Ramin adventures in the South of France about to cook up some tonkotsu
ramen.
Hey, what is up, everyone! Brian, Ramen Adventures here. Forgive me if I mess
up my French this time and Biarritz in the South of France. What is going on I'm
I'm down here in the South of France to meet up with my friend Jean
Baptiste fromKodawari Ramen and we're going
to hit up the farm. We're going to create our own original ramen down here in the
Basque region of France. Well I'm back in France. What am I doing here? Is it for
the sights? Not really. The wine? Oh yes, but no. The food? The glorious, glorious
food. Well, this is ramen adventures and not cuisine Francais adventures so I'll
save those for Instagram. I must be here for the ramen. If you've followed ramen
adventures for a while you'll know that my friend Jean Baptiste opened his ramen
shop Kodawari Ramen in Paris back in 2016.
Since then his shop has become, from what I can tell, the most popular ramen
shop in all of Paris, if not France. They've won awards, the lines are long,
and they've even opened a second shop. At least we can still sample everything at
the original shop. The shop's classic shoyu ramen made with some amazing pork
chashu. Their Tori Paitan, creamy and rich. This limited menu green curry was insane.
Great flavors of unique veggie toppings. Paris is really becoming a ramen heavy
city. These are some of the shops people told me to check out. To be honest I was
a little more interested in the non ramen food this time around. So much
ramen in Paris, so little time. Actually, I'm out of time! Check this out
they have a little dorayaki stand. Dorayaki are Japanese pancake sandwiches
with sweet red bean paste in the middle. Great! We headed to the South of France
to the beautiful beaches of Biarritz and the hills of Bayonne. The pork supplier
for Kodawari Ramen is down here and we wanted to spend some time in the area
possibly making a special ramen using local ingredients. Let's do it. Let's head
to the Basque countryside and make some original ramen. I don't
know what's gonna happen here. It's gonna be super random. What an incredible
chance. The owner of Domain Abotia invited us over to see his vineyard and
use a ton of his pork to make an original ramen. We wanted to use as much
local ingredients as possible, make it unique, but still end up with a
traditional ramen. Let's check out some of these ingredients before we start
cooking and drinking let's have some milk fresh from the farm's cow. Kampai!
Okay what are we gonna do? So today we're gonna do a special Basque tonkotsu. So
we're gonna start by making two different soups. One with genkotsu, 2
kilograms, then 1 kilogram of segara and also jamon. 2 kilogram of ham bones
from Bayo (the owner) and so that's gonna be the first one then the second one it's going
to be a mix of tonsoku, 1 kilogram and 300 gram of the amazing seabura that we have.
First we're going to take for the first soup the bones blanche them, wash them to
remove the bad flavor and the bad smell from the other bones. Let's go!
We decided on a creamy tonkotsu ramen using pigs feet, femurs, back fat, and some
special 24-month aged jamon bones. The jamon bones aren't something you'd
normally make ramen soup out of as they are quite heavily seasoned, but the idea
seemed legit. After blanching those bones pick out any
congealed blood and make sure to pull out this alien-looking bit from the
spine. This is the stuff that gives ramen a bad smell and can affect the flavor as
well. Here is one of the many wine producing regions of France also some
amazing amazing pork. We got the we got the main soup boiling,
the umami soup, and then we're going to make the collagen soup, the sort of fatty
soup. You can do them separately, get the fat out of one and mix them together later.
Prep is mostly blanching and
cleaning, as well as getting a giant roast ready for the oven.
We're going with the local pork roasted in local herbs. How are we gonna cook
this chashu? This is like half sake half mirin preparation that we did yesterday
and I'm gonna add like the same quantity of shoyu soy sauce and then same put in
water and that's gonna be my marinade for cooking the chashu.
Wow! Yeah the pork smelling amazing.
Actually that oven he got from the Eiffel Tower, from the restaurant in the
Eiffel Tower. Somehow he has that down here with in Basque. Random tidbit for ya.
The Grapes of the vineyard were still a few weeks from being picked and the farm
was on break so the farmers said they'd keep an eye on the simmering bones.
To the market! So we're gonna go to the market but first a sneaky drink.
The ingredient we were hunting for was Piment d'Esplete, a local pepper prized
for its beautiful color and intense flavor. At around 4,000 scovilles this
pepper isn't crazy hot but definitely has a kick. Perfect for pairing with a
creamy soup. By the way it is AOC, meaning it's gotta be
local.
Back at the vineyard the soup was looking good. A little more prep and we
needed to figure out what to do with these peppers. Jean-Baptiste wanted to
smoke them with a bit of hay, a technique popular with fish in Japan. Would that work?
The smoke was too intense and grilling them didn't really work either. I
suggested we char them then peel off the skin and serve them like that. Score! The
soup was looking good but we had a bit of a problem. The Parma ham bones had
given a seriously strong flavor to the soup. We didn't want it overpowering
anything, so we scooped out all that meat and tossed the bones. While Parma ham is
usually sliced thin, these cooked chunks were damn tasty. For the noodles JB had
made some experimental ones with corn flour. Let's try it out.
They were good when we tried them. One day shelf life.
The noodles . . . what's going on? Yeah I was like a
experimental recipe. I think it was good you know when we try them it's he had
like a very short shelf life and after 24 hours I mean they're breaking about
Wait a minute! I got an idea!
Now that we were in full Basque style it was time to try out the final
bowl. Let's try it.
Nice work. Merci! What a great experience. It really shows that
for great ramen you just need some technique, some good ingredients, and a
lot of passion. What do you think? Should I come back to France and do a ramen
Tour de France, making local ramen in the culinary capitals of the French
countryside? let me know in the comments.
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