I have never cooked Ramen before, in fact, I have never eaten Ramen before, so this dish was quite an adventure for me. The lovely folks at www.souschef.co.uk emailed me out of the blue to ask if I’d like to try out their Ramen kit and I said HELL YEAH! One of my resolutions for this year is to cook more Asian food (a broad church, I know), I got very excited.
The kit arrived, 2 fabulous Ramen bowls, 2 slurping spoons (forgive me, there is probably a proper name for these spoons), some Ramen noodles, and a recipe card…
I’d read about a new Ramen book called Simply Ramen by Amy Kimoto-Kahn over at Eat Drink Films, and decided that the Ramen kit gave me a good excuse to treat myself. I pored over the book to choose a recipe, eventually deciding on the one that graces the cover… Oven-Broiled Karaage Curry Ramen.
I made teriyaki sauce and marinated two hard boiled eggs for two days, I made a HUGE batch of miso base, I bought some Golden Curry cubes through the internet, I marinated chicken then roasted it, I toasted sesame seeds and fried garlic slices. I was like a human Ramen making machine. Then on Friday night Mr R came over and I assembled the whole kit kaboodle using some home made chicken stock from our divine Pipers Farm Christmas chicken.
Result? One of the most divinely delicious things I have ever made outside the movie star recipe pantheon. Probably joint first in the umami stakes with Valli Little’s Massaman Chicken. Goodness me it was good!
Mr Rathbone loved it and said the following: “this is one of the nicest things that has ever happened round here.” He’s always very complimentary about things I cook, so that’s a big compliment. As we got further and further into our Ramen the flavours seemed to get better and better and he said: “It’s all starting to happen in the bowl! It’s a happening soup!” He liked the egg and chicken combination, saying it was “like a mother and child reunion,” and last but not least, when he saw the name of the next recipe in the book: Geng Gari Gai Ramen, he said: “Glengarry Glen Ross.” So perhaps that should be our NEXT dinner and a movie.
Our plan was to watch Tampopo after having our Ramen, it seemed the perfect movie accompaniment…
I love this line about Tampopo on IMDB “The main story is about trucker Goro, who rides into town like a modern Shane to help Tampopo set up the perfect noodle soup restaurant.” Regular readers might remember how much I love SHANE…
But alas, after all my marinading, miso base making, toasting, frying and general Ramen making activity I was far too pooped to watch a film, so the pleasures of Tampopo will wait for another day…
Amy Kimoto-Kahn herself, is a fan of the film, and wrote a lovely mini-review of it for Eat Drink Films which you can find here – A Fistful of Noodles.
The thing that pleased me most about the Ramen? That everything fitted so perfectly into the bowl. Clever huh?
Thanks so much www.souschef.co.uk for sending me this lovely gift. For those who don’t know Sous Chef they are brilliant. Purveyors of weird and wonderful foodstuff, fabulous cooking kits and gorgeous tableware, I could spend a fortune with them! Now I have made my very first Ramen, I am of course, drooling over their big Japanese bowls…
and little dipping sauce bowls:
and a million other beautiful things. Sigh.
Actually, I think that the nicest meal I had in 2016 was at my neighbour Akiko’s house. She prepared an amazing Japanese banquet, and all her bowls and sake cups and sushi plates were GORGEOUS. Photos do not do this dinner justice…
Perhaps I will put some bowls from Sous Chef on my Christmas list for 2017… Bring on more RAMEN!
If you like ramen, I recommend Tim Anderson’s book Nanban. It’s all Japanese comfort food, including a number of ramen recipes. We turned our Christmas goose carcass into festive ramen, complete with thin slices of pigs in blanket and shredded picked sprouts on top.
aaaaaaaarg! Stop! That makes me sooooooo hungry. I hope that there is photographic evidence of that goose ramen, in fact, I’m going to hop over to your blog to find out!
OMG – I have just seen it. That sounds and looks utterly DIVINE. And pickled sprouts? GENIUS.
ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS!
When I think of Ramen, I think of Top Ramen, which is totally NOT like yours. It’s basically a brick of noodles with a flavor packet.
it was definitely worth all the effort. I think the Golden Curry cube may have been the secret ingredient that made it so fabulous. I am craving another bowl right now! The thing that took the most time was the miso base, but I have enough for five more bowls in the freezer – hurrah!
That ramen looks delicious! I must try that 🙂
There’s a portion of the miso base in my freezer with your name on it my lovely!