Welcome. I’m going to embed a preview from Google Books of the Momofuku cookbook below. It’s cued up to the page before his ramen recipe. The recipe consists of three components: first, the umbrella ramen recipe, followed by two of its most complex elements—broth, and taré seasoning. There are other “mix-ins” that you will need to have ready to plop in the bowl of cooked noodles and hot broth; the umbrella recipe lists some of those typically used at Momofuku (e.g. pork belly, pork shoulder, nori, scallions, fish cake).
Just fyi, I cut a couple of corners when putting the final ramen bowl together. Chang prepares meats for the ramen separate from, and in addition to, the meats cooked in the process of making the broth. Once you remove the boiled chicken, bacon, and finally the pork bones, there’s nothing in particular that you need to do with them. I, being the lazy asshole that I am, simply picked off the meat, put it in the fridge, and pulled it out to use as the meat component in the finished bowl (warmed and seasoned first). I think you could have a superior final product if you were to go the Momofuku route and prepare some more meat, but hey. However: I highly recommend breaking down and re-using the boiled chicken, once removed from the broth, to make taré, rather than buying even more chicken and starting from scratch. It’s unclear to me whether or not Momofuku starts its taré from raw chicken bones/meat/skin, but I simply picked off as much meat as I could, reserving it for addition to the finished soup, and used the resulting skin, bones, and gristle. The results were fantastic. I could drink that taré by itself all day long (although if I did, it would probably put me in some kind of dyspeptic coma).
(When the broth and taré are both done, put a little of both on a spoon and taste it. The combination made my eyes bleed.)
If you can find fresh ramen noodles, use those. If not, look for alkaline noodles at asian groceries (the key is to find some with sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate in the ingredients list). But as chef Chang says, pretty much any noodles, fresh or not, will do just fine.
If I were to make this again, I’d definitely braise some pork belly to go in the finished bowl, and I’d probably use a smokier bacon in the broth; the smokiest, most unforgivable bacon I can find. I’d also use fewer noodles/more broth than what you see in the picture I posted.
Finally, a note on the soft-boiled eggs. I had never made these before, and was a little scared of making them prior to hearing the method (thanks Justin). But it turns out they’re easy as fuck. Bring a saucepan of water to a rolling boil, plop the eggs in, and start a timer for 6 minutes. Prepare a bath of ice water. When the timer goes off, remove the eggs from the saucepan with a slotted spoon and plop them in the ice bath. This halts them from cooking any further. Remove them from the ice bath and roll the eggs gently on a cutting board to crack the shell all around. Find a good spot to peel of a chunk of shell, and the rest should follow easily.
Good luck! And let me know of your experimentations/if you have any questions…
Oh, and here’s a playlist to bump while you cook.
[Insert the following after step 9 of the broth recipe. Taré is the third and final component to Chang's ramen recipe.]
The meaning of the term taré isn't consistent up and down Japan, but in Tokyo, where I learned about it, it is essentially Japanese barbecue sauce. At yakitori restaurants, places where they grill skewers of chicken over clean-burning bincho-tan charcoal, they brush the chicken with a slick of taré just as it finishes cooking. One of the coolest taré-making systems I've ever seen was at a yakitori joint in Japan where there was a channel underneath the grill funneling all the chicken drippings into a stone jar full of tare that was constantly being infused with grilled chicken drippings. (I imagine they replenished it with fresh soy, mirin, and sake the next day, boiled it, and returned it to its station.)
But in addition to its place of honor in the yakitori tradition, taré is the main seasoning—the primary “salt” component—in ramen shops, at least in Tokyo. Ramenyas have their own formulas for broth and their own recipes for taré. Broths are usually easy to figure out, because there's always a big pot bubbling away in plain view, with apples or leeks or whatever secret-ish ingredients a shop adds to it, but taré recipes are more mysterious because you rarely see them being made. Some places add dried scallops, others leave out the chicken bones.
Ours is robust if simple, and it's a good way to put chicken trimmings or bones to use. Most ramen shops add the taré to the bowl when the soup is being assembled to be served, but that always struck me as a Russian roulette way of seasoning a soup—too much, too little, to easy to screw up. So we season our broth with it beforehand, tasting carefully with each addition to strike the right balance.
2 to 3 chicken backs, or the bones and their immediately attendant flesh and skin reserved from butchering 1 chicken
2 cups usukuchi (light soy sauce)
Freshly ground black pepper.
1. Heat the oven to 450°F.
2. Cut chicken back into 3 pieces, split rib cages in half, and separate thigh from leg bones. (More surface area = more browning area = deeper better flavor, as long as you don't burn the bones.)
3. Spread the bones out in a wide (12- to 14-inch) ovenproof sauté pan or skillet and put it in the oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour: check on the bones after about 40 minutes to…
[Return to the Google Books preview.]
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