Soooo. Been a while. Clearly something special was required to drag me from my non-writing stupor.
Because obviously we have been cooking. We haven’t starved, or forgotten how fire works, we’ve just not been in the mood to tell you about it. Okay?
Mostly because it has not been super exciting. That’s because all the super in our life has been stolen by the business of work.
So.
We needed a holiday. So we took a cooking a holiday (a holiday of cooking, not a holiday from cooking). One we have actually been planning since…2015?
That can’t be right.
Nope. Dan’s Amazon order history confirms he bought me Ivan Ramen for Christmas 2015. That’s…awkward.
I was so excited when he bought me this book. It’s incredibly complicated. The core bowl of ramen call up another 9 recipes. And some of those require another layer of recipes below that. I was in project planning heaven!
I full on geeked out and spent Christmas morning plotting out how all the recipes interlinked, and we realised this was going to be a fabulous effort to execute.
And then we sat on it.
Then in 2017 Chef’s Table did an episode on Ivan Ramen, and we remembered we had the book, and we remembered we really wanted to make some Jewish American Japanese food. And we promised we would take a week to make some delicious noodles.
But we’d already planned to holidays in 2018…so maybe 2019?
Finally, about a month ago, we fished a couple of chicken carcasses out of the freezer and trimmed all the fat off them before we made a chicken sweetcorn stock. The fat went back into the freezer and waited.
Then on Friday the 20th of September 2019 we used that chicken fat to make schmaltz.
It was the start of a beautiful thing.
Saturday the 21st of September
Traditionally ramen is all pig and fish. The introduction of chicken is very much Ivan playing with his Jewish American roots. It’s schalmtz. It’s chicken soup. It’s adding rye flour to the noodles (more on that later).
So on Saturday we made the purest chicken stock we have ever made. It’s just chicken. No herbs, no aromatics, no salt. Just a chicken.
Well, a boiling hen to be precise. Complete with head and feet much to our butcher’s evident delight. Did make the stock look a little horror story at times.
THE CLAW!
Monday the 23rd of September
We were supposed to be making Dashi, but we couldn’t source the ingredients. So that’s our one short cut, the dashi (fish stock) was from a powdered mix.
But enough of what we couldn’t do!
We made Pork Belly Chashu, which is pork belly cooked for 3 hours in a soy, sugar, ginger, garlic sauce.
We made Katsoubishi salt, which is ground, baked katsoubushi (shaved dried bonito (fish)) combined with salt
We made Sofrito, which, bizarrely, is a more Spanish/Italian fried vegetable base. It’s apples, onions, garlic, ginger, tons of oil, and an incredibly low temperature for 6 hours.
This was actually the recipe we had the most problems with. The temperature stated was definitely too low, and an instruction to uncover at the three hour mark was definitely missing. But we got there eventually.
We also made Omu Raisu, but that was dinner. It was rice, sofrito, peas and huge amounts of ketchup. Then we covered it with simple omelette and more ketchup. It was so incredibly Japanese.
Tuesday the 24th of September
Obviously, we didn’t just cook during our staycation. We also went out and experienced all the local venues we’d never quite managed to make. We went to The Blue Glass for lunch, and then trundled down the street to Beer Fly. Fortunately we got all the cooking before we started on the wine.
Using a load of pork trimmings from the butchers (which we don’t think they charged us for) we rendered down some pork fat.
We made some Menma, which are just lightly pickled bamboo shoots. And I would eat these for days.
And we made “Roasted” garlic. This was neither roasted nor fully descriptive of how amazing this was. This wasn’t required for the core ramen recipe, but did support some of the extras. It was also utterly worth the continuous care and attention it required over a full 2 hours of cooking.
It was oil and garlic. Cooked at a temperature where the oil starts to bubble, but the garlic doesn’t fry. The end result is garlic infused oil, and garlic cloves soft enough to mash with a spoon.
For dinner we made Breakfast Yakisoba, which was egg noodles, vegetables, Pork Belly Chashu, fried egg, and a little bit of a konbu and bonito stock.
Wednesday the 25th of September
We made Shio Tare (sofrito combined with salt water) and Shoyu-Sofrito Tare (sofritio combined with soy sauce, sake and mirin). We also baked some bicarbonate of soda. Not just for laughs, but because it’s a simple substitute for kansui powder which adds the alkalinity to the noodles. We also slow cooked some tomatoes to semi-dry them.
Enough about that boring stuff though.
We also made the best sandwich to ever exist. A Chashu Cubana.
First you make a garlic mayonnaise using mayonnaise (shop bought I’m ashamed to say), raw garlic, and garlic oil and roasted garlic from Tuesday. This gets spread on a subway roll (or ciabatta if your us. Again, scandalously shop bought).
Topped with Chashu, ham, gruyere, and sliced pickles.
Then the outside of the sandwich is spread with pork fat and the whole thing is fried.
We went to a FatCap Smokehouse for dinner. So it was a strong diet day for us.
Thursday the 26th of September
Crunch day today. Everything comes together to form one delicious bowl of ramen.
We made a lunch of menma, chashu and silken tofu.
We made half cooked eggs and let them soak in the reserved Chashu cooking liquid.
We made noodles! Toasted rye noodles!
Dan utterly kicked ass at this. I most mostly just an extra pair of hands.
I cannot stress enough how awesome Dan was with the noodles.
Then we made Ramen.
This brought together chicken fat, pork fat, shio tare, katsuobishi salt, double soup (a 50:50 combination of chicken stock and dashi), toasted rye noodles, menma, pork belly chashu, and half cooked eggs.
It was glorious.
We went to Bears and Tales to celebrate.
Any excuse.
Rest of the week
We played around with the remaining ingredients to make Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Mazeman and Roasted Garlic Mazeman.
We made some more noodles, this time Rye Fat Noodles, which we used to make Toasted Sesame and Spicy Chilli Tsukeman, and Four- Cheese Mazeman (which I actually didn’t like).
Then there was lots of us just making stuff up.
We also made two frozen desserts. The first was a tomato sorbet, which used the slow roasted tomatoes and I’d always planned to make.
The second was the Lemon Cream Ice with a touch of salt. I didn’t plan on making this until after we made the ramen, walked a half hour into town, had a vodka martini, and I still had fat on my palate.
Palate cleanser required. Palate cleanser delivered.
thegreedyguineapig 