New York strip — slightly over at a solid medium, but I’m not mad. Parmesan polenta rounds. Caramelized fennel with cara cara orange on the side. Not the prettiest plate, but it was damn tasty! A bottle of 2010 Baudry - Croix Boissee paired nicely.
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[Warning – Long Post]
RAMEN!!!
I know I said previously that we don’t make ramen from scratch in this house. That’s it goes against the very purpose of ramen – to get a hot, filling, delicious bowl of something that would be very time consuming to make yourself, quickly and on the cheap. Well, never say never. For various reasons, we found ourselves with the means and opportunity, so we came up with the motive.
4 days or so in advance: First, we made the stock in The Big Pot – a whopping 60 quarts. Note that what we made was really a pork stock, to be used for various purposes. Had we been making only ramen broth, a true tonkatsu broth, we would have handled this process differently. Anyway….We had 35lbs of pork bones, a whole suckling pig (frozen, a freebie when we bought the other one), some chicken backs, and a couple of split pig feet. Brought everything to a boil then washed it all, then repeated the process and scrubbed to remove blood and impurities. Then roasted the just bones in the oven, no oil, to develop a nice caramelization. Then everything went into the pot with charred aromatics and simmered overnight, skimming for the first couple of hours. The next day we cooled, removed solids and strained, and put it in the fridge to cool further. Next we defatted (reserving the removed sheet of fat for later use in the ramen), then reduced, then finally strained again through a finer strainer to remove all bone silt, and were left with an incredibly gelatinous, glorious flubber.
2 days in advance: Made the char siu. We had a whole pork belly from Stryker Farm which we rolled, tie, and poached soy, mirin, sake, sugar, ginger, garlic, scallion for 3.5 hours. Cooled and stored in the fridge under a paper towel, which became saturated with the liquid, in the pot overnight and rotated several times during that period.
Day of serving:
- We made the tare – first made niboshi dashi, also called iriko or sardine dashi with dried bonito, dried shrimp, dried shitake, and kombu. To that were added usukuchi shoyu, normal soy, ishiri (fermented squid sauce from Noto), mirin, sake. Brought to a simmer to remove alcohol.
- Made muyu, black garlic oil by cooking grated garlic in neutral oil gently and until blackened and combining with toasted sesame oil and blending.
- Made soy/mirin/sake/sugar marinated eggs.
- Finely chopped the reserved pork fat.
- Finely chopped scallion and covered with water/vinegar to remove the allium bite.
To serve, we warmed the char siu and sliced thin, then further heated the slices in a pan of the tare, then torched right before adding to the bowl.
We used a commercially available brand of noodles, a very good one that worked just fine, properly cooked in the cute little baskets purchased for the occasion.
To serve, first into the bowl is a few spoonfuls of the tare, then the broth, then a spoonful of the chopped pork fat. Add 3 slices of the char siu, an egg, black garlic oil, our homemade chili oil, and chopped scallion. We didn’t seek out any of the additional toppings normally found on ramen because, well, we ran out of steam.
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extremely impressive!! I would devour this lol. Did you use Sun noodles?
great job!!
Thank you! Yes, Sun Kaedama noodles.
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nice! Do you have a favorite ramen in Philly? I eat nom nom and terakawa fairly often but really wanna try Esso soon
Not really. We went to Neighborhood a few times and found it good, but mostly don’t eat it except when we are in Japan. I ration my carb indulgences pretty strictly, and almost never choose to spend on ramen in the US. In Philly, if I’m going to have noddles, it will be bun bo hue at Cafe Diem.
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Very fair - I have never been to Japan so you probably have a whole different perspective than I do. Cafe Nhan is another great one for Bo bun hue or pho!
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Wow, just wow.
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WOW, WOW, WOW!! 
Time to close this thread.
Thank you. It was fun, but I don’t think we’ll ever do it again.
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And here is today’s installment of guess the orange liquid:
I haven’t been posting much recently. I’m hoping to start again soon!
I caught up to a few weeks posts and wow! I wouldn’t mind eating at any of youze’s!! Thanks all for the posts and ideas!
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Some kind of shellfish bisque?
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That is awesome. Some people think it’s crazy (at least some of my friends) to go all out and make 1 meal that takes several days and hours of prep with top notch ingredients but that’s all part of the fun.
Quick bisque to use as a sauce for shrimps and rice on a weekday. Well done sir.
Thank you! Agreed, though as I said, I’m not sure we’ll do this project again. It was really good, even better today, but the delta between a top ramen shop, fast easy and cheap, and this is small in flavor/quality and enormous in effort and cost.
Thinking about this some more, and discussing with Jonathan - the char siu was superb, better than I’ve had in any ramen, ever. And we loved the fact that the salt level was under control. Now that we have the pork stock in the freezer, and since we have 2 more Stryker pork bellies frozen, we might very well decide to make ramen for guests or a weekend treat. But we probably won’t do from scratch again anytime soon. It’s only worth it for us, really, because we can make and store so much. I realize most people don’t have a 60 qt stockpot! LOL.
Salad with grilled broccoli and lima beans.
Fresh spinach, lettuce, tomatoes and peas.
Feta cheese and roasted pine nuts.
Turned in olive oil, lemon, a little bit of fresh garlic and dried chili flakes.
Butter toasted leftover sourdough bread baked in the morning.
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For yesterday’s late lunch, I made, among others, my usual rodaballo a la plancha (pan-grilled turbot) & linguine alle vongole, washed down with some nicely chilled 2023 Pazo de San Mauro Albariño.
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Leftover food.
Kale and onion’s slowly caramelized on a pan for two hours in olive oil, butter, smokey paprika and chili flakes.
Lots of garlic added in the last ten minutes
Turned with pasta, parmsesan cheese, rucola salad, fresh thyme and lemon.
Super simple comfort food. Really tasty and creamy.
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