The Best Restaurant-Style Ramen At Home

What's the best ramen that you can make at home without spending two days working on it? Today, you are gonna learn how to make a shoyu ramen that is restaurant quality, but it's only gonna take you 20 to 30 minutes to make. Now, for a lot of ramen broths, they are carefully simmered over 12 to 18 hours to build up that depth of flavor, and we will not be doing that. Instead, we're gonna be using a little cheat code to imitate that depth of flavor by building on layers. Layer one, tare. Now, the tare is essentially the seasoning layer to our broth. It's what's gonna give us that salt and a little bit of the umami. So we'll start by adding three tablespoons of shoyu, or Japanese soy sauce, two teaspoons of mirin, two teaspoons of salt, one teaspoon of sugar to help balance, and then I'm gonna use a fourth teaspoon of MSG. You don't have to use MSG, but it is gonna add an extra layer and umami to our broth that I would highly recommend. But if you don't want to, that's fine. You can just use salt. And this is, in its simplest form, our tare. Layer two, aromatic oil. Now, while shoyu ramen is typically considered a lighter ramen, it still needs a little bit of fat to give it that richness and that body, as well as balance out all the flavors, and that's where our aromatic oil comes in. We're gonna start by thinly slicing four green onion stalks. And once you get to the green parts, we're gonna go ahead and stop, separate those whites, because this is what's gonna go into our aromatic oil while these are gonna go on as a topping. So we are going to continue cutting these since we're already cutting these. But now we are gonna move these green parts to a separate container for us to use later. Moving on, we have four cloves of garlic that we are just going to crush and remove the skins from. Other than that, you really don't need to do much else. All of these things are gonna end up getting strained out of our oil, so it really doesn't need to be in tiny little pieces because we're just gonna strain it away anyways. The only thing you need to worry about is removing the skin. I guess even that, you probably could still leave the skin, but I always take the skin off. More of a personal preference, I guess. And lastly, we have our ginger. We only need about half an inch worth, so I'm just gonna go ahead and skin the outside. Then we'll go ahead and chop off our nubbin that we need. And from here, I'm just gonna give it a nice little slice, and then we can just stack up those slices and cut it into matchsticks. And then don't forget to grab all those onions that just went everywhere because it just, we're rolling around. Now into a cold pan, we're gonna add in a fourth cup of oil. For this, you can kind of do different things. In this instance, I'm gonna use about half, so two tablespoons of a neutral oil, and I'm gonna do another two tablespoons of bacon fat or lard. I'll be honest, generally speaking, I would much prefer to use chicken fat. I think for a shoyu ramen, the lighter taste of a chicken fat just works better, but I don't have any on me, so I'm just gonna use what I have. And you can also just use all neutral oil. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Now to this, we're gonna add in our garlic, ginger, and green onion whites, and then we're gonna slowly heat this up to medium heat. Once we've got our pan up to medium and we're starting to see all those bubbles, we're just gonna let this cook for about five to seven minutes or until our aromatics are nice and golden. The real important thing here is you don't wanna burn anything because if you burn it, that burnt flavor's gonna be infused into your oil and you don't want that. So you basically wanna get all the flavor out of it you can, and then we're gonna pull it. Now as you can see, our garlic and ginger have become nice and golden. So now what we can do is we can just carefully, and I mean carefully because it's hot oil, strain out all of it. And make sure you squeeze out any of the residual oil that's left in any of those aromatics. And there we have our aromatic oil. And lastly, layer three, our broth. Now the broth is arguably the easiest layer, but it's also the most important because it is the body, it is the glue that all those other flavors attach to when they combine around like a Megazord. It's like that, like they all combine together to like that, and you need it. And while it doesn't require a lot of work, you do need it. Into a small pot, combine six cups of water. I need another one. Got it. Follow that with one and a half tablespoons of instant dashi powder, and two teaspoons of chicken bouillon powder. Now you can absolutely make your dashi from scratch. You can use a shiro dashi, which is like a liquid concentrate dashi. Personally, I like the dashi instant powder. It works really well for me. It's what my family's always used, and I enjoy it. And for the chicken broth aspect of this, you can absolutely use like a pre-made chicken broth or chicken stock. I would veer away from chicken broths because generally speaking, they tend to be a little bit more flavorful and a little bit too much, and it takes over and becomes like a chicken ramen versus a shoyu ramen. But hey, it's still flavor, and as long as you enjoy it, that's all that matters. And now from here, we're gonna stir all of this together until it's well combined. Bring this up to a medium low heat. You don't want it simmering. You really just want it kind of warm. But then once you have all that chicken powder and dashi powder, what's the word I'm looking for? What's the word I'm looking for? Not disintegrated. You know it. You know what I'm thinking. You know the word I'm thinking. What's the word for that? Oh my gosh. Dissolved. Dissolved, that's the word. Dissolved. Once it's all dissolved, all you need to do is just cover it with a lid and let this sit on warm until we're ready to serve. That's it. And there we have our broth. Now for our toppings, we have green onions, kamaboko, nori, jammy egg, and succulent pork belly. We've already got our green onions cut up from earlier, so next up is our kamaboko. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with what kamaboko is, it's essentially just fish cake. If you've ever had imitation crab, like in a California roll, this is basically the same stuff, just in a different form. I personally love it and can eat like a single slice with every single bite, but you know, it's important to show restraint sometimes. So somewhere between three to four slices per bowl is plenty good. And one to snack on. Now for our nori, it's pretty simple. We're just gonna take one sheet of nori and we can fold it in half, give it a good crease, fold it in half the other way, pop it off, repeat one more time to give us these square nori sheets, but you can also take it one step further if you really want. You take your nori sheets, fold them over again so we've got these nice long strips, pop those apart, then you're just gonna stack them and we're gonna give them thin slices long ways, just to give us nice little strips. And I find the best way to do this is to just place your knife down on top of it and roll and press. If you try to slice through it, you're just gonna tear the nori and that's just gonna be a mess. They also do already sell nori like pre-stripped like this, but that's not accessible everywhere. So I'm trying to make sure this is as accessible as possible for you. And then once those are all nicely cut, you should have these beautiful little confetti-like nori strips. For our pork belly, the first thing we're gonna wanna do is make our glaze, which starts with two tablespoons of shoyu, one tablespoon of oyster sauce, one tablespoon of mirin, and one tablespoon of brown sugar. And then we'll just give all this a nice mix together. Now in a cold pan of your choosing, we're gonna go ahead and lay in about 200 grams of pork belly slices. It doesn't need to really be that specific. It's just about 100 grams per person or per serving or whatever you look at and you're like, that's enough for me. And we'll just bring this up to a medium high heat. Make sure none of your pork belly is lifting. You've got full contact on the bottom. And then once it all starts sizzling, we're actually gonna pour in half a cup of cold water. This is just gonna help the pork fat render out more quickly while also cooking the whole piece a little more evenly. So that way you don't end up with a piece that is nice and crispy on the outside, but rough and tough and chewy on the inside. And this water is just gonna take a few minutes to fully evaporate. And so while you wait, you could subscribe, you could like, comment, you could share this video with someone. You know, if you've enjoyed it, obviously. And now that that water is fully evaporated, we're back to sizzling and developing a nice sear on the bottom of our pork belly. And then once your pieces all have a good color, we can go ahead and flip them. And we'll just let these continue to cook for a couple more minutes just to get a nice color on the bottom. We're gonna go ahead and just reduce our heat down a tad and pour in our glaze. Now this should only take about a minute just to thicken up to a nice filky sauce. Filky? Silky sauce. And once we're there, you want it just thick enough to stick on the outside of your pork belly. And then from there, we can just go ahead and carefully remove. And if you really wanted to be extra with it, you could torch the top of these, but you don't have to. And honestly, I think it's kind of like, kind of lame. If you did a good job, you shouldn't have to torch it. But like, you know, to each their own. You want to torch it, torch it. I mean, I think it's good enough without, but whatever you want. And now we move on to our delicious jammy eggs. We'll start by bringing a small pot of water to a boil. I'm using two eggs today, one for me and one for my wife. They've also been out of the fridge for about 10 minutes now to help prevent the shock when they go in and prevent cracking. And now that we are at a nice gentle boil, we can go ahead and carefully place in our eggs. And we'll let these cook for exactly seven minutes. But also technically speaking, it could depend on a lot of factors. Like what temperature your water is boiling up? How high are you in the air? Not in the air. What is your elevation? How big are your eggs? Like there are a lot of other factors into it. But for me, seven minutes, generally speaking, usually works really well. Play around with it and find what you like. Love that sound. While we wait, how are you? How are you doing? What's going on? What's new with you this week? Anything to celebrate? Anything you're working on? I truly hope you're doing well. Something I really want to celebrate is the other day, I realized it was my three year anniversary posting YouTube videos. And simultaneously on that day, I also hit 1 billion views, which is unfathomable. It's such a ridiculous number that like I can't compute it, but I am so eternally grateful to all of you guys. Because yeah, that's cool. Like the views are cool, but like what we have is way cooler. And without that, the views, none of this would ever happen, would even matter. So cheers to you for a billion views because they're not just mine, they're also yours. And here's to the next three years. Also, I read this thing online that says if you gently stir your eggs while they're in the water, it helps to center the yolks better. I don't know if it's true, but just wanted to share. If anybody has some insight on that, that'd be sick. But I haven't tried it at myself yet. And I started stirring probably way too late. And now that our time is up on our eggs, we're gonna go ahead and move these to an ice bath. And we'll just let these cool down before we peel them and then slice them. Look at how fricking jammy these are. Jammy, delicious, and the most orange yolk I've ever seen in my entire life. Trade secret. Just kidding, I got these at the Japanese market. And now for the part that can absolutely make or break your ramen, noodles. I wanna start off by saying is if all you have access to is those dried instant ramen noodles, that's fine. They will still work, it'll still taste good. But if you can get yourself freshly made ramen noodles, it will completely change the whole experience. Check out your local Asian market, see if they have something like that. Check on Wee, Wee's the delivery service thing. They're not a sponsor, but they do deliver Asian groceries like a lot of places that I didn't think that they would. But no matter how you get them, I recommend with all of my heart that if you can, get them. I really like the Sun Noodle brand because I feel like they have the best texture, but whatever you have access to, use that. Into some boiling water, I'm placing my noodle basket. And I'm gonna do each serving one at a time just to not overfill my pot. About 150 grams of fresh noodles or whatever one serving is to you. We'll go ahead and break them up and cook according to your package directions. Mine is two minutes. And then now once your noodles are fully cooked, we're gonna go ahead and remove them. And what's really important is that you strain out all of the excess water. If you've ever been to one of those cool trendy ramen shops, what they'll do is they'll use their basket and then they just go and flick it down. Oh my gosh, it almost fell out. Don't worry, I put a towel down before I tried this. But essentially all that's doing is just removing all that excess water and stopping it from continuing to cook. You can also just put it in a colander and just give it a good shake, but this makes more of a mess and is cooler, so why not? Now to build our ramen, we'll start with about a tablespoon of our tare, one to two tablespoons of our aromatic oil, three cups of our broth. We'll gently lay in our noodles, giving them a nice fluff and lay. Couple slices of our pork belly, our beautifully jammy eggs, our nori, kamaboko, and a generous amount of our green onions. Thank you so much for watching. I really hope that you enjoyed it and I really hope that you learned something. Here's some videos I think you'll like to watch next. Here's a photo of my drop-dead gorgeous wife and I'll see you next week.