Making the LEGENDARY Taishoken Mori Soba Tsukemen (with Erik Bentz of Cafe Mochiko)

today on the way ramen i'm attempting to make a truly iconic ramen dish created by the god of ramen himself kazuo yamagishi-san this is the original tsukimen higashikibukuro taishoken's morisoba and this might be the best thing i've ever made on the channel so far [Music] so before we get into cooking let's learn a little bit about the person behind this dish and what makes it so special to say kazuo yamagishi-san is a legendary figure in the history of japanese ramen would be a true understatement belovedly known as the god of ramen by his fans apprentices and fellow ramen chefs yamagishi-san was japan's first true ramen celebrity chef he was a man known for many things he was an extremely kind person to everyone he met he served huge portions of ramen he had enormous dedication to his loved ones to his shop and to his craft he is probably best known for creating a style of ramen he called morisoba which eventually evolved into the genre of ramen called tsukemen originally devised as a way to make use of strained noodles that escaped the strainers while making his standard ramen his tuxe morisoba eventually became the star attraction of his shop which led to a daily line of customers who would patiently wait hours to get in the news of a tiny ramen shop in tokyo with these huge daily lines spread throughout japan in the 1960s and led many from across the country to travel to tokyo in search of this shop creating the first ramen mecca and cementing yamagishi-san's status in the history of ramen though yamagishi-san retired and closed the shop in 2007 and later passed away in 2015 over 100 apprentices who he trained at taishoken continued to carry on the flavor of his soups in their own taishoken shops today but many will say nobody can make it like yamagishi-san once did today we're going to be making a home version of yamagishi-san's legendary morisoba with the help of my buddy eric bentz the chef owner of cafe mochico in cincinnati ohio eric is an extremely talented chef who did stints at thomas keller's the french laundry as well as momotaro in chicago he also loves ramen and serves some of the best ramen in the united states at mochiko which he opened this year with his partner elaine i originally challenged eric to come up with a recipe that uses easier to find ingredients than most home chefs would have a pretty good shot of pulling off at home but with his love for legendary japanese ramen chefs he was the one who actually suggested that we do a home version of yamagishi-san's morisot while the ingredients for the real taishoken soup are floating around the internet eric's recipe instead focuses on the feel of the dish while keeping the recipe accessible and achievable for most home cooks and i was blown away by what eric came up with with such humble ingredients and i honestly think that this might be one of the best things i've made on the channel so far so let's get right into it we're gonna start with the tare for this bowl because this tare is a multi-day multi-step process so i would recommend getting it started at least a day before you make your soup because we're gonna be actually finishing it during the soup cooking process into a pot get 750 grams of standard kikkoman shoyu 10 grams of kombu 15 grams of dried shiitake mushrooms 12 grams of sea salt and 15 grams of brown sugar let this steep at room temperature for at least three to four hours overnight if you want to maximize umami then after seeping get this onto a stove and very slowly heat this up to 67 degrees celsius it should take a minimum of 30 minutes to come up to 67 degrees i went for an hour and as soon as it hit 67 degrees turn off the heat and add 50 grams of maiden and 20 grams of apple cider vinegar let this cool as is uncovered overnight and we'll be straining this when we finish the tare while we're making the soup next i made the sweet vinegar or amazu that we'll be using in the final bowl assembly in a small pot combine 130 grams of rice vinegar 17 grams of salt and 70 grams of sugar warm this on low heat just to dissolve the sugar and salt and then turn off the heat and drop in a tiny piece of dried kombu let this cool down then transfer it into a container to store and leave the kombu in there the noodles for this dish are extremely important as the fresh flavor of the wheat and the noodles themselves are a big part of the experience luckily these noodles are very high hydration and come together fairly easily so if you want to give noodle making a shot this is a great first recipe to use i have a couple of videos on the channel on the techniques i use to make noodles so please check those out because i might gloss over some steps here i'm also making half the recipe because i made a test batch before filming so if you plan on serving this ramen to people double everything i say here i'm gonna start off by making the kansu which is the alkaline solution which makes ramen noodles ramen noodles i start off by weighing 7 grams of baked baking soda and 7.5 grams of salt then i'm going to beat an egg and then weigh out 10 grams of whole egg and finally i'm going to weigh out 200 grams of water add everything into your water and then stir to combine make sure everything is fully dissolved and then set this on the side your kansui is ready to go next i'm going to weigh out my flour we're going to be using a blend of all-purpose flour and cake flour for a lower protein mix so 300 grams of ap flour and 200 grams of cake flour into a large mixing bowl whisk this together and then slowly drizzle in your kansui a little at a time stir in the kansui then repeat this process until all of the kansui is poured into your flour then use your hands to fully incorporate everything together into a loose dough it should look something like this and have a consistency similar to wet sand then transfer this loose dough into a ziplock bag and let this rest for 30 minutes after 30 minutes step on the bag to knead the dough into a flat sheet it should look like this and you can use a rolling pin to even out the sheet after flattening it then let the dough rest again for another 30 minutes after the second rest you can cut the dough to fit your pasta machine and then roll it down do at least one lamination of the dough either by combining two dough sheets like i did or by folding the dough sheet in half and then smashing it together roll the laminated sheet out to a thickness of about 1.5 millimeters or the five setting on the atlas pasta machine be sure to dust a little sheet with potato starch or cornstarch and let the rolled out sheet rest one last time for another 30 minutes before cutting it into noodles finally cut your noodles using the spaghetti cutter attachment and you can use these noodles the same day or rest them in the fridge overnight i probably wouldn't rest it longer than a day because you're going to lose that fresh wheat taste which is what you're after so use it within a day or so for the soup eric kept this recipe very simple the original taishoken soup uses pork femur and trotters as well as chicken but we're using chicken here as the main flavor and we're gonna use pork shoulder for the pork element as well as for the cha shoo eric recommends six pounds of chicken backs but if you can't get them you can use a whole chicken with the breast removed or even six pounds of chicken quarters i'm using two whole chickens and breaking them down and removing the chicken breasts to make other things you don't need to break down the chicken super cleanly since it's just going to be used for stock so don't worry if you can't do this perfectly but if you need a tutorial on how to break down a chicken you can check out my buddy yakitori's channel he is who i learn from and you can also learn how to make some great authentic yakitori once you have the chickens broken down you want to remove the guts from the chicken backs and then lightly rinse the bones then put all the bones into a large pot saving the chicken skin on the side for now and then cover with four to five liters of water turn the stove on to high and bring the water to a boil to get the scum out of the chicken and once this gum is floating at the top and clump together skim it off be sure to stir the chickens a little bit to get any hidden scum to come up and once you get all the scum skimmed off wipe off any scum that's stuck to the side of the pot with a paper towel and then add in your rinsed chicken skin i used queso's technique here with a lid slightly cracked open because the soup has a shorter cook time you want to keep this soup pretty hot hotter than normal maybe around 97 degrees celsius if you can it shouldn't be boiling but you should be seeing tiny bubbles come up to the surface regularly check the time you started this summer because we're going to be using that to time other steps in the process while the soup is cooking we can start to prep the cha shoo for the chashu we're going to be using pork shoulder this time not pork belly we're gonna be using two and a half pounds three pounds maybe actually more maybe up to five pounds if you want more choshu and can fit it into the soup the only pork shoulder i could get was cut the wrong way into steaks but if you can find one that has the grain running lengthwise you want to use that what you want to do is bind the pork with butcher's twine according to eric this helps lock in the moisture and keep the cha shoe soft and juicy i did my best with the pieces that i had but hopefully you can get a better cut for the aromatics we're not using much if you watch taishoken videos you'll often see a lot of stuff floating around in there but we're going very simple here green onion tops ginger peeled and sliced and some garlic cloves that are cut in half that's it the official measurement eric gave me was a handful so measure out a handful of these aromatics check your clock and about one and a half to two hours in you can drop in the bound pork and the aromatics and about three hours in skim off the fat that's collected at the top of your soup this will be your aroma oil a mix of chicken and pork fat infused with the aromatics in the soup continue to let your soup cook and in about four and a half hours check the pork shoulder by poking it with a chopstick if you can easily poke a chopstick through the pork it's soft enough and ready to be seasoned strain out tate that you made the day before and take your pork shoulder out of the soup and put it into a large ziploc bag pour your today into the bag with the pork and then get all the air out of the bag using a bowl of cold water chill down the pork and today in ice bath or cold water for one hour at five hours of total soup cook time taste it to check its flavor it should be done or close to being done at this point and should have a nice chickeny flavor with a hint of pork if you like how your soup tastes turn off the heat and stick 25 grams of kombu in and let that steep with the residual carryover heat for 45 minutes after an hour of soaking in the tare pull the pork out and transfer it into a separate ziploc bag or container to store don't let the pork sit in the tiny for longer than an hour because it's going to make your tare less salty and your pork too salty if you let it sit in there so get your pork out of there strain it out and your tare for your soup is finally done while you have your combo steeping you can make the final component for the bowl the gyofun fish powder we're going to do a very simple version of this and just grind up some hanakatsu katsubushi and basically what you're going to do is just take some katsubushi and then grind it up into a fine powder after 45 minutes of steeping the kombu in the soup strain out your soup and you're finally done and ready to eat i highly recommend you eat this the day you make the soup because it's just such a fantastic fresh tasting soup to serve boil 200 grams of noodles for 2-3 minutes and you want to overcook these noodles because you're going to be shocking them with cold water which will firm them up again if you taste them while they're cooking they should be pretty dang soft when they're hot put the cooked noodles into cold water and then rinse off all the starch try not to lose 50 grams of noodles in the sink like i did here and then transfer the noodles into a bowl you don't need to strain off the extra water for this style because they'll probably evaporate as it's kind of like just sitting there transfer about 200 mils of soup into a smaller pot to heat up and while your soup is heating up you want to add these things in this order into a bowl 20 mils of your aroma oil 30 mls of tare about a quarter teaspoon to half a teaspoon of the sweet vinegar a few shakes of ichimi togarashi japanese chili powder a spoon of your gyofun fish powder and some chopped green onions and finally when your soup is hot you're going to pour in 180 milliliters of your soup drop a piece of chashu that's cut in half and a hard-boiled egg no soft boiled eggs for this one and there you have my attempt at eric bence's home version of higashiki bukuro taishoken's tokusei morisoba tsukemen when i forgot you put a little piece of note at the top of the soup as well to eat it you take a little bit of your noodles dip them into the soup and then slip away and the soup should taste pretty salty if you eat it just alone but if you eat it like this it perfectly seasons every single bite usually i pick apart the ramen that i make and say what's bad about it and what i don't like but this bowl honestly was phenomenal quite possibly the best thing i've made on the channel so far maybe the best thing i've made in my entire life now it could be just because i didn't eat anything the whole day while i was cooking and i was just completely starving by the time i ate it but i think what makes this experience great is you have this fantastic tasting fresh noodle paired with a soup that's hitting every single flavor sensation you can experience when you eat it your taste buds are tasting salty sweet sour spicy bitter umami all perfectly balanced and in the perfect ratios and i think a huge amount of credit goes to both yamagishi-san for designing this dish to hit all of these flavor notes and also to eric for being able to nail down not only the flavors of the dish but the ratios of these components to bring about the spirit and feeling of taishokan completely on his own truly amazing what real chefs can do and this is why i don't even like to pretend that i know what i'm doing if you're anywhere near cincinnati ohio it's well worth the time to make the trip out to cafe mochiko and eat eric's ramen many of my ramen nerd friends have eaten his stuff and said it rivals the best bowls they've eaten in japan you can follow eric on instagram at eric underscore ben's and cafe mochiko at mochiko cincy and just for a little fun for this video last year eric invented a challenge for this took him in called the taishoken omori challenge the omori serving at noodles that taishoken is 640 grams and that's pre-cooked by the way so it weighs even more after you cook it it looks something like this and i was actually one of the first people he issued the challenge to and i actually chickened out and i didn't do it because i can't eat that much noodles but if you are up to the challenge and want to defend my honor for me the first three people who make this recipe and eat 640 grams of noodles tag me on instagram prove that you did it and i'll send you a way of ramen apron just a little fun don't kill yourself guys for an apron i'll do more giveaways in the future but if you like to eat a lot of noodles anyway give this one a shot have at it anyways thank you so much eric for the recipe i would never have been able to come up with this on my own and thank all of you for watching and for all the support i'll see you all in the next video peace you

Channel: Way of Ramen

Views: 373,431

Keywords: taishoken ramen, ramen, japanese ramen, taishoken ramen recipe, tsukemen, tsukemen recipe, taishoken ramen shop, how to make tsukemen ramen, how to make tsukemen, mori soba, real japanese ramen recipe, taishoken tsukemen recipe

Id: IZYa8DuC9gM

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021