RAMEN SCHOOL #3 | How to Make Ramen Eggs | 味付け卵 Ajitsuke Tamago | Ajitama

Nope, this video is not yet making a bowl of ramen. But bear with me, we will get there, I absolutely promise. We've made soup, we've made chashu, so we've made our broth and one of our toppings, of our five elements that go into ramen. And today we're making what I think is one of the most important toppings that I never have ramen without. It's ajitama, which is the contraction of ajitsuke tamago, or as we'd like to call in English, ramen eggs. So ajitama or ajitsuke tamago means a flavour infused egg. And that's exactly what this is. But it's not just that, this is one of the big misconceptions when it comes to ramen eggs. It's not just putting flavour into an egg, it's actually a cured egg. You use the flavour from our liquid that we'll make up, our steeping liquid to infuse the egg, but also the salt and sugar that's included in that liquid actually helps to cure the egg. We'll look at the difference between a cured ramen egg, one that's been appropriately left to marinate for as long as it needs to, and one that hasn't, and I'll explain that in a bit. But first, let's get to our eggs. These are free-range eggs, they're about 65 grams each. The key with boiling an egg, and I know it's like people who can't cook always say, I can't even boil an egg, but actually boiling an egg is something that I don't think a lot of people do properly, because it's all about controlling the environment. Eggs are pretty temperamental, and so to get a perfect boiled egg at exactly the consistency you want it, if you're out by even a couple of degrees, you know, from 62 degrees to 65 degrees internal temperature of an egg is completely different. From 80 degrees to 72 degrees is completely different. So you really want to control as much as you can, so you can get consistent results every time. Of course, just throw it into some water, boil it for a bit, take it back out again, and you get a cooked egg. You won't get a precision boiled egg, but for ramen you want an egg to be boiled to precision, and that means controlling the temperature of the water, pretty easy to do, how long it's in there, again pretty easy to do, the size of the egg, again if you're buying the same eggs every time, that shouldn't be too hard either, and also the temperature of the eggs. You can keep your eggs in the fridge if you want to, but you need to adjust for that change in temperature. So how do we boil an egg? I always, whether I'm doing ramen eggs or not, make a hole in the base of the egg. This is just a poultry skewer. I'm using that to make a very, very small hole in the base of the egg. Why? Well, for a lot of reasons. This is the most important part. What it does is first, inside the egg there's a little bit of an air pocket, and as the egg gets older, a lot of the water evaporates from inside, and that air pocket gets larger. That's what causes an egg to crack when you boil it. It's not the egg itself expanding all that much, it's the air pocket inside there expanding. So if you put a hole in the base of the egg, the air pocket can actually release as the egg's being boiled. Now secondly, another reason why this is such an important thing to do is, have you ever tried to peel an egg and it's just not coming away? The egg white is sticking to the membrane inside, and the membranes stick into the shell. If you have that problem, and I know that quite a lot of people do, you can solve that again with this little hole in the base of the egg. Don't worry about the egg coming out, it's no change of air pressure inside to actually force the yolk out there. So the process of cooking our egg is, we're going to boil it, then we're going to shock it in some ice water here. And what will happen there is, the egg, when it cools down rapidly, will suck water in through that hole, which will run around the outside of the egg, around the membrane, and actually release the egg and the membrane from the shell. So this is a super, super, super important step. Don't skip it, because if you do, you're going to end up wasting a lot of eggs, particularly when they're soft boiled. We're only going to cook these for six minutes, and so when they're soft inside, you run a really great risk of damaging the egg. Put a little hole like that in the base and solve all your problems. One thing I will say though, don't try and be clever and put two holes in there, because if you've got a hole in the top and a hole in the bottom, the air rushes in the top, it pushes the egg out the bottom, and you'll end up with egg white noodles in your boiling water. So let's go and boil our eggs. So getting a precision boiled egg is all about time and temperature. The temperature is pretty much fine, because you're going to be using boiling water, which should be at or very, very close to 100 degrees. You want to be able to cool that down very quickly, so I've got a bowl of ice water here, and of course the only variable then is time. We use a timer for that. I've set this to six minutes, because I know that that's right for my size of egg, but if you're using smaller eggs or larger eggs, you might need to adjust that temperature. I'll lower my egg straight in, and I'll stir them just for the first minute. Stirring the eggs firstly allows the air to escape, but it also centres the yolk in the centre of the egg, so you don't get it up against the side of the egg or anything like that. When the timer goes, the eggs are straight out and straight into ice water. I'll stir that again for another 30 seconds, so you don't get any pockets of hot water in there, and then I'll leave that for again about six minutes, so the eggs can cool completely. So while I leave the eggs to cool, we can get our flavouring liquid together. So this is probably the best thing to flavour your eggs with. This is the stock, the braising stock from the chashu that we made in the previous video, and that's just had the fat skimmed off it. I would dilute that one cup of liquid to two cups of water, just to reduce the intensity of it a bit, but if you didn't want to do this, I'm going to show you a very, very simple curing liquid for the eggs. Same ingredients again, sake, mirin, shoyu, soy sauce. So these are your basic ingredients. You can see it's quite similar to a teriyaki sauce. You can actually use our homemade teriyaki sauce that you might have seen in other videos, diluted down to make a cure for the eggs. To that, you can add whatever you like. You can add shiitake mushrooms, bonito flakes, any of those kind of umami ingredients that we saw in the first ramen video. You can add any of that to flavour your eggs. It just depends on how you want to flavour your eggs, but what you want to bear in mind is you need to have an ingredient of salt, so that's from coming from the soy sauce, and or sweetness. So this is from the mirin. You can add sugar and salt. I've been to Toripaitan places, white chicken broth places, that don't want to use any soy sauce to colour the egg, because they want their soup and everything in it to be as white as possible, and they just cure their eggs in a mixture of sugar, salt, and chicken stock. But it is important to have that sugar and or salt in the curing liquid. So I'll just burn off a bit of the alcohol of this, mix it together with the soy sauce, and that will be our liquid. So very simple, just some sake and some mirin into the base of the pot, bring that to a simmer. Watch your eyebrows when you do this, but just tip the pot slightly so that it catches fire. That's just going to burn off a bit of the extra alcohol, so I can turn the heat off now. Soy sauce in, two cups of cold water, and that is our ajitama liquid. That's ready to go, so now let's peel these eggs. You want to crack it where you've got the hole, because these are quite soft inside, and if you crack it on its side like you would normally for an egg, you can actually damage the egg, and it can split open because it is very delicate. So just where you made the hole in the base, and start to peel the shell away. You can see how easily the shell is coming away, not sticking to the egg white at all. That is exactly the benefit of pricking that hole in the base. Pretty perfect soft cooked egg. I'll just give it one more dip back into the water to remove any water tension that might be holding the last bits of shell on there, and then pop that into a bowl, and repeat for the remainder of the eggs. Now notice how nicely oval shaped this egg is. You know, it doesn't have that air pocket that looks like somebody's sort of taken a bite out of it. Again, just poking a little hole in the base of the egg solves all your problem. So then on goes our steeping liquid, and those can go into the fridge. But before I put these into the fridge, I want to show you why it's important to steep the eggs. It's not just to add flavour to them. You know, this is one of the big misconceptions. Here's the egg that we've just started to marinate, and here's some that I've done a little bit beforehand. So these eggs have been steeping for one day, and these ones have been steeping or curing for two days. And the difference between these, you know, from the outside they don't look all that different, but the difference is all on the inside. So let's cut the egg that we just boiled a couple of minutes ago. Lovely soft yolk, kind of gelatinous white, but also completely set, perfectly cooked egg. Now let's cut the egg that's been curing for one day. You can see the yolk is starting to get a little bit darker because it's now becoming a cured egg yolk, and the outside has become a lot firmer. The white is a lot firmer than this white here, and now for the two-day egg. You see, that for me is a perfect ramen egg. The yolk is darker still, it's cured, you can see it's starting to cure around the edges, and it's much darker on the inside, and the white has become firm without being too tough. You see, and it's not just the flavour that goes into the egg, it's also about the texture of the egg as well. You see, this just cooked egg, it's actually not a great texture for ramen. Ramen is a very textural dish. You spend a lot of time trying to get the texture of the noodles right, the texture of the broth right, and then if you put this kind of like soft flaccid little egg in there, it's just nothing when you're eating the bowl of ramen. Something like this, on the other hand, is going to be a much tastier egg, not just in terms of the flavour, but in terms of the texture of it. You know, you want to be able to bite into the white and taste the white. You want the yolk to be thick and gelatinous. You don't want it to just be an ordinary old soft-boiled egg. Of course, if you wanted to make your eggs even firmer, you could leave it for an extra day or you could increase the salt and sugar that went into the steeping liquid. But as it goes, zero days, one day, two day, think about the cure of the egg because that is how you make a really great Ajitsuke Tamago.