- This is not your regular bowl of ramen. It's perhaps the first
ever German bowl of ramen, which is the result of
the most educational ramen experience I've ever had. And it actually tastes
pretty damn good too. Ohh! But before you call me crazy, please just give me a
chance and let me explain. A little confession first, I thought I knew how to
make pretty decent ramen. You know, add some
handmade alkaline noodles, maybe ooh, lets add
some miso and make some marinated ramen eggs. Don't get me wrong, the
results were pretty tasty and they actually even
kind of looked like ramen but, it was not ramen. How do I know that? Well, recently I started
binging a YouTube channel, called "The Way Of Ramen". And that's where this whole story begins. It only took me a few videos, to understand that I got
ramen completely wrong. Ramen is a way of thinking, perhaps even a philosophy. It's about breaking
down what is essentially just a bowl of noodle soup,
into all its elements. And obsessively controlling each and every one of them, individually, only so you could then
assemble the perfect bowl for you current craving. And that is, not exactly how I approached ramen before. So I started playing around with some of the new things I've
learned on the channel, and boy, did that make a difference. All of a sudden my homemade bowls of ramen actually started tasting somewhat like the real deal I remembered
having in Japan. The hardest part was really getting hold of all the specialized
Japanese ingredients. You know, high end soya sauces, mirins, dried fish and things like that. And that, made me wonder, if ramen is mostly about the right approach then, what if I mixed in some local ingredients, and flavors. German ingredients and flavors in my case. Would that even work? Would that still be ramen? Well, I know just the right person to ask. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Ryan from "The Way Of Ramen", who kindly agreed to share some of his insights with me. - I'm personally not a ramen chef I'm just a home cook. And so I'm just learning and as I go I'm kinda documenting what I'm learning. - So obviously I had to
ask Ryan the big question. Is it possible to make ramen
with German ingredients? - Yeah I've had this discussion with my community recently, kind of a lot where, I think people outside of Japan are much more strict in
what they consider ramen, they'd consider it a Japanese thing, but people in Japan are very loose with their definition of what ramen is. As long as it has those noodles. I think most people maybe don't know, but in Japan ramen is also very regional. Ramen chefs are making things with their local ingredients, and that's what makes, hokkaido, Sapporo miso ramen special because they're using a lot of Sapporo ingredients. That's what makes kumamoto tonkotsu ramen very special because they're using local ingredients there. And so, I really think that's the next step for people making ramen. I've really gotten into the idea where ramen should be more of an expression oh who you are. And using local ingredients is something that I think more ramen chefs outside of Japan should get into doing. - Well there you have it guys, if that's not an endorsement for the German ramen idea then, I don't know what is. So let's get more specific. First we need to understand the basic components of ramen. - I think most people who make ramen will tell you that ramen
had five basic components. You have the soup, the noodles, the tare, the oil or aroma oil, and the toppings. What most people consider
ramen broth, in the west, is actually made up of
the three components. The soup, the tare and the oil. Those things are combined in the bowl before the noodles and
the toppings are added. - Now that sounds like a pretty good framework to start with. But we still need to find that local hero ingredient that we're gonna center this whole project around. And finding that ingredient, really wasn't difficult. Every year, from around April to June, the whole country of Germany goes completely nuts over white asparagus. Last year I made a video about it, and I recommend you check that out, to understand more about the German obsession with asparagus. And one of the things people like to do with asparagus is making
a creamy asparagus soup. (mysterious music) Could that be the way to go? - The soup, when they make ramen in Japan has no salt added at all. You're making the soup
for umami, and mouthfeel. And the tare in Japanese is just anything that applies flavor to something. In ramen the tare is all the saltiness, and a little bit of
the flavor of the bones and the meat if you use meat. But all of the salt and a lot of the umami comes in the tare. - You gotta love it, don't you. As long as you respect the approach, it's gonna be ramen. So I started with my hero ingredient, beautiful German white asparagus. I know exactly what you're
thinking by the way, and I need you to hold it back for the rest of this video. First step is always
to wash and peel those, as well as trimming off the fibers' ends. But we're not throwing these away. As per German tradition, we're turning them into stock. And since ramen stock is all about umami, I'm also adding half a sliced cabbage. Cook those for at least one hour, to extract all the natural
sweetness and savoriness. And once we have achieved that, I'll caramelize the peeled
asparagus in butter, until golden brown. And now we're just sort
of swapping out all the mushy vegetables for
deeply roasted asparagus. Cook for another 30 minutes
to fully soften that, and then blend everything
into a creamy soup. Visually, this is actually super pleasing since it almost reminds me of a creamy tonkotsu stock. All it's missing right now is some body, because I didn't actually
add any salt yet. As per Ryan's advice, I'm gonna leave that to the tare. And now tare itself can be pretty much any seasoning used in Japanese cuisine, but there are some
classics to go with ramen. Some are based on soya sauce, some are based on misu or dashi, and some are simply based on salt. And that's the way I wanna go here. I wanna keep things a little more plain, so the asparagus and the broth can really shine through. Ryan actually has a really
cool and super simple salt or shio tare recipe on his channel, and I decided to base
my tare off of that one. It pretty much just starts out with absurdly salty water which is balanced with small amount of only a few other ingredients, like for example mirin,
that sweet rice wine and a dash of rice vinegar. Which, I decided to leave out and use some German white wine instead, which should also bring
sweetness and acidity. I did decide to leave in the soya sauce, I'm not a purist. And then a bit of extra sugar, and MSG. All of that, goes into
my dissolved salt water. Once everything came up to the boil, I also felt bold, and added a dashi seasoning bag for extra depth. There you go, let all of this cool down and this is a fantastic simple shio tare. And now, the last element
we need for the broth, is the aroma oil. Would it be insane to use butter in an aroma oil? - I don't think so at all, but you could also do like
a caramelized onion oil. And then just add butter as a topping, later to kinda let it pool on the top. And I saw that you also do like a fried breadcrumb thing, so you could do the fried breadcrumb and then use that as kinda like a drizzle
on the top, as a topping. - I think that sounds
pretty damn delicious. So here's what I did. I started by slowly rendering out the fat from a cup of chicken skins. To me chicken schmaltz just hits the spot when it comes to ramen, and I wouldn't wanna miss it. So once the fat has melted you can remove your chicken skins, and
don't throw these out you can do all sorts of
nasty things with them. Then I'm adding in diced onion and a few crushed garlic cloves
and letting those infuse into the oil and slightly caramelize. You could probably go much further without browning it even let the onions in the oil but I decided to go for
a more delicate note, and sifted those out. This is already an amazing aroma oil. So I'm saving most of
it, but reserving some to which I then added knob of butter, and sprinkled in some toasted breadcrumbs. They burn quickly, so take everything right off the heat. The resulting aroma oil has all the onion and garlic and chicken flavors but also, buttery richness and some toasty notes and texture from the breadcrumbs. Now will all the elements
for the broth done, what about the rest? First let's talk about noodles and for those, I like to stick with the rule of two. Since ramen is all about control, I like to start with just
regular all purpose flour to which I then add some
extra gluten myself, about 2%. That gives us the strong flour we need. Then I go for 2% salt, and another 2% baked baking soda, which I dissolve in water. Soda or some other alkaline is what gives ramen their springiness and characteristic flavor. I actually really like chewy noodles with as little as 34% water or even less. But the dough is so tough, that it's every hard to work with. So instead, on a normal day I like to go with 38% hydration, which doesn't overwhelm
me or my pasta machine. And now, there's another thing. I like yellow ramen. - The thing that makes
ramen noodles yellow in Japan as well is some kind of coloring, it's not just the alkaline. The alkaline will make it slightly yellow. So what a lot of people in Japan do is they use jasmine pods, to get the yellow coloring out of that. They steep that in water and instead of just using plain water, they use a jasmine pod tea almost. And then they use that to
color the noodles yellow. - Okay now that, is advanced. I do not have that. What I do have, is some
food coloring though. Of course, that's totally optional. Now I rarely recommend kitchen gadgets on this channel but this
silicon bag you guys, is a life saver for making any kind of stiff, hard dough. You can simply add all ingredients, shake 'em up, knead the dough inside the bag, you can even knead it with your feet. The bag is elastic and
you get a perfect dough, without any mess whatsoever. (sigh) In fact it's so simple
I repeated the process with both red food coloring, and even squid ink because yes squid ink is the only food coloring that's black enough. And yeah I did this to
make ramen in the colors of the German flag. I know, I know, and I'm sorry. But I got thumbnails to make you know. The thumbnail that you
clicked on by the way, and also I don't like click bait, so I'm not Photoshopping that shit. Now the thing about pasta machines is, they usually suck. Just like this one that
I bought for this video, because it looked cool and guess what, it broke after like two weeks. So instead, I'm using my good old friend that I bought a decade ago in China. It's all busted up but
it still works perfectly. I like to get my ramen sheets to the thinnest setting and then liberally dust
them with corn starch. By the way, this is a glass with starch that I covered with aluminum foil and poked a few holes into. (sigh) Thank me later. So after you get your beautiful ramen you wanna store them in
individual containers. And I can highly recommend getting a set of lunch boxes like these. If you make a lot of ramen, that is. They will keep in the
fridge for up to a week, or even longer in the freezer. Now finally we can work on our toppings, and according to Ryan, this is a good time to get creative. - There really is no
rules as far as toppings. If you have the flavor in mind you just build those flavors in the bowl, so when you take a bite it's like, wow, this is exactly what I wanted to do. - Whoo, good thing I have
a vision for this bowl. In Germany, asparagus
is pretty much always eaten with some type of ham, boiled, cured, you name it. And arguably, the king
of German ham is kassler which is a cured and then smoked piece of pork, usually neck. Which just so happens to fall in line with the Japanese love for a few slices of chashu pork as a ramen topping. Now I'm not gonna cure and smoke a piece of pork today, that's for another time but I have a workaround. I'm gonna use smoked salt and season it with pepper, juniper berries, garlic powder, mustard seeds, and a bay leaf. Grind everything up together. Super fragrant and smokey
curing rub I guess. Now all you need is a
juicy piece of pork neck, and I use around half of my salt to season it all over. Then placed in a zip-lock bags with mirin, soya sauce, and dark soya sauce for a truly unusual flavor mix. Another trick to really
get the smokey note in there will be adding a
little bit of liquid smoke. This guy, is gonna first
marinate overnight, then hang out sous vide for
five hours at 75 Celsius, then spend the night in
the fridge on to finally get sliced into not so thin slices. Come on guys, this looks legit. Except we're still not done guys we're gonna give it a quick sear in a bit of our scented chicken oil. The torching is definitely optional here, and anyway there you go. Beautiful juicy chashu kassler. The last thing I'm gonna do, is get some more veggie toppings ready. I'm obviously gonna go
for some more asparagus. You can cut it into number of ways but I'm keeping it raw. Yes it's totally safe and delicious to eat raw because I wanna include multiple layers of asparagus
flavor in this dish, not just the cooked one. And then finally, I just chopped up some local dill pickles. They're salty, and tangy, and why not. Last but not least, I give
my noodles a quick boil, just 90 seconds is how I get the chewy texture I like, and now, it's finally time to serve. - A lot of people outside of Japan are really trying to emulate flavors that they've had in Japan like the perfect tonkotsu ramen, or the
perfect shoyu ramen. Like they have this
memory and they're trying to recreate it at home, but I think the next step after that is to try to look at what
you have available locally, using those is more of an expression of who you are versus trying to recreate something that you had in Japan. - So, I believe this is it. The most German bowl of ramen the world has ever seen. First I'm gonna take a
little bit of the broth. It looks legit thick. (slurps) Oh! (laughs) (slurps) (slurps) The broth is packed with like veggie umami goodness, very cool! I can't believe I didn't use any meat or bones in this broth. Like the creamy asparagus soup really has like the texture of something almost reminiscing of like
tonkotsu or something. Let's try it all together. With my noodles. (laughs) I'm just gonna like mix it all together. Ooh ooh ooh. This, just looks ridiculous. Blonde noodles first. (slurps) That is a good batch of ramen noodles. (slurps) Mmm, one thing I'm noticing right away is that I get a lot of butteriness which is amazing! I would not have thought that butter goes so well with ramen. Ouuu, and now we can
try some of the kassler. (chewing) I can't believe it, it
actually tastes like kassler. It tastes like the real deal. That's sous vide method, has worked much better than I expected. Mmmm, Oh oh oh, with a little bit of pickle. (chewing) mmmmm asparagus. Ohhhh! Yes yes yes. More noodles. The breadcrumb butter is ridiculous. Now let's try some of the black noodles because I think I might be able to taste some of the squid ink. (slurps) Nope, no squid ink taste but the good old buttery creaminess. This asparagus broth is so good. I think this shio tare is
exactly what it needed. It doesn't taste like soya sauce, it doesn't taste Japanese. It just gives everything
the salinity it needs. But it still kind of leaves room you know. For the asparagus to shine. Asparagus! (chewing) I thought this was gonna be a fun experiment, like
I was not expecting this to legitimately taste this good. I'm gonna say it, you don't need the kassler. If you wanted to play around with this, I would actually suggest just making this broth and topping it with some fresh asparagus That is it, you don't need any pork. The pork is trying to take the stage here, but the clear star is the asparagus. This is a good bowl of ramen.
Ich hoffe da sind Bratkartoffeln drin