Chicken Shoyu Ramen

Hey, remember when I made samgyetang?

Well, when I finished making samgyetang and juk, I decided to take the remains of my chicken and make me some stock because why not? Stock is always handy.  In recycling my chicken carcass, I also recycled as much of my soup stock ingredients as I could (that means gizzards, jujubes, chestnuts, ginseng, onion, and garlic) and threw some ginger in there because why not!

The wheels in my little brain might have also started turning and I may or may not have been planning to try and make some ramen because that’s been something I’ve wanted to try for a while.  Because I love noodles.  And soup.

Before I get too far into rambling about making ramen, this for you turds that are only here for the recipe…

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I went back and forth between trying to make my own noods (hehe) or just buying some from the store for a little while before deciding to just buy the pre-packaged kind and to save the noodle-making for another time (and another blog post).

I really wanted to try and do something similar to the kind of ramen that made Ivan Orkin famous.  If you don’t know who Ivan Orkin is, get the hell off my blog, watch the Chef’s Table episode that features him (Season 3, Episode 4) on Netflix, and then come back here.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Did you watch it? If so, good.  If not, shame on you.  Make sure you watch it later we need to keep moving.

One of my goals in life is to try Ivan’s Tokyo Shoyu Ramen (and also literally everything else he’s ever made but the Tokyo Shoyu is what really got me going, along with the roasted tomatoes), so I decided that I wanted to try a shoyu broth too! Shoyu is Japanese for soy sauce, so a shoyu ramen is a ramen that’s flavored and salted with soy sauce (duh).  Other ramen seasonings (apparently called “tare”) are shio (salt) and miso (fermented soy beans).

I looked through a few recipes on the google for inspiration, and they’re all basically the same…boil the heck out of some chicken and also dump soy sauce and and dashi and stuff in there and hope for the best.  While this cooking style is pretty typical for me and generally speaks to my soul, I really want to mimic Ivan’s style of pouring broth into a bowl that already has the soy sauce in it because I’m secretly bougie as hell one of the reasons I started this blog was to try new things and try to make pretty foods that also taste delicious.

Why does he do that? Nobody knows.  But if I had to guess it would probably have to do with flavor strength…In Korea, there are two types of soy sauce.  One is specifically for soups (Guk Ganjang, literally “soup soy sauce”) and it’s saltier (more salty?), less sweet, and lighter in color than regular ganjan, which is more like the soy sauce you use in sauces and dips.  Do other Asian countries have different types of soy sauce? Probs.  Also my friend Bridget just confirmed that in China they have different types of soy sauce as well.  Anyway, I would imagine that boiling a darker, less salty soy sauce in your soup would lead to undesirable consequences (like sad, not tasty soup), so pouring broth over a soy sauce mixture is better.

For my mysterious mixture, I ended up deciding to mix soy sauce with mirin and a little bit of Chinkiang vinegar.  Chinkiang is a type of vinegar from China that is dark like soy sauce and has an herbal, tea-like taste to complement the light vinegar flavor.  I had planned to use brown rice vinegar but decided to use the Chinkiang instead since the flavor was mild and I wouldn’t have to worry about the vinegar overpowering the rest of my tare.  The mirin added some sweetness and the vinegar gave a little bit of acid…I didn’t want too much acidity because I was also planning on adding an acidic food to my ramen and didn’t want to make it too sour because then my food wouldn’t be tasty and I would be sad.  Balance, you know?

Maybe I should write a post about all the factors that go into flavor.  Remind me to do that.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah.

The start of this ramen adventure was kicked off with the selection of the perfect playlist.  Since Bridget was here to help me and she’s never had an angsty teen period in her life, I decided to expose her to all of my favorite angsty songs from high school.  You’re welcome, Bridget.

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So before Bridget actually came over to help me prep the ramen toppings, I had to prep a few things myself in the name of flavor.

The night before our ramen adventure, I made tea colored eggs with a slightly modified recipe from Serious Eats.  The modification is that I used two less eggs and halved the marinade ingredients.  I soft boiled four eggs (I brought water up to a boil, reduced to a simmer, added eggs for 6 minutes, then removed from hot water and into an ice bath), peeled them and placed them into an airtight container.  I then poured a mixture of soy sauce, sake, mirin, water, and sugar over them and covered with a paper towel, making sure to soak the paper towel in the mixture so that the eggs would be always be in contact with the liquid and have a nice, uniform color.

I started making the broth the morning of since broth is the most important thing about ramen other than the actually ramen itself.  As soon as I woke up,  I soaked 2 pieces kelp in water for about 30 minutes to keep it from making the broth too fishy, drained the water, and tossed the kelp into the stockpot with about 6 cups broth, 2 cups of water, 6 chicken drumsticks (I wanted to use chicken thighs but the grocery store ran out 🙄), one onion, 5 garlic cloves, 2 pieces of ginger, and the bottoms of a bunch of scallions.  I brought the whole thing to a boil and reduced it to a simmer when I realized that I forgot to add shiitake mushrooms.  I soaked 6 dried mushrooms in water for a about thirty minutes before draining and adding them to the stock as well.  While I was soaking the mushrooms, I figured I could add some carrots and celery to the stock as well to help round it out.  I peeled 3 small carrots and grabbed a heart of celery and cut both ingredients into large chunks before adding them to my stock as well.

The last thing I prepped in advance was the scallions.  I took about half of a bunch and cut off about 1/4 inch of the tops, then thinly sliced them diagonally and tossed them into an ice bath so that they would be nice and crunchy when it came time to throw them onto the ramen.

Bridget came by at 1 and we started prepping the toppings for our ramen while the soup simmered for forever.  We roasted some tomatoes that we cut into thirds with olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little sugar for about 30 minutes at 450 and they kind of looked like roses, so that’s fun.  I wanted to use Roma tomatoes and cut them in half, but the Romas looked pale and sad and I’m not about that life.

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We then prepped a bunch (4 heads) of bok choy, half we cut into strips to have as a fresh green, and the other half we chopped into bite-sized pieces and threw into a mixture of ground pork, garlic, Korean red pepper flakes, sesame oil, and mirin.

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After that, we took a break because we worked hard and deserved that shit and also the rest of our toppings were a bag of frozen corn (that we thawed, of course), bean sprouts, and enoki mushrooms which don’t really need any prep other than a quick rinse.

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When we were finally hungry, the broth had been simmering for about 8 hours and smelled wonderful! In each of our bowls, Bridget and I poured 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, one tablespoon of mirin, and one tablespoon of Chinkiang vinegar before pouring a few ladles of broth on top.  We then added some al dente ramen and covered our noodles with all of our toppings.

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I’m so impressed with myself right now guys.  It was freaking delicious.  The soup was so well rounded with flavors from the chicken and vegetables and played well with the salt and tiny bit of tang from the tare.  The toppings really melded with the soup too! Everything worked together better than I had hoped, especially since the eggs were sweeter than I would have liked ( I won’t add extra sugar next time) and we had realized after the fact that we could have made the ground pork a little more spicy.  But those tomatoes! That little bit of caramelization with the acidity paired with those chewy noodles and the savory broth was everything I wanted it to be and more.

Once we were done eating, I realized that we had made WAY too much food for the two of us and had to figure out what to do with it all.  We froze our fresh Bok Choy and bean sprouts as well as the left over broth for another day of ramen.  The eggs and tomatoes ended up in my belly during the week as well as the ground pork and enoki mushrooms (I ate those with rice and kimchi for breakfast.  Yum).

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So yeah, I’d say Chicken Shoyu Ramen was a great success.

Go ahead and try to make this.  I dare you.  Also tell me how yours turned out and what you did differently! I feel like ramen is whatever you want it to be, so experiment with it and do what you want to do with it!

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So if any of you follow my insta or my Facebook page, you’ll know that I made my dream come true yesterday and went to Ivan Ramen Slurp Shack in NYC. It was everything I wanted and more. Also follow my insta and my Facebook page.