Forget Instant Ramen, Do This Instead!

The soup from this ramen is smooth and nutty with a uniquely mellow spice. It's Tantanmen Ramen, the Japanese version of Dandan Mien. Welcome back to Wok Wednesdays. I'm Jeremy from School of Wok, London's Asian cookery school. You know what we'll do here. It's all about the cooking. So let's get straight into it. Now the first thing about this, it really is the sort of Japanese version of a Dandan Mien, Tantanmen. Pretty much the same words, but there's some slight differences to it. And you can see, you'll see the influence of Chinese ingredients going into this dish with a sort of combination of more, I guess, more clinical Japanese cooking. Really simply, we're going to start the stock off with your base ingredients. Ginger, garlic, spring onion. Fine slices of ginger. Some rough garlic. So you'll see I've cut everything quite chunky actually. And the idea of this is, it's a quick ramen dish, this. I've made it really simplified and I'm not too worried about chunky bits because I'm going to sieve them all out later on. They're there to add real flavour to the base of my stock. And I'm using a chicken stock that we already have here at the school. We've always got frozen chicken stock ready for our classes or cooking for you guys on the videos. And at this stage, what you want to do is you want to sieve those base ingredients until that ginger really starts to crisp up and go a little bit brown around the edges. You're going to get a different, sort of sweeter flavour from the ginger from that. Traditionally, tantanmen will have a base of spice but not be overpoweringly chilli-ish. And I like to use a little bit of Sichuan peppercorn in here. I'm not going to crush them. Again, they're just going to go in whole to add flavour to the stock. About half to a teaspoon to give you that little tingling feeling on your tongue when you drink the soup. Now, I've not used much oil at all to sear these base ingredients because I want the flavour to get into it but I don't want the stock to be too greasy. Now, I wouldn't usually do it this way but for a quick ramen and to get quick flavour, I quite like adding my sauces, my seasoning sauces to the base flavour first before I then add my chicken stock. And what it does is it just sort of brings out the saltiness in a very quick way. So some chilli bean sauce has just gone in and then about a tablespoon of light soy. And I'm on a medium heat here so I get pretty much like an immediate caramelisation of that sauce before my chicken stock goes in. As I say, this is not necessarily the most traditional way to make this dish but if you just want a quick fix, it really is tasty. So whilst your soup is bubbling away and it needs about 20 to 30 minutes, something like that, you've got plenty of time to make up your tare which is essentially like your base seasoning with all the sesame paste and things like that in there. The first thing I'm going to do is make up a quick sort of Japanese chilli oil. I've got about a tablespoon of shichimi which is a mixed chilli powder with some sesame seeds in there and then I'm going to add more sesame seeds. I've got my wok on which I'm going to use to sear my pork mince in a bit but I'm going to take some oil which I'm just heating up over here and lightly sear this shichimi powder, this Japanese chilli powder mix. So what you'll see when you add your hot oil, it needs to be just smoking hot and then sort of pause for a couple of seconds before you pour it into the chilli because what you don't want is for it to burn that chilli powder which is very, very fine. A spoon of light soy and then your sesame paste which you can swap out for tahini if you can't find it. So then mix into that oil and this is what creates that lovely nutty flavour to the base of your bowl of noodle soup. Really give that a good mix. If you find that the sesame paste is kind of curdling a bit with that oil then you can just take a tiny amount of stock and add that to your tare and that will thin it out straight away. The last bit of flavour that's going to go in here is a bit of sesame oil. Now you can see I've got a lovely smooth sort of base paste that can go into the bottom of my bowl of noodle. Give that a little taste. So easy. Next up, my pork mince. I've got some nice sort of fatty pork mince here and I'm just going to use about half a spoon of light soy. There's light soy in the stock and in the tare already so I don't need to go too salty with this. A tablespoon of oyster sauce and a tablespoon of hoisin sauce to give it a slight sort of sweet flavour to the meat. Give that a good mix. So as I say, this is really possibly one of the simplest ramens you'll make and there's so much flavour from all that tare and the stock itself all I have to do now is sear the pork and break it up. Medium to high heat, just keep moving it around, break up that pork mince and it'll have a nice balance of sweet and salty from that marinade. You're probably talking about four to five minutes to cook it through and give it a slight brown around the edge of that pork mince. This stock has been going for about half an hour now so I'm just going to sieve all the bits out so it's a nice smooth soup. You can smell the Sichuan peppercorn in there. As I say, it should be a quite mellow spice rather than sort of hit you too hard. I quite often get asked why we boil noodles in boiling water separately as opposed to just putting them straight into the stock. Well, noodles have quite a lot of starch in them so what you're trying to do is just get rid of any excess starch and you don't want that starch to go into the stock itself and thicken that soup up. This soup should be nice and thin and the thickness comes from the tare with all that sesame paste and all that goodness in there. These are fresh ramen noodles and really they only need about a minute or so to come to a boil and just start to float at the top and then we'll serve them up. Once your noodles are floating at the top of the water, they're ready to come out. I've got way too many noodles for one bowl here so I'm just going to take them straight out before I serve them up just so they stop cooking. Now, I've got some spinach here that again I'm just going to blanch in this hot water. It's not even boiling. I'm just going to pop that spinach in whilst it's still hot and from the hot water they'll just wilt immediately and then from here we can just start to compile. And look, for a quick mid-week meal with a lot of flavour it's as simple as just mixing it as you wish. You know, don't go too sort of strict on any rules. I quite like to get your stock and your tare mixed together. Oh, look at that colour. Have a little cheeky taste whilst we're there. Ah, so warming, so simple. Get those noodles in, some spinach and then a good bit of that marinated pork and a little bit of crisp around the edge of some of those pieces is what I like. Spring onion and in just over half an hour I've got really quick tantanmen. Simple as that. It's so easy to make, so flavourful. I could have that three times a week. Don't forget, if you like this recipe and want to learn more like, comment, subscribe, ding, hit that notification bell and we will see you for the next ramen.