How to Make Tanmen (Stir-Fry Ramen) That Stays Crunchy

Vegetables on most bowls of ramen are a garnish. In ramen, they are the start, stir-fried first, and then cooked into the soup broth until the soup tastes of them. Watch how it happens. We start with prep because, as with every stir fry, getting everything ready is more than half the job. Slice a quarter of a carrot into thin rectangles. It matters more than pretty here because every vegetable going into this bowl gets only about one minute of heat. Roughly chop 150 grams of green cabbage. Cut 30 grams of garlic chives into 5 centimeters lengths. Drop half tablespoon of dried wood ear into hot water to rehydrate. You will find it labelled black fungus in most Asian grocers. The vegetable side of this dish is wide open. Carrot, cabbage, sprouts, chives, and wood ear are my usual picks, but onion, mushrooms, your favourite, or whatever is going soft in the crisper drawers, all slot in fine. Then they slice two cloves of garlic and cut ten grams of ginger into fine julienne. Now 150 grams of bean sprouts straight into a bowl of cold water. They sit there so they stay crisp. And right before they go into the pan, you're going to shake them out hard. In a small cup, stir one tablespoon of milk together with one teaspoon of potato starch. Say, buy the stuff in Arm Street because that little cup is what decides how this soup ends up tasting. For the soup, pour six hundred milliliters of freshly boiled water into heatproof jug. Add one and a half tablespoons of Chinese chicken bouillon powder, one and a half tablespoons of sake, half teaspoon of oyster sauce, and half a teaspoon of salt. One thing about the bouillon, every brand is concentrated differently, so check the dilution on your own thing before you commit. Mine builds broth at one teaspoon per 200 milliliters. But if yours is weaker than that, you need to add a bit more, and vice versa. Brew is ready. Now the pork. Set a wok or a wide skillet over high heat and melt one tablespoon of lard until it shimmers. Lay 150 grams of thinly sliced pork belly out flat in the hot fat, spread apart, and season it with two pinches of salt. Then leave it alone. No stirring, no poking until the edges go crisp and brown. Tamin looks like a vegetable dish, and it mostly is. But the fat coming out of the pork right now is what holds the whole thing together. Every vegetable that goes in after this picks up a thin film of it. That is pork done. Drop the heat for a moment and add the ginger and garlic you cut earlier. Stirring just until they smell fragrant, just a few seconds, no more, or the garlic turns bitter. Crunk the heat back to high and the vegetables go in by order of toughness. Carrot first, then the cabbage, then the wood ear, then the chives, and the bean sprouts last. Shake and dry. Hit the whole pile with a pinch of salt. Keep them moving for about one minute until the whole pile turns glossy and starts tangling into a soul. Keep the heat high the entire time. Drop it and the vegetables stop saring and start sweating. And once they are sweating, you cannot get them back. Now the part nobody expects. The instant they are bright and barely wilted, lift every single vegetable out of the pan and onto your plate. Pour the hot soup into the same pan and bring it up to a boil. While the soup comes up, a quick word on the name. Tomen and Tantanmen are not related. Same corner of the same family and nothing else in common. If you came here wanting the spicy sesame one, that video is on the card. Boil two portions of ramen noodles in a separate pot with plenty of water. Fresh ramen noodles are the targer here, and if you want to make them soft, that video is on the card too. Here is the one rule with these: boil them half the time on the package, half they finish in the soup. And if you boil them all the way and simmer them in broth, on top of that, they turn soft in the bowl before you can even sit down. A thin broth you can fix, a mushy noodle you cannot. Drain them and slide them into the boiling soup to finish for the rest of the package time. Taste the soup on its own now before it goes anywhere near a bowl. This is the moment to bring it up with a small pinch of salt if it tastes flat. Adding a little at a time so you do not overshoot. Now it's time for the vegetables to come home. Tip them all back into the pan and reach for the little cup of milk slurry from very start of the video. Pour it in. Stir once gently and look at the surface as it turns. The starch gives the broth just enough grip to hold on to the noodles, and the milk takes the edge off the salt, so the bowl feels fuller without feeling heavy. And there is the payoff for pulling the vegetables out. They have been sitting on the plate the whole time, and the carryover heat plus this soup finished them the rest of the way. So they arrive at the table still snapping. Divide the noodles and the soup between two bowls, then pile the vegetables high on top rather than stirring them through. Finish each bowl with ground white pepper, and you can be heavy-handed here. Then a drizzle of toasted sesame oil across the surface. The steam takes its strategy. And this is my tammen. This is what a mountain of vegetables tastes like once it cooks into the soup. Make this tonight. Google tammen stacchi for the full printable recipe with exact measurements and timing. Want even more delicious recipes? Grab my free cookbook from the link in the description. Okay, let's go over the ingredients one more time, and if you're ready to cook, grab the written instructions by clicking the full recipe box with a picture that's about to pop up on your screen. Tap the recipe card on your screen for the four-ingredient omelet with exact measurements, every timing, and notes for getting each step right. Next time I'm making TKG. See you then. Tap the recipe card on your screen for the full printable version with exact measurements, every timing, and notes for getting each step right. Next time I'm making TKG. See you then.