The Easiest Homemade Ramen You Can Make: Japanese Tan Tan Ramen

If you're looking for a quick but restaurant-quality ramen recipe that doesn't take all day to simmer on the stove, then this is for you. Hey, everyone, it's Sarah from The Walks of Life, and today I have a ramen recipe for you. Tan-tan ramen is a Japanese dish, but it's actually based off of Chinese Sichuan dan dan noodles, or dan dan mian. So this is a spicier dish. It uses ground pork rather than a roast pork chashu. It has some sesame paste in it, so it's really kind of creamy and savory. For this recipe, you don't have to make this crazy long-simmered broth with pork bones or anything like that. It's a fairly simple process. We're going to use chicken stock, and we're actually gonna use soy milk for creaminess. You could also use oat milk. And we are going to make a tare, or a soup base, with sesame paste, soy sauce, and other ingredients, including dou ban jiang. We're at the very end of this jar's life here, but it's a spicy fermented broad bean paste, and that's what's gonna give this dish its spice, as well as a little chili oil. This is actually one of our most loved recipes on the blog. People who make it say this tastes as good or better than my local ramen restaurant, and I'm gonna show you how to make it. I am going to start by marinating my ground pork. This recipe makes two servings, so we are going to do four ounces per bowl. I'm gonna season it with some minced ginger and some mirin. So I'll start with the ginger. I need about a tablespoon of minced ginger. I'm gonna use a little bit less because I'm using organic ginger, which is actually really quite strong. So I'm just gonna very finely julienne, and then mince this way. And I will add that to the pork. And then I need a tablespoon of mirin. There are varying qualities of mirin. This is just what we got at our local grocery store. It's also totally okay to add Shaoxing wine here to substitute that. And then I would just add like half a teaspoon of sugar because mirin is quite sweet. So I'm going to get the ginger really nice and incorporated. You often will see rice wine with a pork dish because it sort of cuts that porkiness, for lack of a better term, and just sort of softens that flavor a little bit. We're gonna need two cloves of chopped garlic. Now I'm just gonna chop the scallion for the topping. And this stem is a little thick, so I'm actually gonna cut it in half lengthwise, which is always a good idea. So now we're gonna mix up our soup base, which is really gonna give the broth a lot of flavor. So I'm gonna start with the sesame paste. I need two tablespoons. This is Asian sesame paste. So you can see it has this like really rich brown color. It almost looks like almond butter. This is very different from tahini, which is also a sesame paste, but that is usually made with very lightly toasted sesame seeds or raw sesame seeds. It has a different flavor. We get a lot of questions about whether you can use tahini as a substitute. It's totally different. You definitely need a Chinese sesame paste for this. You could find Japanese sesame paste as well, but definitely it should have this dark brown color. So next I'm going to add two tablespoons of soy sauce, a tablespoon of chili oil, and this is going to give it some spiciness. And then finally, I have to add a teaspoon of rice vinegar. This just adds a little bit of tang to balance out the richness of the sesame paste. And a half a teaspoon of sugar. That will make you enough soup base for two bowls of noodles. And if you're making more, just multiply the recipe as needed. So a quick word on ramen noodles. So we are using fresh ramen noodles here today. And where you might see with tonkatsu ramen, thin straight noodles, we're actually gonna use the wavy noodles today, which are more common in this tantan ramen. The best brand I found that you can find in like a Chinese market or even some regular grocery stores is Sun Noodle Company. They cook up great and that's what I have today. Okay, so we're ready to cook and we're going to have three things on the stove. First, we have a pot of water that's coming up to a boil for our noodles and vegetables. Then I have a pan to cook my pork in and I have another pot here which I'm going to simmer the stock mixture in. I am going to put in two cups of chicken stock. In this case, I'm using two cups of water with two teaspoons of Better Than Bouillon, two cups of unsweetened soy milk. You can also use unsweetened oat milk. I'm just gonna use a whisk just to make sure that the bouillon paste is well incorporated. And I'm gonna bring this to a simmer but I don't want it to come to a full rapid boil or the milk can split and then you get kind of a grainy look. So now I'm gonna cover that and I am going to cook my pork. I'm gonna start by adding a little bit of oil. This pan is already heated. So I'm just gonna add the pork. I have a little bit of residual Better Than Bouillon. I'm just gonna like kind of put it on the pork. A little extra flavor never hurt. So I'm just gonna break up the pork and I want it to brown. And the goal here is to get it kind of crispy. So as I said earlier, this dish is actually based on a Chinese dish, Dan Dan Mian, which is actually not a soup based noodle dish. It is a dry like sauce toss dish. The Japanese have definitely taken this version and made it their own, but it has sort of roots in the Chinese Sichuan dish. If you want to try a Dan Dan Mian recipe, my mom has a great recipe on the blog that is very traditional. And then my sister also has a shortcut Dan Dan Mian in our cookbook, The Walks of Life, Recipes to Know and Love from a Chinese American Family, which we will link in the description box below. And you can also watch a YouTube video of us making that shortcut Dan Dan Mian and we will put it right here. So my pork is starting to crisp and it's in nice little bits. And now I'm going to add the dou ban jiang. Spicy bean sauce. Finally reached the bottom of the dou ban jiang. We finally reached the bottom of this jar. I'm gonna add this garlic. And we are just gonna stir fry this for about a minute. Okay, so my pork mixture is done. Now I just have to cook the noodles and the vegetables. I'm just going to add half of my soup base into this serving bowl, one serving. Now I'm gonna add my noodles and they're only gonna cook for about a minute to 90 seconds. For the first minute, I'll just cook the noodles. And then at the end, I'm gonna add the spinach because those need even less time to cook. And we're gonna come over and pour in the soup base because we want the soup to be in there before the noodles go in. So we're just mixing the soup base with the broth and the soy milk mixture. And the noodles and veggies are done. And now we can top with pork and some scallions. Okay, let's give this tantan ramen a try. Here's our beautiful noodles. Still chewy. Mm, that broth is so tasty. It's so creamy from the sesame paste and that soy milk mixture. You get those little bits of pork and they are so savory and a little spicy and it's really good. Oh wow, those noodles are perfect. It tastes like you're at a ramen restaurant but ramen takes a long time to master, right? You have to know what you're doing with the broth and with the toppings and the ramen egg and all that. This particular ramen is pretty easy to pull off without all of those skills and prep. And it's just really satisfying, really tasty. And if you like a spicy ramen, you're gonna love this. Mm, delicious, so satisfying. If you want more proof, then just head to the comments on this recipe. See how many people have said that they can't believe that they made it themselves at home and just give it a try. And if you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out more recipes on thewalksoflife.com.