1/2 cup Water
- 1/4 cup Mirin
- 1/4 cup Sake
- 4 tbsp Sugar
- 2" length of Ginger, sliced thinly
- 4 Garlic Cloves, peeled and smashed
- 4 Scallions, cut in half lengthwise
- 6 Large Eggs, soft-boiled and peeled
Shoyu Tare Ingredients
- 1/2 cup Dashi Stock (from powder is fine)
- 1/2 cup Soy Sauce
- 1/4 cup Sake
- 1/4 cup Mirin
- 3 tbsp Sugar
- 2 tbsp Salt
- Ramen Noodles
- Green Onions
- Corn, fish cakes, nori, shiitake mushrooms, beni shoga, etc.
Cover the pork trotters and chicken wings in water and bring to a boil, then drain and rinse the meat of scum and try to dig out any especially gnarly looking bits of dark marrow or leftover blood. Re-cover with water, add in the ginger, garlic, and scallions, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer, cover, and cook, skimming scum for the first 30 minutes or so, for 4-12 hours, adding water occasionally to keep the mixture from drying out. You’re shooting for about 3 qts in the end. Strain out the solids and reserve. If you want, you can refrigerate it and peel off the fat cap that forms, if you want a less oily ramen (this is mostly an issue if you have to use chicken wings rather than carcasses, as has been the case for me traditionally).
Meanwhile, sear the pork belly on all sides on high heat until browned and crisping up. If you can actually get a hold of a wide “slab” of pork belly, you can absolutely roll it up into a log and use butcher’s twine to hold it together to get those perfect spiraling round slices you see on all the fancy food blogs, but my local stores only carry narrower “stripes” of pork belly, so I just cook those as-is.
Bring the water, mirin, sake, sugar, ginger, garlic, and scallions to a boil in a dutch oven or other lidded cooking vessel. Put the seared pork belly in there, partly cover with the lid, and then add it to a 300F oven for about 3-4 hours, flipping every hour, until it’s completely tender and darkened and the liquid is reduced.
Again, you can absolutely chill this liquid to remove the fat more easily (and there will be a LOT), but do reserve it, and put the soft-boiled eggs into it once it’s cooled down for 4-12 hours to marinate them. Chill the pork enough to make it sliceable, ideally overnight.
Finally, for the tare, just heat those ingredients enough to dissolve the sugar and salt easily while stirring.
To serve, slice some of the chashu pork and sear it in a skillet to brown it. Add the tare to the reheated tonkotsu broth until you’re satisfied with the flavor (you may want to tweak the levels of salt, sugar, and soy sauce to your personal tastes. You can also mix tare and broth separately for each bowl you prepare, but to be honest, after spending an entire day making this shit, I just do not have time for that).
Place cooked, drained noodles in a bowl, pour over the broth-tare mixture, and then serve with the sauteed pork belly, a split soy-marinated egg, and whatever other toppings you like (e.g. corn, scallions, fish cake, nori, sliced shiitakes, etc.).
Edit: I stress the non-traditional/I’m doing it wrong part here before someone leaps down my throat for sullying the beautiful creamy pale texture of tonkotsu ramen with a soy-sauce-based tare seasoning, rather than just salting it until it tastes like the milky pork water that it is in truth :)