Izakaya Alice: Ramen

Last night, Izakaya Alice was in full swing!!

On the menu earlier was a Smoked Turkey, two Nappa Cabbage salads, and the wakame salad. We also served some Five-Grain rice. This was just an ordinary dinner menu, though. It wasn't Izakaya Alice...

...until 12 AM!

Izakaya Alice opened up shop as a Ramen Joint! I made some shoyu (soy sauce) ramen and shio (salt) ramen using the same recipe as before. Unfortunately, I only had lame-o dried ramen noodles, but the soup was creamy and rich without being oily. I was pretty happy with it!

We didn't close shop 'til close to 3 AM. Needless to say, my Sunday morning hiking plans were diverted, but I hadn't had that much fun in a LOOOOOOOOONG time! I laughed so much for the entire evening that my face muscled hurt all day today!


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By the way, I don't know if my wakame salad is the same wakame salad that Angeline asked for earlier, but mine is so super simple, I don't even know if it can be really called a recipe...

Wakame Salad:
1. Bring dried-wakame to life by soaking in water, ~5+ min.
2. Blanch pea sprouts and chill in ice water.
3. Slice cucumbers.
4. Arrange wakame, pea sprouts, and cucumbers in a nice glass bowl.
5. Mix ponzu with a touch of sesame oil and ginger; pour over salad.
6. Sprinkle toasted sesame seeds.
7. Add tomatoes if you like, and you're done!

Ramen Fever - Part II

I ran out of my favorite breakfast item a few days ago, and I've been scrambling in the kitchen every morning, trying to find something I wanted to eat... I've found myself eating the pseudo-fresh ramen packages for breakfast two days in a row, but it's just not the same anymore... I used to genuinely like those packets. But now... after my exposure to really high quality ramen in Japan... they just don't do anymore...

These pictures really don't do the ramen justice, but it's the best I could do with the Papa Bear's automatic camera and the strange yellow lighting at the Nagoya Men-douri ramen theme park. The theme park is made to look and feel like the mid-Showa period (~50 yrs ago?), and so the entire park has that yellow, old-school light-bulb kind of lighting...



Seriously, Japanese ramen really has changed a TON in the decade I have been away from the Japanese ramen scene. I've been a big fan of ramen all my life, but my favorites were always the instant bowl kind (vs the instant cup ramen). I do remember how ramen shops were getting increasingly more popular with every short visit back to Japan - I distinctly remember one noodle shop that was so good a few years back, I had two bowls of the ramen back-to-back to the store keeper's surprise. Back then, though, it was the noodles that caught my appetite. Not until this last visit, did I get to try some of the supposedly best ramen soup - the new, powerful driving force behind the Ramen Fever in Japan.



I've been following some of the Japanese ramen blogs, comics, and essays, and here is the gist of the story. Ramen shops started out with just making a simple stock for the noodles in Post-War Japan. Back then, the seasoning was the differentiating aspect for the shops. Then, the Hakata Tonkotsu Ramen Boom happened, and all these shops with mega-rich pork broth started popping up everywhere, redefining what a ramen soup should be like. As the ramen shops learned how to make powerful broth from all sorts of animal parts, the quality of the ramen soups improved drastically and more creative efforts were put into the noodles to match the soup better. Soon, the revival of the fish stock broth as a harmonious partner to the animal broth blossomed, and ever since then, ramen in Japan has become a culinary achievement like few others - quick, delicious fast-food meals where chefs carefully construct flavors, mixing and matching ingredients, toppings, spices, noodle textures, and anything else they can possibly think of changing to improve upon their ramen.



I only had enough appetite to sample two of the six ramen shops for a total of 8 bowls of ramen - 2 main bowls and 2 half-bowls for the four of us at two shops. The two shops differed in their strengths - the first shop being more noodle-focused and the second shop being very much soup-focused. Although I always thought I was a noodle-focused kind of girl, the soup at the second shop really blew me away. It was simply divine. The complexity of the Shoyu ramen soup was amazing - rich in deep flavors with that familiar warm undertone of the Japanese favorite dashi - fish and seaweed broth. I smelled the dried fish ever so slightly while the chicken and pork added strength that dashi never had. There was no hint of oiliness or heaviness, just deep, nourishing richness of a well made animal stock. No joke, I have never had soup so perfectly delicious to my palate before.

I learned a lot from that bowl of ramen - I think my soups are going to get better now that I have a clear idea of the 'most delicious' flavor... Although it's too hot now to spend hours infront of the stove, I think this winter is going to be a soupy winter!

Ramen Fever - Part I

Since it's a lot later tonight than I expected, I have to keep this post short...

But let me tell you, there are some serious food bloggers out there in Nagoya, Japan. My hometown of Nagoya is not particularly famous for ramen, but just a quick Google search for ramen blogs in Nagoya will bring a plethora of interesting sites.

Seriously, these guys eat one new bowl of ramen a day... And really good ramen too - this is not your Maruchan college instant noodles. This is a serious culinary movement in Japan - the Way of the Ramen.

They recently built an entire indoor 'theme park' in Nagoya, dedicated to ramen. Titled Nagoya Men-ya Yokochou (Nagoya Noodle Shop Corner), the shops in this park are run by guys who are serious ramen-freaks. From 6/24-8/31, they are having a spicy ramen festival, where all seven of the shops have created a new menu item - a spicy ramen - to combat the summer heat.

Luckily, when I was there, one of the shops was undergoing renovations/replacement, so I only had six shops to choose from - but let me tell you. Choosing the six shops in there was as challenging as trying to decide on the best meals in San Francisco. Some noodle shops play up their noodles made with special water, while other shops emphasize their soups made with the new, trendy double-soup method: two soup stocks - one that is usually seafood-based and one that is land animal-based, separately made and mixed in the bowl right before serving to bring out the best combination of broths and flavors.

But that's all I can handle reporting now...

More coming tomorrow~!

The Best Recycled Turkey - Ramen

I had a belated Thanksgiving meal last night (Saturday) with some friends at my place. It was a pretty eclectic menu, consisting of a roast turkey with basil-cilantro-garlic shoved under the skin (best way to get the flavors into the bird!), brown and wild rice stuffing with raisins and a variety of Asian mushrooms, soymilk turkey broth gravy, pumpkin Israeli couscous, soy milk mashed potatoes, and pomegranate molasses carrots. Appetizers were sliced grilled steak that the Papa Bear and I call 'Bobby's Beef'(more on this on later this week) and home-shucked Kumamoto oysters with homemade daikon gratings and ponzu sauce. Heh, not your typical Thanksgiving meal, but the spirit was definitely there...


Surprisingly, we didn't end up with a whole lot of leftovers besides the turkey carcass. But the bird carcass is actually my favorite part of cooking an entire animal. I am too much of a cheap-o to make stock with an entire bird, but a carcass with most of its meat picked off? Perfect. I take this as my special opportunity to create delicious broth by cooking the leftover body for hours on end. I had a few left over beef bones as well, so I threw those into the soup to add some more iosine monophosphate umami into the mix to counter act the predominantly glutamate-powered broth.



I usually turn this bird broth into risotto or some other Western dish, but as I was dancing around the kitchen celebrating the fragrant turkey aroma my broth was emitting, the Papa Bear came downstairs (our rooms are upstairs) to see if I wanted to go out for pho+?. As I was still in my PJs and planned to stay in my PJs for most of the day today, I suggested that I make turkey-pho for us instead. To this, he asked me if we had any pho noodles at home...which we didn't have. So I quickly replaced my suggestion with ramen. The broth I had made was so rich and so deeply complex with cilantro, basil, garlic, and some left over rice stuffing floating around, I was certain it would rival most ramen broths in the Bay Area. We agreed that ramen for lunch sounded good, so I decided to do a little experiment.


As most ramen fans know, most stores have a big pot of stock that has no seasoning in it, and ramen soup is made from stock and seasoning individually in each bowl. What that meant was that I could try a few different combinations of seasoning to go with my rich turkey broth. I assembled a simple old-school shoyu broth (extra-strong bonito broth with soy sauce), a tomato-powered salt broth (because tomatoes have the same molecular umami composition as bonito broth and soy sauce), and nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce) with counter-balancing ginger.


I added just enough turkey stock to the three seasonings to create a trinity of choices. Each of them was so individually different, I was totally amazed. Utterly taken back. I mean, theoretically, of course all three soups ought to taste different, but boy, this was an unique experience. All three of them had the same background flavor of that almost gamey turkey smell, but the top note - the first taste - was so drastically different. The shoyu was buttery and powerful in a delightful way, the tomato-salt was gentle and nourishing, and the nouc mam... that just didn't work. The nuoc mam-ginger was just too edgy and harsh; it didn't envelope the stock to bring anything out of it.


The Papa Bear was immediately smitten with the shoyu while I preferred the tomato-salt (which is to be expected, since the Papa Bear likes rich ramen, while I gravitate towards the lighter, delicate ramen broth). Once the soup seasoning was decided upon, I made more of the seasoning we liked (the first batch was tester-sizes), prepared some boiled eggs for toppings, cooked up some frozen, ex-'fresh' ramen noodles (did you know that if you freeze 'fresh' noodles, they get chewier?), and voila - shoyu and shio ramen was created from our Thanksgiving leftovers! What was also very amazing was that this dish, even though there wasn't a piece of turkey meat in the end, was very deserving of being called 'turkey ramen'. The broth mingled beautifully with the noodles, such that each bite was full of turkey essence and fragrance. I will definitely do this again next year!

PS:
The Papa Bear preferred my seasoning over the store-bought packaged seasoning...