5 Easy Ramen Recipes That Taste Like HEAVEN In A Bowl | Marion's Kitchen #loveasianfood

Literally a bowl of heaven for me. The first thing we're going to do is turn a store-bought stock into something super magical. A little bit of oil and some onions. We're basically building up a whole bunch of spicy, yummy, umami flavour. I just want these onions to really soften up. You must always be patient when you're sizzling onions. We really want that soft, sweet, savoury flavour, not raw onion flavour. My onions have turned translucent. Time to add my garlic. I've got some slices of ginger here. I've sliced them really large because I want to fish them out at the end. They're just going to infuse their lovely gingeriness into our broth. Now for some kimchi. You can find kimchi in most supermarkets these days. Look for it in the fridge section. I've got here the kimchi cabbage itself. My little tip for you always is to just steal a little bit of the kimchi juice out of the packet as well. Put a little bit of that in whatever dish that you're cooking. Stir-fry or anything like that because it's got loads of flavour. I'll pour that in there. Now the chicken. I think for this dish, really you want the dark meat. Because we want everything to break down, get all gelatinous and soft. We want that really intense flavour as well. This is going to simmer for a while. Breasts will dry out a little bit. I've also kept these pieces on the bone. Because I think that the bone just tends to add a little bit more of that gelatinous texture to the soup. We want that chicken to get all mixed up in there with everything else. We want some soy sauce. Now, time for the stock. If you've got a beautiful homemade stock at home, please go ahead and use it. I'm happy to doctor up a store-bought stock always if it's going to save me a little bit of time. If I'm having a weeknight dinner. To be honest, you're adding so much flavour with this kimchi that you won't even notice. One other little secret ingredient that I have up my sleeve is Korean gochujang. That's a fermented chilli paste. It is savoury, full of umami. It's not super spicy, which is why I like to use a whole heap of it. Because it adds so much extra flavour and such a lovely colour too. The easiest way to do this is to just pop a ladle into your soup. I'm going to just dissolve that paste because it's quite thick in that ladle. Rather than just having it float around in there. Mix that through. Just bring that up to a gentle simmer. Then put the lid on. I want that to keep going and simmering away for about an hour until that chicken is full tender. Let's have a look and see what's been happening in our pot. That is seriously magical. That fragrance is amazing. I know a classic ramen broth would take 8 hours, 9 hours. But we're doing a shortcut version today. This is still going to have a huge amount of flavour. Just because I like to do things a little bit extra. We're going to get it roasty and toasty and really lovely and golden in the oven. I'm going to pull out my chicken pieces. We're going to add even more flavour by just basting these guys with a little bit of sesame oil. Just a little sprinkling of salt. Pop these under a really hot oven grill for about 10 minutes or until they're beautifully golden. Remember those ginger pieces that we put in at the beginning. I'm just going to take those out. As always, I'm going to check my broth for seasoning. That flavour, the kimchi, the spicy gochujang. Incredible. That chicken has undergone a magical transformation. It is beautiful and golden. I'm going to get it onto my chopping board. This is the part you don't want to miss, guys. This chicken is literally just falling away from the bone. I'm not even touching it with that knife, almost. It's just coming straight off. Ridiculous, joyful, all of those things. These noodles are looking good. Of course, because it's ramen, I have giant bowls. Small bowl just wouldn't do. Back to this amazing broth. I just want to scoop out some little chunks of kimchi for each bowl. Make sure everyone gets a little portion. Now that glorious soup. Of course, I want some of these chicken pieces. Then the final touches. Egg and some spring onion. I am ready for the couch. Check out that ramen broth. If you didn't think it was possible to make ramen at home, believe my friends, we are going to make an epic bowl of ramen noodle soup. The first thing we want to do is deal with our chicken wings. The thing with any kind of broth or when you're using bones for broth, the smaller the pieces that you can get them into, the more it will release flavour and gelatin from the bones and all those good things. Take your chicken wings. Just slice through the joints so that you've got three pieces rather than the one big large one. Got a whole big bowl of those here. To speed up the flavour process for our stock, I'm actually going to roast these first. That's going to create a browning and a Maillard reaction on the outside of the chicken. It's that browning, that stuff there, that's the flavour we want in our soup. I want some carrots as well. Now let's get these guys started with some salt. Find that with broths, the more that you can layer flavour and seasoning, the better it will become. A little bit of oil just to get things started. Give those a good mix. I want to roast these in a hot oven for about 45 minutes or an hour until we get a really beautiful deep brown colour. Let's take a look at our chicken and carrot. You can see the beautiful golden colour we've got on that chicken. That is all flavour, my friends. Awesome. I'm going to get this onto a heat. I just want to heat this up until it's sizzling. This part is all about making sure we don't leave any of that beautiful browning behind on the pan. I'm going to deglaze the pan with a little bit of water. Now wait for that to start bubbling again. Now, what you want to be doing is getting your spatula or your wooden spoon and really scraping up everything from the bottom of the pan. The water will help you and the heat will help you. But don't leave any of that flavour behind. If you have a look, that liquid is a beautiful golden colour already. Now that we've got all the bits and pieces off the bottom of the roasting tin, now we're going to get into our stockpot and start that broth going. I want to get my chicken and my carrot into my pot. Just take your pan and pour all of that delightful liquid over your chicken. Now for our aromatics, these are the special ingredients that are going to make our shoyu ramen broth super special. To start off with, we have konbu, which is dried seaweed. You can grab this at an Asian grocer or a Japanese supermarket. This is one of the essential ingredients for a traditional Japanese ramen broth. It's going to give us a background savoury flavour and a deep depth of flavour to our broth. Keeping on the same umami track, we've got some dried shiitake mushrooms and some spring onion for some nice aroma. I've got some garlic here. I've just sliced a whole head of garlic in half. That's going to go in. Then some slices of ginger. Top that up with some more water. Now we add in the shoyu or the soy sauce. Give that a stir. One of my big tips for making a really beautiful, clear broth is to make sure that you don't simmer this too hard. We want a nice, gentle simmer for about 3 hours. Every so often while it's simmering, just take a spoon and take off any of the white foamy bits and pieces that rise to the top. See you in 3 hours. 3 hours later and we did in the meantime have a wardrobe malfunction with some pork and some hot oil. Anyway, I'm fine but the dress is not fine, so we've changed. We do things by the book here. We're not swapping in and out. As you know, it's all for real. Anyway, let's get back to our ramen broth. I'm going to save these beautiful shiitake mushrooms, which are now lovely and rehydrated. We can slice those up and use them in the soup. This broth is smelling so amazing, I can't even tell you guys. I'm going to pull out all these big pieces of aromatics and the seaweed. Take those out first. Then, just to make it easier to strain, I'm going to start taking out these chicken pieces as well. A slotted spoon is going to help you out here. The thing with this chicken is that it's been in here for 3 hours. All of its beautiful flavour has gone into our broth, which is great. But it does mean that the chicken itself, that chicken meat, kind of doesn't have much flavour. You can totally go ahead and shred it and eat it or add it to your noodle soup. But I tend to find it has lost a lot of its really good flavour. It's okay because my mum is here filming with me today. She will happily take all of it home because you know Asian mums, they never waste anything. This is looking good. I've got most of my chunky bits out. I'm going to strain this through a fine mesh sieve. If you don't have a really fine sieve at home, you might find that your broth has quite a few particles in it. If that's the case, just put down a cheesecloth or a coffee filter and run the broth through that as well. It's got nothing to do with the flavour. You can totally just leave it as it is. But if you want a restaurant-style crystal clear broth, that's what you need to do. This one's looking good because we've got a very fine mesh strainer here. If you're a very patient person, which I generally am not when it comes to food, and we've already been simmering our broth for like 3 hours, you would put this into the fridge overnight. That would solidify the fat on the top of the broth. You could just scoop it off. I have a little trick to taking the fat off without having to wait. If you use some paper towel and then just rest it on the top of your broth, paper towel will soak up most of the oil and the fat on the top. Just do that a couple of times. Now look at that. Most of the fat and the oil is gone and we are ready to serve this guy up. Now we've got a really great ramen broth. I'm going to just take enough that I need for the 2 bowls that I'm going to make today. The rest I'm going to save for later. This freezes really well. I'm going to let this broth come back up to a simmer. I want it really nice and hot. While it's doing that, I'm just going to mix together a little seasoning. I've got some soy sauce here. I want to mix in some mirin. That's a Japanese cooking wine, a little bit sweet. Let's have a taste and see what we need to do here. This is such a complex broth. You've got the beautiful savoury flavours. I can taste that chicken and all those background flavours, like the spring onion and the ginger and the dried shiitake. So good. It does need seasoning though. I'm going to add in quite a bit of my seasoning sauce that I've made. You can just do this to taste. Everyone likes a different level of saltiness. This is something that you can adjust on your own. I'm also going to add in a little bit of just plain regular salt as well. Don't want to darken the broth too much, but I do need some extra oomph in there. Now that is tasting perfect. Lovely. I've got my ramen noodles here. I'm going to ladle over that hot soup. Look at the colour of that amazing broth. So special. You can top this with a whole manner of different things. I happen to have some chashu pork or slowly braised pork belly that I made the other day. I've got a video on this on my YouTube channel, so you can check it out if you're interested in making it. Just put a slice of that on there. I've got some of those sliced shiitakes. A little bit of spring onion. To me, ramen is not ramen without an egg. There we go. This is one comforting bowl of heaven. I can tell you that right now. You actually could believe you're eating this in a restaurant. You guys are going to love this one. We're going to be doing a quite classic version of the birria side of things, which is a very traditional spiced and slow braised soup. Then we're going to add in our ramen elements at the end. Let's get on to doing the birria part first of all. I'm going to use some beef ribs here. I love how soft and gelatinous these guys get after this treatment. Just pop them into a tray here. I want to get them all luxuriating in like some salt and pepper business. Make sure you're doing all the sides. I really think at its heart, this dish is all about how you lay the flavours. At each step, I want to be really careful to be seasoning and searing and doing all the things that are going to bring out the best spiced, beautiful flavours. Just let those beef ribs sit. I need to make a marinade, which is also going to be part of the sauce later on. It serves a double purpose. I'm starting off here with some chipotle in adobo sauce. A nice smoky chilli pepper kind of vibe going on here. Some tomato. Some vinegar. I'm using rice vinegar, which is an Asian style, but even just a white vinegar would do. Some garlic. I'm using some fresh oregano here just because I found some at my local market this morning. But you could also use dried too. Now for the spices. Some smoked paprika. Some ground cumin. Just give this a blitz. Wow, it's like I can already smell that birria, smoked chilli kind of thing going on. It's already making me smile. Just pour that over your beef ribs. Make sure they're nicely covered. You know that I am always an advocate of taking shortcuts whenever I can. But I do find that these really do benefit from an overnight marinade. It really allows the beef to take on the flavour of that sauce. But also the acidity that's in the sauce and the salt that we put on the beef, it really helps to tenderise the beef as well. Overnight in the fridge please. These are some ribs that I made yesterday because I was very organised. What I want to do before we get cooking those is actually make a little bit of a flavour base for them. I just want some oil into a casserole dish or a dutch oven. Then throw in some onions. At the base of so many good soups and stews is sautéed onion. You may as well do it right if you're going to do it. What I like to do is the onion plus a little bit of salt. I also want to add in some more spices here. Cinnamon sticks and some whole cloves. You want to give those onions time to do their thing. I find that if you don't let the onions cook down and you add your other ingredients, you get this raw onion flavour even after hours of cooking. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. Time to add the ribs. What I want to do is take off some of this marinade or most of it because I want to sear the beef in that oil. I don't want the marinade to burn. Just take that off and get those ribs into the pan. Again, there's technique here which is helping you get the ultimate flavour from your soup because when you're getting that browning and the caramelisation on the meat, you're also getting flavour. Give those beef ribs time to get a little bit of colour. Make sure you get all sides. Now that the beef has some nice colour, we can add in our marinade and also some beef stock. That colour is so delightful already. Just wait until you can see some little bubbles forming there and then turn the heat down. Now we need to be really patient. Go and watch a Netflix show or something. We've got four hours now until that beef is really beautifully soft and tender. I've been very patient because my kitchen is currently smelling amazing. Let's have a look in here, shall we? Oh my goodness, that beef is so soft. One little nudge and it's all going to fall apart. Look at that bone comes clean out. When I made this the first time, I figured out that this is the real danger point in the recipe because this beef, have a look. Oh my goodness, is so soft and ridiculously delicious right now that it's really hard to wait. But wait you should because there is another even more delicious step yet to come. Just wait and see. Just releasing all of that meat and it just falls apart. So soft, tender. Now the real secret here, I think this one little additional step which makes this amazing is I'm going to take some of that red oil from the top of that braising liquid and we're going to use this oil to fry that beautifully gelatinous beef into something that's kind of sticky and crispy and still tender and wonderful. It's really quite magical. You can leave a little bit of oil on the top there. I really love a noodle soup that has that lovely sheen of cooking oil on the top. Now I'm just going to strain off the other aromatics from the soup though. Now just use that ladle to push that soup through. We've worked so hard on all that flavour. I don't want to miss any of that beautiful broth. Now to bring everything together, just spoon a little bit of your lovely spiced oil into a pan. Add some of your slow braised beef. Then just keep that moving around in there until you get lovely little crispy bits. Now I've had my broth heating up, I'm going to cook my ramen noodles. When your noodles are tender, grab those guys out. It's always a little messy, this one. That red sauce is delicious, but don't get it on your clothes. Now you want your beautiful crispy but tender spicy beef. Oh my god, this thing is just like a work of art. Ladle that hot soup all over the top. I've got some other bits and pieces here. Just some finely sliced cabbage, an egg, some jalapeno chillies. And just a little bit of coriander at the end here. Wow, there you go. That is literally a bowl of heaven for me. I like to do this with a little squeeze of lime. Now I just need to get in here. Wow. Holy smokes, that is so good. Guys, that flavour is so complex. You've got all the beautiful spices. You've got the chilli spice as well. And that beef, because it's released all of its flavour into that soup. It's just... It really is amazing. Noodles, beef. If there is one noodle soup you make this year, it's got to be this one. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Super easy miso ramen broth with porky buttered corn topping. This is one ramen noodle bowl you need to know how to make. We're going to start off with a miso tare. This is like a flavouring or a seasoning that we're going to put into our chicken stock a little bit later. I want to start off with a little bit of mirin. That's a sweet Japanese cooking wine. I'm going to add some ginger and some garlic. When I can see that mirin bubbling away, I'm going to pull it off the heat. Now I'm going to dissolve in there my miso paste. A little bit of that hot liquid and just move it around and dissolve it in the ladle. I'm tipping it out into the sauce as you go. This is going to season our broth a little bit later on. Before we get to that part, I'm going to make all the toppings that we need. The first thing I want to make is a pork topping. I just want a little bit of oil. I'm going to add in some garlic. And then some pork mince. Just spread that pork out and stir-fry it until it's almost cooked. Now you want to add in some soy sauce. I just like to let that simmer away until that soy sauce has been soaked up by all the pork. Everything is all salty and porky and there's not much liquid left in the pan. You can see that most of that liquid is gone now. Trust me, that pork is really beautifully savoury and salty. I'm just going to transfer that into a bowl. I'm going to cook my corn in the same pan because it's the weeknight. I want to get things done quickly without too much washing up. The next thing on our agenda is some buttery sweet corn. For that, we need to start off with some butter obviously. And some corn. I'm just using frozen corn kernels because I've always got them in the freezer. Cooking the corn in the same pan means it kind of picks up some of that porky juiciness from before. You want a little bit of salt on there as well. Just when that corn is heated through and all nice and buttery, then we can just take it off for later. Now we're ready to cook our noodles. Only one way to check out if these are ready. Just perfect. You just want to wrangle your noodles out of there. Straight into a large bowl. We just want to finish off the broth. I've got some warm chicken stock here. I'm just using a packet one because we're taking shortcuts this time around. If you've got a homemade one, obviously use that. I'm going to pour in that miso mixture we made earlier. Let's just try this and see if we need any extra seasoning here. That is definitely a great way to doctor up a store-bought stock. That miso hides all manner of sins. We've got that beautiful ginger and garlic coming through and a little bit of sweetness from that mirin. Just great. A generous helping of this over our noodles. Now we load this guy up with all our toppings. Some of that pork. The sweet buttery corn. Some shredded cabbage just because I like the extra freshness and the crunch. I've got some very special soy sauce marinated eggs here. If you want to know how to make these guys, I've got a video on my YouTube channel on how to cook the perfect soy sauce or ramen egg. Just a little sprinkle of sesame seeds on top of that pork. There you go guys. A little cheats version of some buttered corn and pork ramen noodle soup. Of course, I'll test it out for you guys because you've got to make sure you're getting the goods. That is a killer combination. Yum. This awesome combination of ramen noodles with a creamy, spicy broth, spicy pork. All the things that I love. It happens to be very, very easy to make at home. Everyone's winning with this one. Let's do our spicy pork topping first of all. Just need a little bit of oil. Some garlic. Some pork mince. I'm just going to grate some ginger straight in there. Here comes the spicy. Tan tan men is basically like a mash-up of Sichuan dan dan noodles and Japanese ramen noodles. Of course, we're using a Sichuan chili bean paste. This one is what gives us the heat and a bit of umami, savoriness. If you can't get a hold of this one, then go ahead and use a little bit of Korean gochujang. I won't tell anyone. You'll still get a really beautiful color and a little hit of umami. It'll be a slightly different flavor but still delicious. To that, I'm going to add a little dash of sake and some soy sauce. What we want to do here is let that pork absorb all of that tasty goodness in that sauce. I'm just going to turn the heat down and let that simmer away until almost all of the liquid has been soaked up. In the meantime, I'm going to mix up a little paste which is going to turn everything beautifully nutty and creamy and just a little spicy as well. To start off with, we need some sesame paste. This is a Japanese sesame paste. It's made from roasted sesame seeds. It has a really beautiful, almost bitter kind of flavor and a very intense flavor. A lot of people say to substitute tahini for this one. But I actually think the flavor is a little bit more like peanut butter. If I couldn't get a hold of the Japanese style sesame paste, I would just use some peanut butter. To that, I want to add some soy sauce, some white vinegar and a nice little hit of chili oil here. Give that a mix. I also want some spring onion here. I just want the pale part. Just mix that through until you've got a rather thick paste. Set that aside and let's wait for our pork. Take a look at this pork. You can see all that juiciness has now been absorbed. We're looking really good. I'm going to just pop that to the side. We're going to get on to doing our broth. Unlike your usual ramen broth, this one is pretty much going to take the same amount of time that it will to boil your noodles. We just need to heat everything through. I've got some chicken stock and some unsweetened soy milk. This is also going to add to the creaminess in the finished soup. While that's heating up, all I need to do to prepare my bowl is just add in a heaped tablespoon of that paste we made earlier. Now that that soup is piping hot, pour that over the top. Encourage everything in there to make friends. I've got some ramen noodles here that I'm just going to tip straight in there. Now we want some pork. A little bit of greenery here. I've got some bok choy that I've just briefly put into some hot water. Of course, because for me a ramen bowl needs an egg. Then just a little sprinkling of spring onion. There you go, guys. Wow. If that is not one joyful-looking bowl, I don't know what is. Look at that. Look at the little bit of spicy red oil there coming off the pork and seeping into that creamy broth. Wow. It tastes so complex. It really does taste like you've been simmering that thing for days, honestly.