MELT IN YOUR MOUTH Sous Vide Japanese Ramen Chashu Pork Belly

If you don't know already, noodles are one of Carmen's favorite dishes. I think if there's one food I have to eat for the rest of my life, it would have to be noodles. Just check out her Instagram account, it's just noodles after noodles after ramen after different kinds of noodles all over the place. Obviously, ramen places are one of the places we frequent very often. Carmen is a lot more adventurous than I am. I always get the same thing. I usually get a tonkatsu, is that how you say it? Tonkatsu, yeah. Tonkatsu with extra char siu. That melt in your mouth goodness. And that's really what we're making today. Again, Japanese ramen char siu is different to Cantonese barbecue char siu. We've made that in the sous vide before, and I have to say it is one of the best things I've ever eaten. I think so far it's the best thing. That we've ever made, period. If you haven't seen that video, make sure to subscribe, and we also will have the link of it in the description below. Alright, let's get to it. Power this up. Boom. This is the marinade. We're gonna start off with sake. You can just use a cheaper cooking sake, that's good enough. Yep, that's what we're using. So one cup. Don't drink it all. Beauty. One cup of mirin. So we're doing this so we can cook off the alcohol a little bit. Alcohol doesn't cook off that well in the sous vide. Okay. So we're waiting for this to come up to a boil, and so what is mirin anyway? So mirin is a sweet cooking rice wine. It's very similar to sake, but it has a much higher sugar content. Teriyaki sauce, you taste that sweetness, it comes from mirin, and this is an essential Japanese condiment. So, can I set it on fire again? Again. It's starting. Woah. Okay, okay, I'm a little scared now. Oh my gosh. Um. Cap it? As long as it doesn't burn the house down, sure. It's dying, it's dying. Alright, so that was the show. That's it for today. Now it's coming up to a boil. We're going to add our other stuff. Soy sauce, one cup. Okay. Garlic, about six cloves. Ginger, about three inches. And kombu. Guess we're going to break this a little bit. And our final ingredient, big scallions. Well, these are Chinese scallions. I guess they are basically scallions on steroids. No kidding. In Chinese we call them da cong, literally meaning big scallions. The main difference with this and regular scallion is that it's a lot more pungent, spicy, and coarser. If you cannot find these in your supermarket, you can use leeks. So we have our pork belly here, about two pounds. So the first thing I like to do is I like to burn off the... Ah, the fire again. Burn off the skin. You mean the hair. He has this little smile on the corner of his lips. I always have a little smile. No, it's different, it's different. I can smell already, like a pork crackling smell. Okay, so I like to leave a little overhang here on my board. So I'm going to roll it up. So we're going to roll it up real tight, nice and tight like that. So once it's here, we're going to take this over. We're going to wrap this, okay, nice and tight. Okay, so once that's on, you leave a little bit here and then we just wrap. We wrap, we wrap, we wrap. Have you heard of... No, what is that? The prettiest pork belly? Yeah, that's still the prettiest pork belly. Am I the prettiest pork belly? Yeah, alright. Want to see my pork belly? I don't think the audience wants to see that. Alright, so we brought it back here and now we tie it off. The main reason why we do it in one take is so it just takes one cut to take it off. Nice, beautiful rolls. This is a spiral you'll get. So we're going to put this in. Okay, nice and easy. All we're going to do, pour our goodies in there. Straight in, all in. That's it. Actually, we're not even going to do that today. We're going to put it straight in. What? Straight in. You're not going to seal it? How are you going to seal it? No, I'm not going to seal it. I'm just going to push it in. See all the air is out. That's it, there's no air inside. So recap, if the bag is full of liquid, you don't have to seal it? Actually, it's because I find it really difficult to seal the bag when there's liquid in it. As soon as the vacuum goes, all the liquid goes in. But if you just make your bag a little bit bigger, you don't need to seal it. All of the air is pushed out anyway and it sinks to the bottom beautifully. Here's our pork, it's done. We took it out of the sous vide, put it on ice, put it in the fridge overnight, and now we have our jello. What's the purpose of this? So the purpose of that is so we can remove all of this fat. All of that is fat. Good old lard. Oh, lard. Can we keep this? So we're going to take out all of that lard. That's quite a lot of lard. Yeah, you didn't add any extra oil or anything. You're taking it out because you want to keep the marinade, right? Yeah, I want to keep the marinade. You can use this to marinate the eggs. Japanese ramen eggs. After you strain the fat out, you can warm up the contents. Strain it out, remove all the scallions and all the ginger and any other remnants. So you can use this extra marinade as a sauce, like a soup base kind of thing. Pork belly gold. So I'm just taking off all of this excess. Savory jello. Probably tastes good too. So one of the reasons we also put it in the fridge is so that it's much easier to cut. If you cut it, if you try to cut it while it's warm, it's just going to become all... Well, basically you're just going to have pulled pork. Is it just me or it shrank? It shrank. Does it actually shrink? Yeah. It's all fat, right? Huh. Shrank quite a bit. Looks like a different piece. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Who's to say? Is it? Yeah. And now you use your hands. That is really good. It's so tender. You can have the fat. Pork belly. You're touching all the food with your hands. It's really tender. I guess at home it's okay to touch with your hands. It's always okay. You eat with your hands. We're the only ones eating it, so it's okay. But if we invite people over, Kevin will still touch it with his hands. I still use my hands. I can taste the sweetness of the mirin. A little bit of salt. I'm just more impressed about how tender this thing is. We have more, right? We have more. Let's try this one. This one is thick. This one is still really tender, too. But I do like the char. Yeah, I think I like the char one better. Even though it was tender, the char parts have a little bit of very slight crunch. Yeah. But the inside is super tender. It just falls apart. Oh, our noodle? Oh. Yeah, we can try the noodle. We can try the noodle.