Tonkotsu Ramen | Basics with Babish

Hi guys. This week we will move away from the basic technique and into more advanced territory. Homemade

tonkotsu

ramen

...less of an essential skill and more of a right of passage for the modern home cook. Sure, it takes a few odd days to prepare and you might burn your hands on the alkaline salt, and sure, getting all the elements perfect is a constant barrage of challenges. But with that first steaming sip comes a superlative sense of accomplishment. Not to mention a really delicious dinner. Let's get down to the

basics

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tonkotsu

ramen

broth from scratch by boiling pork bones and aromatics for 12 hours and we've covered how to make chashu pork belly in our sous vide or at least we've gotten it started. You can find links to these techniques in the description of this video.

Let's get that stuff out of the way and we can move on to the remaining soup supplements. Starting with some marinated soft-boiled eggs, I have here some soft-boiled eggs that we've soaked in water, shocked in an ice bath and peeled, and now we're going to make a super simple marinade with equal parts of sauce. soy and mirin, which is a super tasty Japanese cooking wine. Then for every part soy sauce and mirin, we'll add about four parts water, then we reach for a rubber spatula or spoon and realize we had the best mixing tool in our hand the entire time.

Gently add the eggs and they will float, but just make sure there is enough liquid in the bowl to theoretically cover them. I'm going to add a little more soy sauce and mirin to make sure they're well coated and then we'll put them in the refrigerator shaking them after about two hours, refrigerating them for a minimum of four and up to 24. Then we move on to tare, an ultra-flavorful, umami-packed soup base. We start by heating up a good splash of vegetable oil over medium-high heat and adding a little bit of dried anchovies and letting these guys really absorb the heat for three or four minutes, we want them nice and golden brown and we want a nice coating of love on the bottom of the pot.

This means letting them sit and stick, so take a thematically inappropriate sip of a martini and let them sit at the bottom of the pot until a nice brown substance forms. Once it forms, it's time to deglaze with a little soy sauce. Let's add maybe half a cup. Now you can see it was a very hot pan where I let it cool before adding a little more soy sauce because we didn't feel like we added enough, and then an equal part of mirin, stir it in and get it really hot before adding a little bonito in dried fish flakes.

I know this mixture sounds quite fishy, ​​but it's really just an umami bomb that will help make our tonkatsu broth pop. You can see I've taken it off the heat because I want the bonito to steep like a fish tea, and then I'll add a couple tablespoons of sake, put it back on the heat and let the alcohol boil. , we strain, and that's it, we have done tare. You can refrigerate it until ready to use because now it's time for the most dangerous part of the process: making homemade ramen noodles. The first step here is to make some alkaline salt, which we're going to prepare by baking baking soda (yes, that's what I meant) at 250 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour.

This changes the pH balance of our baking soda and makes it a mild skin irritant, so be sure not to touch it. We combine 2 teaspoons of our baking soda with four ounces plus two tablespoons of water making sure it dissolves completely. Then in a large bowl we place 240 grams of all-purpose flour to which we add our alkaline water mixture and combining with a wooden spoon or another we want a shaggy but cohesive ball of dough and as you can see this is a bit too dry, so I'll add a little more water, thinking about pasta dough in terms of consistency.

Once a cohesive but not sticky ball of dough is formed, we are going to pat it into a disk, sprinkle it with bread flour and cover it, let it rest for half an hour, as if it were pasta dough. go clean your apron because you've made a mess and then once half an hour has passed take the dough out of the bowl and then it's time to start rolling out, we'll start by doing a single rudimentary rolling which is lightly dusted with flour, rolling it out and folding it into thirds like a letter, then in thirds again... so it's not like a letter, but hey, I'm not going to judge you for how you fold your letters.

We extend this just a little bit, wrapping it in transparent film and letting it rest again for another half hour. We're simply letting the gluten relax before launching into the big guns, that's right. It's time to break out your shiny new stand mixer pasta roller, you know it when it arrived for Christmas. I think it's the only way to get one of these as a Christmas or wedding gift. Anyway, we're going to give this guy a final rolling before we roll and cut them, so let's give him a pass on the widest setting of our roller.

It folds into thirds as if rotated 90 degrees and begins to roll out even thinner until we have about two or three in our pasta press. If the edges are too jagged and it's falling apart, just go ahead and laminate it. a few more times. This is getting a little long for individual noodles, so I'm just going to cut it in half, as you can see we're also giving it a little more bread flour before the most satisfying part of our day. the noodle cutter. Sprinkle even more bread flour and roll them into little ramen nests on a rimmed baking sheet dusted with bread flour.

At this point, these can be refrigerated or frozen. I'll just cover mine with plastic wrap and refrigerate because it's almost ramen time. Continuing from where we left off in the sous-vide episode, the chashu pork belly comes out of the water bath and onto a wire rack and rimmed baking sheet which we will then place with the round side facing the sky under a broiler until that emerges. deeply browned and crispy, excuse me while I stare at this in awe for a moment, and then we'll cut the rope and slice this guy. Now, ideally you want to chill it overnight so it's nice and firm, and cut it into super thin slices.

But I'm really hungry, so put the ramen noodles in some boiling water. We won't let them cook for more than three minutes and I'll test for doneness after about 90 seconds. At the bottom of a bowl of hot noodles goes a few tablespoons of our tar followed by a few ladles of steaming broth and our freshly cooked and rigorously beaten noodles. Throw those guys in the broth and here we go. and now it's time to get dressed with nowhere to go, at the back of the bowl goes one or two slices of our chashu pork, next to it goes a single sheet of nori or dried seaweed.

Then we cut one of our beautiful marinated soft-boiled eggs in half and placed it on the other side, a handful of scallions optionally and I like some pieces of spicy Menma or fermented bamboo shoots and there you have it after two days What I think you'll agree was worth the effort: a steaming plate of perfection. You've come a long way from that 39 cent packaged junk you bought in college and which I admit I still eat from time to time. So grab some chopsticks, eat and get ready to have your mind explode and don't forget to slurp your noodles loud and proud.

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