Good ramen is pretty simple to make at home, but really good ramen is almost impossibly difficult. Our ‘basic’ ramen at the restaurant is a complicated two-day process and the finished dish has eight different toppings, most of which are made in-house and involve quite a lot of labour in and of themselves. So even though ramen is my favourite food, I almost never make it at home, and when I do, it’s pretty much always instant ramen from a packet gussied up with a few simple toppings.
But a few years ago, I was doing some consultancy for a new Japanese restaurant that wanted to make ramen, but didn’t have the time or space to dedicate to producing large quantities of rich broth and lots of toppings. At first I thought: Bah! It can’t be done. There are no shortcuts to great ramen. But then I recalled a ramen shop in Sapporo called Keyaki that I visited in back in 2007. They did something I had never seen before, which produced an immensely flavourful and deep ramen in a matter of minutes: they stir-fried a combination of miso, pork mince and other seasonings in a rocket-hot wok before combining it with their broth, which browned the meat and caramelised the miso until the mixture was nutty and rich. I decided to give something similar a go, and it worked wonderfully. So here it is: a truly excellent bowl of ramen that can be made from scratch in under an hour. This, to me, is as rare and exciting as a unicorn.
Not at all difficult, especially considering ramen usually takes days to make