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(gentle chiming music) (indistinct chattering)
- How do you lose your map at a time like that?
- Believe me, I've asked myself the same thing ever since.
- Hello there.
Welcome back to another episode of "Anime with Alvin."
Today, we're gonna be taking a look at the ramen from "Ruby"
which, in the show, is served in a giant large pot,
and I have to say,
making a ton of ramen from scratch was an exciting idea,
and we're gonna be using The Way of Ramen's video
as a reference for Shoyu ramen.
In his video, he references Keizo Shimamoto,
a highly respected ramen chef
and actually someone I know very personally.
So thank you to you guys for the direction.
We're first starting with the soup.
I'm gonna take an entire whole chicken
and put it in a pot and cover it with water
and just let it cook for a little bit.
While that comes to a boil,
I'm gonna get started on the chashu.
I'm taking this rather large slab of pork belly
without skin and just trimming off any flaps
or bumps of meat that might get in the way while rolling.
These scraps will be saved for a snack later
so make sure that you don't waste those.
This pork belly gets rolled up nice and tight
with some butcher's twine and dropped into a pot
into which we're going to dump some marinade.
That means one cup of soy sauce, one cup of sake,
two cups of water and three inches of ginger,
three cloves of garlic, and two scallions just chopped up.
While waiting this to come to a simmer,
I realized that the liquid isn't high enough
to cover the pork so I doubled the amount of soy sauce
and sake while adding in a third cup of granulated sugar
to balance the sweetness.
This goes for about two hours,
flipping every maybe 15 or 20 minutes or so
to make sure that all sides of the pork are evenly coated.
Now that our whole chicken is simmering,
I'm adding in two and a half pounds of chicken feet
and roughly the skins of eight chicken thighs.
These will add some really nice flavor
and collagen to help thicken the soup.
This is gonna go on a low medium heat
for at least six hours and maybe up to 12.
Remember those pork trimmings we cut off earlier?
Well, now it's time to make them into a snack
so I'm just throwing them in into a little pan,
letting them brown and seer until the fat
starts to give the outsides little nice golden brown color
and adding in a handful of sugar
just to help get a caramel started.
Once the color's looking good and the sugar
is just on the verge of burning,
I'm adding in half a cup of soy sauce
and half a cup of sake to help de-glaze the pan
and just give everything a nice little bath.
To balance the flavors,
I'm finally adding a quarter cup of sugar
just to help glaze the meat.
It's a pretty foolproof sauce that works
for any sort of meat that you have leftover.
I just like it 'cause it's a way to use up leftover scraps.
We ate all of this in about 15 seconds.
Another component you might find
in some pretty tasty bowls of ramen
is an aroma oil, and in this case
I'm taking the green white parts of three scallions,
chopping them up pretty thinly,
dicing up two shallots into pretty small chunks,
doing the same exact thing with another three inch knob
of ginger and crushing and chopping up four garlic cloves
into small pieces.
Once our little army of aromatics
have been assembled and divided,
they go into 125 milliliters of vegetable oil,
starting the heat from very low and just turning this up
until medium to low heat,
just until the moisture has evaporated
and every single little bit in there
has turned a nice brown.
Once this smells really, really good and aromatic
this gets strained into a bowl
which we're gonna keep the oil separate
but also keep those crispy bits for later.
This is a little flavor jar that contains
300 milliliters of shoyu and 32.5 milliliters of mirin.
It's been sitting for a week
because that will allow the flavors to develop
in order to make our tare,
a very concentrated, powerful, flavorful sauce
that essentially seasons our soup.
I'm not sure exactly what goes on
but I can tell you over the course of the week
the flavors and aromas have changed quite immensely.
And to keep jamming this thing with more flavor,
I'm gonna add in a sheet of kombu
and about two shiitake mushrooms dried into this
and let this sit overnight.
Now to make some dashi,
combining 2.5 liters of water with 25 grams of kombu
and 12.5 grams of dried shiitake mushrooms.
This also hydrates and sits overnight.
While that's going I'm gonna soft boil
some eggs really quick.
Pretty simple.
Eight to 12 eggs, as many as you'd like,
six and a half minutes in boiling water
and straight into an ice bath.
Foolproof method for me,
gives me a nice soft jammy yolk every single time.
When the next day comes around
we're gonna pour all of this into a pot,
bring this up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit
with a temperature gun,
which I'm going to use on everybody in this room
to see if it works.
Aha, everybody's vitals is looking good
and once this reaches 140 degrees,
I'm moving the kombu and shiitake
and then bringing this up to 194 degrees.
Then I'm adding in 32.5 grams of katsuobushi,
letting that steep for about five minutes or so
and straining the whole thing
so we have a nice container of dashi.
To finish off our tare, I'm heating up this shoyu mixture
until it reaches 175 degrees, removing the kombu
and shiitake mushrooms and turning off the heat.
Then in goes five grams of sea salt
and 10 milliliters of Thai fish sauce
just to add some extra punch of flavor.
Like I said, this thing is very strong
and I'm quite excited to see how this
will eventually flavor our soup.
And this is our chicken soup from the day before.
It's been going for about 12 hours and has rest
overnight to cool.
I'm just removing a lot of the fat from the surface
and saving some of that for later
but also taking off a lot of the scum and extra fat
that we do not need in the end product.
To strain this, I'm not trying to disturb the whole soup
by dumping the whole thing in a strainer,
rather ladling it cut by cup into a strainer,
as much liquid as possible
without getting those chicken bits stuck in the middle.
After removing all of those little feet
and entire carcass of chicken,
I'm pouring the rest and trying to get as clear
of a chicken soup into this as we can.
These eggs have been hanging out in that ice bath
for long enough, so it's time to get them
out of their shells and into somewhere safer
to be cut open at a later date.
I always like peeling eggs in water
'cause it helps them remove any little bits of shell or skin
that might be stuck to the surface.
This soup now goes into a pot
and begins to heat before we can add in its aromatics.
So while that's going, here is our chashu
which has now emerged
from its very flavorful soy bath from yesterday.
I like to let it sit in the marinade overnight
that it's braised in just to absorb
a little bit more flavor.
My favorite part about cutting cold chashu
is that it stays perfectly together
and you get those nice pink cross sections
and swirls that reminds you that you are doing something
good with your life.
These are gonna go set aside because we're gonna go
and give them some solid heat treatment at a later time.
The aromatics for our chicken soup is vegetables
so I'm throwing in a quarter of a head
of Napa cabbage cut into squares,
half a head of garlic which is just cut in half,
and about 25 grams of ginger
which has peeled and been sliced.
This cooks for about 15 minutes at 200 degrees Fahrenheit
and the whole thing gets strained once more.
Again, you can eat those vegetables too.
I definitely took those home and added it
to my chicken and just like that, our soup is ready.
And now for the really fun part,
it is time to assemble our battle station to plate up.
So I'm taking each and every single one of these eggs,
cutting them in half and taking a half a second
to admire their beautiful, runny, soft yolk.
Next up is our chashu, which we have spread
into a single layer on a baking sheet
just so that we can take a blow torch
and beautifully sear each side of them.
This is usually my favorite part
of eating a bowl of ramen if they have it
and I like to get a little smoky
and torched just 'cause it smells
really, really, really good.
Now that army of toppings have been assembled,
including those greens from those scallions we cut earlier
we can now start to build this entire giant bowl of ramen.
I have to my left a giant pot of boiling water,
to which I'm going to ladle a little bit
inside the bowl just to heat it up.
These are some beautifully freshly handmade ramen noodles
we got from a Japanese grocery store.
I could definitely make my own
but they'd probably be really, really not good
so these are gonna do just fine.
They go into the water for roughly one minute per batch
and while those are cooking, I'm going to build my soup.
I remember watching Keiso make a bowl
of ramen a long time ago
and usually he starts by putting in the tare first.
So after exiting the hot water used to heat the bowl,
I'm pouring in the tare first,
followed by a lot of the chicken soup that we have made.
And once those noodles are ready, batch by batch,
I'm going to dump them into their nice little broth bath
and try to fold them using chopsticks
and provide a nice little flotation device
onto which our toppings will sit on top of.
And now we have to plate this
according to how it looks in this show.
So we're gonna start by doing a multitude of eggs
in one quadrant of our bowl
followed by a handful of pan seared enoki mushrooms
that we just quickly cooked off camera.
Next to it goes a handful of our crunchy aromatic bits
from our oil earlier.
Those fried garlicy shallot ginger scallion bits
are gonna be pretty good.
Opposite the eggs goes our entire army of chashu slices,
torched and seared.
At this point, I'm getting quite excited
'cause usually I only get two to three pieces
of pork in my ramen bowl and now we have about 7,000.
And finally to close the gap,
a handful of the scallion cream.
After doing a little bit more nudging and fidgeting
I now present to you our giant bowl
of shoyu ramen from, "Ruby",
with everything pretty much made from scratch
besides noodles themselves.
A recipe inspired by the Way of Ramen's video
and my dear friend, Keizo Shimamoto,
thank you to you both providing
such valuable assistance with this.
And we've been working on this pretty hard for two days
so I think it's about time we ate this thing.
And as always, first you must taste the soup.
Wow, this, I am surprised, but I'm also not surprised
considering this is a recipe that comes
from two of the most respected ramen people on the internet.
It is amazing.
So full of flavor, but not heavy or rich
like a lot of ramen can be.
And if I really wanted to describe this,
I could go to thesaurus.com and start pulling out
some big words but I gotta tell you
this just tastes super, super, super satisfying.
All the toppings, the eggs, the pork,
everything just goes together so well
which means that the whole entire studio
definitely went a little ham on this one.
Steve took home the rest.
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