Ramen 101.2: Soup Basics—Pork and Chicken

Although the most fundamental element of "ramen" is the noodle itself (a special wheat noodle treated with alkaline salts), we tend to think of "ramen" in terms of the soup in which the noodles (usually, but not always) are served. The soup, after all, is the source of so much of the flavor and richness that makes ramen so good. So where does that flavor and richness come from?

Well, it comes from extracting all sorts of compounds like amino acids, polypeptides, and fats from animal bones by boiling them for extended periods. Usually we’re talking about pork and chicken bones. But other flavor sources are also common: dried fish like katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (anchovies) are big in Japanese cuisine, as are mushrooms (like shiitake), and kombu (a type of dried seaweed). As you can see in this link and this link (yes, the Umami Information Center does exist), all of these ingredients are big in sources of umami: glutamate and ribonucleotides like guanylate and inosinate. It’s also common to use vegetables like onions, which will endow the soup with added sweetness. In our ramen experiments, we’ve made use of all these things.

The Meats: Pork and Chicken.

Pork is an extremely common ingredient in ramen. In general, we’re talking about pork bones: femur bones, neck bones, back bones. You can make ramen soup with any of these. There doesn't appear to be a strong reason to use one or the other, but some chefs do have a preference. Practically speaking, cost, availability, and process issues are likely to dictate one's choice. For example, femur bones may be more expensive and have a lot of marrow, but you have to break them and cook longer to complete the extraction.

It’s also common to make your chashu topping by boiling pork shoulder (aka pork butt) or pork belly with the bones when making your soup, then removing the meat, marinating it, slicing it, and setting it atop your ramen. And have you ever heard of back fat? This is the layer of fat right under a pig’s back skin. It can be used to add more flavor and thickness to your soup.

Back fat = #6.  http://chestofbooks.com/food/science/Domestic-Science-School/Pork.html#.VLXSUouKfWU

Chicken is also very common, and is often used in combination with pork. For some applications, chicken parts are used. I’m talking about chicken backs or frames, chicken necks, and chicken feet. In Japan it’s common to use torigara, which is a cut that includes both the back and the neck. In other applications, a whole chicken can be used.

Soup Categories: Paitan and Chintan

A fundamental point about ramen soups is that they can be loosely divided into two main categories. Paitan (白湯) (meaning “white soup”) is a thick, cloudy soup. Chintan (清湯) (meaning “clear soup”) is clear, exactly as the name implies.

As an example, tonkotsu ramens are almost always paitans. These soups are thick and creamy. They're full of fats and collagens extracted from pork bone marrow and cartilage. The fats provide tons of flavor, while both add body to the soup. If you cool a thick tonkotsu broth, it will rapidly solidify. But you can make chicken paitans, too. These toripaitan ramens have been ascendant in popularity in Japan over the past decade. Although the Japanese tonkotsu boom ended around the time the toripaitan boom began, tonkotsu ramen is still hot in the U.S. Using chicken feet is a key aspect of toripaitan: they are a great source of collagen and soup body.

Ramen School:  Hiroko's tonkotsu paitan (left) and a guest chef's chintans (right) 

The main difference between paitans and chintans lies in their preparation. Higher temperature and more robust boiling will make a paitan, while chintans are produced by heating at sub-boiling temperatures. High temperature produces an emulsion, which is a mixture of normally immiscible liquids (like oil and water). Lower temperature cooking allows the fats to separate cleanly from the aqueous soup; the fat can be removed and even used later as a flavored oil topping.

Emulsion: Molecular Explanation.  Fantastic image from http://blog.ioanacolor.com.  

Roughly speaking, pork with its capacity to impart body and richness, is good for making paitans. Chicken, which contains a lot more glutamate (read: more umami) than pork, is good for making chintans. In practice, it's common to combine pork and chicken. And there's a scientific reason for this relating to umami synergy. Look forward to future posts about this fascinating phenomenon.

Next up:  Where does a guy buy chicken feet, anyway?

Ramen 101.1 – Let's Talk About Ramen!

So, yes, we've eaten our fair share of ramen. But, to restate the obvious, eating it doesn't tell you a whole lot about how to make it. As soon as we decided to make a go of it with Shiba Ramen, we dove right into our ramen education. Now, over six months into the project, we've learned a lot. We're still learning a lot, but we're getting into the territory of fine detail. We've got a good handle on the basics. Hiroko's ability to access Japanese-language materials (not to mention the ten days she spent at ramen school last October) has been predictably invaluable.

This is the first in a series of posts about ramen. I'm going to break down the cuisine into its constituent elements. This process should make it abundantly clear that ramen isn't what I called “ramen” in my room in Bradley Hall at Ohio State University in 1996 (or what you called “ramen” in your own dorm room).  Lest there be any confusion on this point, I defer to Wikipedia:

Today, just a short intro into the elements. I'll detail these in the rest of Ramen Chemistry's Ramen 101 Series.

Soup stock. This is the core of the product. Making it involves boiling pork or chicken bones (often both together) for an extended period. I'll explain later how different parts of these animals contribute different features to the soup. Believe it or not, chicken feet have a very useful function here. Other umami-imparting ingredients—mushrooms, kombu, dried fish like niboshi or katsuobushi—also have important roles to play, especially if you seek the more complex flavors found in Japanese cuisine.

Tare. Tare (pronounced "tar-eh") translates literally as “sauce.” It's—for example—the miso or shoyu (soy) concoction that takes your soup stock and transforms it into miso ramen or shoyu ramen.

Noodles. Alkaline wheat noodles (no, ramen is not gluten-free). You can make them or buy them from Sun Noodle.

Oils. Flavored fats floating on the soup surface. Res ipsa loquitur.

Toppings. Ramen enthusiasts know that chashu (boiled and marinated pork shoulder or belly) and soft-boiled eggs are traditional ramen staples. But there's a lot that can be done here.

As you can see, we have much to discuss. 

It all begins here:  a pot full of chicken and pork backbones.  Ramen school, October 2014.

A Brief History of Ramen, California Edition

Ten years ago, Hiroko and I moved to California, spending our first six years here living in the Asian food hotspots of Silicon Valley and the Peninsula (we lived in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Burlingame). There are so many great hole-in-the-wall Japanese places in that area. One of our favorite sushi places, for example, was Kitsho—not a particularly inviting place, sitting as it does next to a strip mall and behind a gas station near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. But the sushi there was amazing. When we moved north to Burlingame, we discovered Sushi Sam’s in San Mateo. Like Kitsho, you don’t go to Sam’s for the ambiance. But when you taste his seared toro with sea salt and yuzu at the end of the omakase, you may have a transcendental experience. I did, on multiple occasions.

Sam's seared toro.  Photo Credit: http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/sushi-sams-edomata-san-mateo#MJunWl-lTpqR4QpH0HtuKQ

When we lived on that side of the Bay, we had routine access to ramen. Some of it was really good, some not so much. But we could get it when we wanted it. There were a couple of decent places in Mountain View at the time, but San Mateo was a real mecca. Santa Ramen was always heralded as the gold standard around there, although I found it a bit salty for my taste (fortunately, by that time I’d grown more cautious about guzzling the soup) and a bit too crowded.

Our favorite was Himawari. Not because the ramen there outclassed a lot of the other ramen places in town, but because Himawari made an effort to be a better overall customer experience. It wasn’t dumpy like so many of its competitors’ spaces were. The décor was tasteful and modern, the lighting intimate, and there was always great music (usually jazz). The lines were rarely long, and we could usually sit at a comfortable table and enjoy a quick meal. It was a go-to comfort food restaurant for us. Like I said, that’s because Himawari combined quality ramen with a great holistic customer experience.

Himawari.  Photo Credit: http://www.schubysnack.blogspot.com

Three years ago, we moved to the East Bay. While there is some excellent Japanese food on our new side of the Bay, in Oakland or in Berkeley, the fact is that the Japanese food scene from San Jose through San Francisco simply outclasses the East Bay, in terms of both quantity and quality. When it comes to ramen, there isn’t a whole lot. There are a couple of fancier ramen places, but they are pretty expensive and the lines are long. But we view ramen as comfort food: food that you can eat when you want at relatively low cost. We enjoy ramen the most when the barrier to eating it is low.

 

As Hiroko tells it, ramen is viewed as fast food in Japan. Not “fast food” in our typical American vernacular, usually referring to lower quality, mass produced food. Rather, fast food in the most basic sense—food that is fast to get, and fast to eat. Calling it fast food in this sense renders no judgment about the quality of the food or the way it’s produced. It simply connotes the investment of time the consumer must make to enjoy the meal. It goes without saying that the meal can still be high-quality and delicious. For us, it just shouldn’t involve making a reservation or waiting in a long line, followed by a hefty bill at the end of the meal.

Fast Food: American Vernacular.

Fast Food:  Food That Is Fast.  Photo Credit: http://www.ippudo.com/products/menu.html

Does that make sense?  Over the next couple of posts, I’ll explain how these observations led to the idea for Shiba Ramen.

A Brief History of Ramen, From Cambridge to Tsukuba Science City

If you read Ramen Chemistry's first post, you understand that pursuing a ramen business isn't obvious from our backgrounds. In this post, I'll start to explain how we got to this place, how we settled on this of all things we could have tried. It seems like ramen itself is a good place to begin.

Chicken soup doesn't seem complete without a pile of pork on top. Some of our ramen, November 2014.  

So we've been into ramen for a long time (speaking casually, we're not fanatics). Hiroko is from Japan and has been eating it all her life. She introduced it to me in Cambridge, MA around the time we met there in 2002. Near Porter Square was (and I just learned still is) a little mall containing a strange mix of stores: a Gap and a bunch of Japanese restaurants and a Japanese grocery. In that mall was a little ramen shop called Sapporo Ramen, run every day by a lone Japanese man. I always got the miso ramen, dumped far more hot pepper sauce into it than I should have, and drank down every bit of the very hot, spicy, and salty broth. I always left feeling wobbly-kneed.  I only learned later that in Japan, drinking the whole bowl isn't the norm.

 

Hiroko moved to Japan for several years while I finished graduate school. Although I kept overdoing it at Sapporo Ramen, my visits to Japan exposed me to really good authentic stuff, both in Tokyo and in Tsukuba, the exurban backwater where Hiroko was living at the time.   Unlike in the U.S., there’s no such thing as a culinary backwater in Japan, even in geographical or cultural backwaters. The Japanese, as a whole, have such deep commitment to craftsmanship. When it comes to food, they are so incredibly attentive to preparing quality dishes with quality ingredients, and doing so with unrivaled consistency.

Ono Jiro is the perfect shokunin, the most public example in the West of the Japanese craftsman who, with masterful and uncompromising attention to detail, elevates a mundane profession to high art.  

And they usually specialize, so that restaurants will focus on a single food: ramen, soba, sushi, tempura, yakitori, tonkatsu, and the list goes on.  All over Japan, from Tokyo and Osaka to the rural hinterlands, you’ll find this kind of specialization. In the U.S., you’d be more likely to find restaurants that try to do all these things at once, often compromising the overall quality of the menu. Sure, Japan has plenty of those kinds of places too (did you realize Denny's is huge in Japan?) but the specialization phenomenon is the dominant one, and really drives Japanese food culture.

 

Visiting Hiroko in Tsukuba, a rural town an hour from Tokyo where cheap land and a good local university had induced international tech companies to set up shop (part of it is even called, in English, “Tsukuba Science City”), I first had tonkotsu ramen. What a revelation! I hadn’t experienced anything like it in the U.S. in my early days of ramen eating. I found the rich and pale white pork broth extraordinary. For years afterward in the U.S., I looked for tonkotsu ramen, but rarely found it. It seems more prevalent these days, maybe because ramen has started to take off in the U.S., maybe because pork has been the in-vogue meat for the past few years (see, e.g., the recent near ubiquity of pork belly and bacon in American food culture).   

That is for real.  Any doubts as to the wholesale cultural ascendancy of bacon here in the early years of the third millennium are hereby extinguished.

In the next post, I'll talk about the ramen we've eaten in California.  But of pork, readers of Ramen Chemistry, we shall speak again soon.