- [Andrew] This episode is
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BingingWithBabish.com. On the sites, you'll find recipes, equipment lists, other news and updates, all beautifully designed,
if I do say so myself. Get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com/babish. (characters speaking Japanese) - [Alvin] Hello there. Welcome back to another
episode of "Anime with Alvin." Today I'm gonna be making probably one of the most iconic anime
recipes of all time, the Ichiraku Ramen from "Naruto." The ramen from the show seems
to be a miso tonkatsu ramen, so I have three kinds
of different miso here. But before we get to that, we have some other things
that we need to attend to. A bowl of good ramen
usually has quite the number of components that make it delicious. And the first thing that
we're gonna get started on is the char siu. What I got here is a
whole slab of pork belly. This one has skin on,
but in making char siu, it is usually recommended
to actually take the skin off for easier cooking
and handling purposes. In the show, Naruto does
like quite the amount of char siu in his ramen, so
we are making a lot today. Before I roll the pork up to make those signature circular patterns, I do need to trim off a lot of the fat and a lot of the excess
meat that comes with it. This stuff is great to marinate, chop up, and cook in a stir fry, so
I'll be saving these for later. And I do want to mention that I have not made
ramen from scratch before. And so in order to make this video, we reached out to Ryan from Way of Ramen, who runs a magnificent YouTube channel focused on all things ramen. He also happened to
make the Ichiraku Ramen from "Naruto," as well, and we are going to be taking a lot of our recipe based off of
his techniques and videos. So thank you, Ryan. I
hope I make you proud. So after putting this little
pork belly through a diet plan, we are now ready to roll. To begin, I'm laying down four pieces of equally cut string or butchers
twine on a cutting board. It's really important to keep things tight 'cause if you don't,
everything's just gonna kind of go everywhere and it's not very fun so might as well keep it rolled tight. But once the pork belly has been turned into a long and very tight tube, I'm placing it seam side
down onto the string. That's also really important so that things don't start
flopping around again. And one by one, I'm tying up the string in a pretty simple knot, making sure that it is
relatively tight to keep the pork in its nice tubular shape. One final step, just give the
pork a little bit of a slap. This is for quality assurance purposes. Just like how this phone call might be recorded or monitored. I would like to introduce
you to the Holy Trinity of a lot of Asian cooking, ginger, garlic, and scallion. After chopping these up, these are gonna be the
perfect accompaniments to go make friends with our pork. But first I do wanna get a head
start on the pork's flavor. So in a large Dutch oven, over high heat, I'm searing off the surface
of the rolled pork burrito until the edges are nice and golden brown. I don't believe this step is necessary, but, hey, might as well get
some free flavor in there. Now I get to add the aromatics. So the ginger, the garlic,
and the scallion go in, and now time for the liquids. I'm pouring in shoyu,
sake, water, and sugar. This is going to be the braising liquid for the pork to get nice and tender and also absorb a lot of
those flavors as it cooks. It's kind of like a big flavor hot tub, and honestly a little jealous
of the pork right now. And once the pork is relaxing in its nice little bubble bath, I'm gonna use a tool called a otoshibuta. Essentially, it's a drop
lid that goes directly on top of the simmering liquid and the food inside the pan to
prevent a lot of evaporation and to evenly distribute the
cooking liquid along the food. There's a lot of ways you
can actually make this out of parchment paper. I think it's a pretty cool
trick, so look into it. As far as timing goes,
I'm gonna let this go for about two to three hours
until it's nice and tender. Now, in the show, it's mentioned that
Naruto's favorite ramen is a miso tonkatsu ramen. So we need to make a miso
tare that'll help season and flavor the soup. For our miso tare, I'm gonna combine red
miso, white miso, mugi miso into a small saucepan over medium heat. Then I'm gonna add ginger and garlic, both of which have been grated and minced, followed by shoyu, sake, mirin,
togarashi, and sesame seeds. If you're thinking to yourself, "Man, that sounds like a lot of stuff, and it probably is a lot of flavor," you'd be right. It is a lot of stuff, and
it is a ton of flavor. After cooking this for a few
minutes to release the rawness of a lot of the ingredients we threw in and the consistency has thickened, this is ready to be set
aside for later use. This is niboshi. It's a kind of dried fish used
to make things, like dashi, and I'm gonna remove the heads off of it because they can be quite bitter and have some unpleasant tastes. Once the heads and bodies of
these fish have been divorced, they're gonna go into a
container with some water. This is the first of
many steps that it takes to make our soup today. One of my favorite things
about a good bowl of ramen is the jammy egg that kind of lays on top. As you can see, I'm trying to
use a needle to poke a hole in these eggs, but it is not working. I'm now using a knife to
poke holes in these eggs. It sounds kind of cool to say, but it's probably not
the safest thing to do. Slow, don't break the egg. Oh, oh. It's c- (gasps) Yes! Let's go, baby. Woo! For a nice soft boil, I'm putting these into boiling water for about six and a half m- Oh, okay. This guy seemed to come
out a little bit early. It's all right. Happens to the best of us. Back in the carton you go. These eggs get dropped in for about six and a half minutes on the dot
for that perfect soft boil. One of my good friends Keizo
Shimamoto is a ramen chef. He taught me that if you swirl the eggs in the water like a Whirlpool, this will cause the
yolks to sort of center and stabilize in the middle, giving you a beautiful
perfect cross section for the customer. I was never a good student in school, but this makes sense to me. And after exactly 390 seconds, I'm taking the eggs out
and putting them straight into an ice bath. This will shock the egg,
prevent it from cooking further, and hopefully make them easier to peel. Let's get a little sneak peek, shall we? Ho ho ho. Now that's what
I'm talking about. Yes! Woo! Please excuse us while Kendall and I make a little snack in the back. Approved. Our pork has been in its hot tub for about three hours now, so it's pretty much ready. I'm gonna take off the otoshibuta and transfer the pork
onto a tray to be chilled. But all this marinade left in the pot, that's the good stuff. I do like to take the fat off of the top with a paper towel trick taught to me by none other than my dad. He does this a lot at
home when he tries to take off the fat that floats
on top of his soups. And he thinks by doing this,
he is gonna lose weight. I've seen his belly. I don't think it's working too well. But for the purpose of this marinade, it makes sense to take as
much fat off as we can. Once it gets strained out and transferred to another container, this amazing braising
liquid with all the flavors of the soy, the sake, the sugar, and the pork belly get poured on top of our beautiful soft boiled eggs. Time for another trick. We're gonna use a paper towel
to sort of soak and press on top of the eggs. This will make sure that
any parts of the eggs that dare to poke out above
the marinade will get submerged and colored right back in. In order for these eggs to get a nice tan, I'm putting them in the
fridge for at least a day. The ramen from the show
is a tonkatsu style ramen, which mean it starts with a lot of bones. I have here pre-blanched pork femur bones, chicken carcass bones, and chicken feet. These are all gonna add a lot of flavor and a lot of body to the soup
as we simmer it for hours. In addition, I'm also
adding in pork fat back. The idea is as the soup and
broth continuously comes to a boil and reduces, the fat should emulsify
into the broth itself, which is pretty cool. I'm boiling this until
the meat kind of starts to fall off the bone and
become a little tender. That's when I get to say
hi to you guys. Hello. And after the meat is
nice and loosened up, I'm gonna start adding the vegetables, which are gonna be the
aromatics for the broth. This includes some chopped cabbage, a chopped onion, a chopped carrot, half of a whole head of
garlic, chopped scallions, some ginger, half of an
apple, and one potato. We're gonna let everybody
in here become friends for about two hours or so. Peace out, little dudes.
I'll see you soon. And while that big pot of
broth goes on the back burner, I'm gonna finish off our dashi. So remember those little fishies we put in the water earlier? Well, that's going into a smaller pot, along with some kombu and
the dried shiitake mushroom. After giving these guys
about 10 to 15 minutes or so to return to their
formerly hydrated selves, following a little bit of gentle heat, I'm adding in katsuobushi,
or dried bonito flakes, to the mixture and
letting that slowly simmer just until the heat has permeated. The studio has now taken
on a scent of the sea. So we are going to strain this entire pot and end up with a beautiful
dashi for our ramen. It is now three hours into the future, To my delight, our ramen
broth has thickened and reduced nicely,
taking on a milky color and becoming very, very intense in flavor. As you can see, I'm also
using a whisk to break up any of the remaining bones or vegetables that might be lying around, just to release that extra
amount of flavor into the broth. The coolest part is that I
don't really see fat floating on the top. It all seems to be actually emulsified within the liquid itself,
which is pretty cool. And it is at this stage in the cooking that I'm adding in the dashi. I've heard adding it too
early can cause the flavors of the dashi to get muted. And as you can see here, I am attempting to strain this entire pot of broth into a small container. We have a beautiful tonkatsu broth. I salute you, Way of Ramen. You really know what you're doing, man. Now that one of the hardest
parts about the ramen is done, I'm moving on to the toppings. Our roll of char siu
has set up quite nicely. So now it's time to take off the strings and slice these into nice little
beautiful rounds for later. Look at these little dudes. Just like Naruto, I also enjoy quite a lot of meat on my ramen. I'm also slicing up some scallions, as well as the signature topping
that Naruto is named after. This is a fish cake called narutomaki, a very fitting topping
for a boy who loves ramen. And finally, the ajitama,
which have gotten nice and dark from their little
rest in their flavor bath. It's important to get your toppings in order before cooking the ramen because I was taught that time is one of the most important ingredients
when you're making ramen. A minute too late, your soup gets cold. A minute too early, your
noodles aren't ready. Everything needs to be cooked,
plated, served, and eaten in a very, very small window of time for the maximum enjoyment. Remember the marinade we put the eggs in? Well, you can actually brush that on top of the char siu and blowtorch it to get a really nice
caramelized, smoky exterior. This is something that I
remember Keizo doing a lot in his shop, so I'm gonna do the same. Also kind of an excuse for me to play with a little bit of fire. I love fire. It's amazing. It smells so good. The fat is rendering and crisping up. It's getting a little smoky. The sugars are caramelizing. This is why I'm the kind of guy
that'll order extra char siu in his ramen whenever possible. Let's talk ramen noodles. You can go and spend a lot of time and effort making
these from scratch, but I decided that it was
a little too much work for a ramen amateur like me. So I went out and I got some
high quality ramen noodles from a local noodle maker. Another trick I learned from
Keizo is that you can squeeze and almost compress the ramen
noodles together a couple of times before boiling. I think this helps wake up and excite the gluten inside the noodles to get them a little bit
more springy after cooking. The second the noodles touch the water, things get pretty intense. We now have exactly
one minute to make sure that this bowl is ready with the soup and the tare before the noodles, so that means putting a
spoonful of the miso tare in the bottom of the bowl and ladling in a healthy portion of soup. Usually these things are
weighed out to the gram and to the milliliter, but I'm being a little bit rough here because it's my first time. The moment the noodles touch
the soup, the clock is ticking. Every single second they sit in there is another second that
they're gonna get soggier. So working quickly and
putting on the char siu, trying my best to make sure
that these slices don't sink and fan out in a beautiful pattern and making sure it is loaded up, 'cause that is what Naruto wants. And after about seven thick and beautiful slices of char siu, I'm splitting open are ajitama. Ooh, hold up. That looks nice. Look at that jammy centered yolk. Followed by our thinly sliced
scallions and narutomaki, the menma, which is a
bamboo topping I got also from the store, and
finally, the nori sheets. And I would like to
present to you our version of the Ichiraku Ramen from "Naruto," heavily inspired by the
recipe that Way of Ramen used in his video. And now for the moment
I have been waiting for. The char siu is delicious,
it's smoky, it's so good. Let's see how the broth
and the noodles are. The seasoning could be
a little bit better. I think my ratios were a little bit off, and if I adjusted the ratio
of the tare to the broth, it could have been a little bit stronger. But this is rich. It is thick. It is milky. It coats your tongue.
It coats the noodles. Everything just tastes really intense. And I love that. There's just so many flavors going on from all the kinds of miso
to the garlic to the ginger to the pork and the chicken and the... It kind of all just combines
into this one explosion. It's also really fun to eat 'cause there's, like,
7,000 toppings on here. This is a lot of food. So if you'll excuse me, I am going to have some
alone time with my ramen. - [Andrew] Thanks, again, to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. They've been a great partner in supporting the Babish Culinary Universe and bringing my websites to life. From websites to online stores,
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