Life in the time of COVID19: Making Tonkotsu Ramen

If there's one thing that the lockdown has afforded us, it is the luxury of having more time in the kitchen. My husband and I have been trying our hands on recipes that we wouldn't have tried during ordinary times due to the amount of time needed to prepare them.

Today, or for the past 3 days rather, the husband has been preparing the main ingredients for his tonkotsu ramen.  He knew it needed a lot of effort but when would be the perfect time to make it except now, isnt it?  Following Adam Liaw's recipe, he embarked on a 3-day tonkotsu ramen journey.

Tamago

The first that he made was the egg. It is a simple dish for those who know how to cook soft-boiled egg - the white part is cook but the yolk is runny - but for us who do not do that, it was tough.  The first batch of 5 or 6 eggs was cooked for 7 minutes but when we were peeling it, we thought it was cooked thoroughly.  So we adjusted the cooking time to 4 minutes. It turned out that that was too short. The eggs kept on breaking up because the white was too soft and it couldn't hold the weight of the whole egg together. We wanted to try cooking it at 5 minutes but well, we ran out of eggs so we just went ahead and submerged the hard-boiled egg in its marinating broth.

Half-boiled eggs in broth

The following day, the husband bought another tray of eggs and after some experimentation, we figured out the perfect timing for cooking half-boiled eggs.  Boil the water, gently drop the eggs, lower the fire and simmer the eggs for 5 minutes. After that, put them in an iced bath. That will give you a perfectly cooked half-boiled eggs.

Finally, we had our target number of eggs and marinated them for 2 nights in the fridge. We tried one which was marinated for 1 night. The marinate has already permeated the egg whites but hasn't reached the yolk yet. Now we know why at least 2 nights is needed.

Shriek of delight 

Chashu

The chashu is pretty straightforward. We chose pork belly and had the skin removed by the butcher. The husband rolled it into a wrap and tied it with jute strings before simmering it for 45 mins into another kind of broth. Once it's cooked, it goes to the fridge for at least one day to make the meat firm and easier to slice thinly. 

Simmering the chashu in yet another kind of broth

Cross section of a beautiful chashu. Our roll was too big resulting to a more difficult slicing of thin pieces

Charring it with a blow torch

Tare

Apparently, tare is very important to Japanese ramen. It is the base for every ramen soup that some chefs guard their tare recipe and do not share it with their cooks.

For this recipe, the husband used bonito flakes, Japanese dried anchovies (which was bigger than the usual dried anchovies one will see in grocery stores or in the market), shitake mushroom and kelp. He left the mixture in the fridge overnight then cooked it later on in very low heat for quite some time to allow the water to extract all the umami flavor from the rest of the ingredients.  The strange thing is that the water should not at any point in time, be allowed to boil. How interesting could that be?

After that process, salt is added to the broth. A lot of salt that in the end, the tare tasted extremely salty. Once it's done, the tare would smell like the sea. Salty and fishy with that umami scent which I assume is from the anchovies and the kelp.

Tare. Add about 15-20ml of this for every 240ml broth

Pork broth 

Aah, the pork broth.  This requires a lot of love.  The husband used a mix of bones from the knuckle and the whole pork leg (which our butcher chopped).  The bones had to be cleaned, submerged in cold water and left in the refrigerator overnight. This process is supposed to draw blood from the bones to lessen the black scum that would come out from the bones when boiling it.  To prepare the bones for it's 7-hour boiling journey, put it in a pot and submerge it in cold water then bring it to a boil.  The first hour must be a vigorous boiling. The brownish/greyish/blackish scum must be constantly removed.  On the 2nd or 3rd hour of boiling, the scum should now be white. The broth must also be whitish at this stage too.

Broth in the making 

In its 7 hours of boiling, we may have used at least 10 liters of water to get, maybe 1.5 liters of broth?  I know, I know, it's such a crazy process but you must do what you gonna do!

Ok, we're not done yet. After boiling, the broth must be placed in an iced bath. The reason is that one must achieve a certain temperature to prevent the growth of bacteria, or something. At this point, we don't care anymore. We just follow what we are told.

Broth in an iced bath 

Once you have the broth, you are set. I mean you can set it aside in the fridge overnight (said Adam Liaw) but we refused. We used the broth on the same day that we made it because well, our patience ran out on the 3rd day of the whole preparation process.

Oil 

This may be the easiest ingredient to cook...if the pork lard is ready. Otherwise, this also takes time to prepare. The oil is derived from frying the pork fat. Yes, pork fat. So cooking ramen made us realized that tonkotsu ramen is not something that one should eat every day because of the fat, the salt, and well, the effort involved.

Infusing the oil with the taste and scent of spring onions, garlic and bonito

Now back to the oil. This is where bonito powder, chopped green onions and garlic would go to. These will help infuse the oil with a fragrant smell and a subtle taste that is needed by the broth.

Toppings

We used rehydrated black fungus and spring onions for the toppings. Preparation is easy. It just needed slicing.


Preparation

Just like with any noodle dish, preparation involves mixing the different ingredients together in the bowl following a certain sequence. For this ramen, the first that goes in the bowl is the tare, followed by the fragrant oil, then the broth, noodles, chashu and the toppings.  Now you have your Tonkotsu ramen! Itadakimasu!

Assembling your ramen. 15ml of tare, 10 ml of fragrant oil, about 250 ml of broth, a serving of noodles topped with chashu, spring onions, black fungus, bonito powder, nori, and chili

Our end product - a delicious bowl of Tonkotsu Chasu Ramen

Cooking for me used to be a mere trivial activity. It's something that needs to be done almost every day in order for me to feed my body with nutritious food. But with the kind of cooking and baking that we have been doing during the circuit breaker period, my husband and I had a better appreciation of the ingredients, the process and the amount of labour involved that one will not get from just buying food. Cooking is an enjoyable learning process. It's a combination of science and intuition, both of which are acquired from having to cook and going through the experience until you learn the rationale behind the process and know when something is perfectly cooked, undercooked or overcooked.

Cooking has also magnified the value of food. I grew up in a farm and from an early age, I was taught to value every grain of rice or every drop of soup.  Moving to the city and eventually to Sg, I saw how so much food is wasted when food is seen as a mere commodity devoid of any value once you have consumed what you needed or what you enjoy.  No matter how I held on to my food-related values, there are times when I would fall into the convenience of throwing leftovers that I think I would not need or I wouldn't want to eat anymore. But with cooking, especially those that require a lot of preparation, the process has re-emphasized the value of food. It's not just a commodity. It's a product of a long line of labor from the farmers, fishermen, traders, sellers, and down to us consumers. And like anything that we put a value on, we should don't throw them away easily.