This was Ramen at home!
When we were at
Union Market, we bought fresh Ramen noodles at the same store that J found
kimchi. The noodle didn't come with soup or seasoning. Just noodles. No instructions about how to cook. Even no ingredients or date for best by when, like the store's kimchi jar. Well, the kimchi was good; we expected the noodles would be too. To enhance our Ramen experience, I made special soup and toppings - soy sauce based soup with sliced pork, eggs,
Moyashi, or beansprouts and
Negi, scallions, like one of traditional Japanese Ramen bowls. In fact, this was my first serious Ramen project. For pork and eggs, I adapted a
recipe from a Japanese lady's blog who lives in NY. After cooking pork in Sake, red wine and soy sauce mix with scallions, garlic, ginger and a red chili pepper, about two hours, I added soft boiled eggs and rest them overnight in the refrigerator.
Next day, I removed all fat on the surface. The pork looked nice! Unfortunately our butcher gave us a fatty cut, so I had to cut some fatty part when I sliced the pork. I should have trimmed more fat before cooking. I would do better next time if there is next time...
I boiled noodles about two minutes. It looked like ramen and smelled like ramen.
To make soup, I mixed chicken broth and the pork stock. The most difficult part was actually picking up and cleaning beansprouts. I guess many Americans don't often cook beansprouts like Japanese, so there is less demands for beansprouts at least around this area. It's so hard to get nice fresh beansprouts like one in Japan! Anyway, I quickly boiled beansprouts. Fresh scallion was ready too!
It looked and tasted great! The pork was tender. The soup was tasty. The noodles were fine. The beansprouts had nice texture without unwanted bean tastes. However there was one thing that unexpectedly didn't turn out right: eggs. Their condition was lovely soft, but amazingly salty! I didn't know boiled eggs, especially yolk could absorb so much salt from the soup. Overnight soaking was obviously too long. The flavor was lovely, just too salty to eat for us. By pardoning the unexpected salty eggs, I think our first ramen-at-home project was successful. Better than I thought!
