RAMEN SCHOOL #6 | Rich Double Soup Base for Ramen | ラーメン

So in our very first video for Ramen School, we made a very, very simple double broth, a chintan, a clear broth that can be used for ramen. Today, we're gonna ramp it up a little bit. We're gonna make a slightly more complex broth, still using the double soup method, but this one is gonna be our complex double soup. Immediately, you can see that some of the ingredients that we used are very, very different from our first ramen broth. We're keeping it simple at the beginning, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think you don't need to have a lot of different ingredients to make a good ramen. It's a great place to start, but if you do want to start getting a bit more complicated, a little bit more in depth to the kind of ramen you can make, here's kind of the next step. We've got a lot of different ingredients here. Obviously, a lot more pork than we had before. Originally, we used chicken, the same ones, chicken feet and a whole boiling chicken, an old chicken, but now we've got pork neck bones and pork leg bones and pork trotters again. On the dried seafood side, before we just used katsuobushi, the bonito flakes, and kombu. Here, we've got some sardines, some iriko, as it's called in Japanese, some dried prawns, and this is fish maw, or the swim bladder of a fish, traditionally used a lot in Chinese cooking, dishes from Shandong province, that kind of thing. It's got a lovely dried seafood flavour. It'll go great in our double soup. So what do we need to think about when we're increasing the pork content of our soup? Well, it depends on what you make. This isn't gonna be a chintan. It's not a completely clear soup. We're actually gonna boil this with the lid on, so it's not gonna reduce as much. It's going to be a little bit more cloudy. We're gonna cook it for a lot longer. So this is gonna cook just with the bones for about five hours, then a couple of hours more with some of the other vegetables and things in there. So it's going to be a lot more cloudy than a regular clear broth, but that's not necessarily a big problem. The old days where it was just chintan and paitan are kind of past. You can do so much more with ramen now, and you're not essentially bound to just making completely clear broths or completely cloudy broths. You can kind of change it up a little bit, but we're still gonna use that double stock method because I think that is the best. The composition of the bones is really important. The pork neck here, it's gonna be a much richer, deeper flavor. The leg bones are going to be a much more mild flavor, give it a little bit more gelatin. Of course, the trotters are there for gelatin as well, as are the chicken feet. One thing that you do want to think about, I didn't want to freak you out by saying this too early in the piece, is when I'm cooking ramen, I only use meat from female pigs, and that's the same for char siu, for the bones, for stock, et cetera, et cetera. The reason I do that is because of something called boar taint. Boar taint is that slightly piggy smell, sometimes very strong piggy smell you get with some pork. You don't get that with female pigs. So I don't know if you have a butcher that can tell you the difference, but a lot of Asian butchers will either only source meat from female pigs or will have meat from female pigs at a slightly higher price than male pigs. So same process as before, we'll cut up the chicken, we'll cut the toenails off the chicken feet, we'll throw all of this into here and get it on the stove for about five hours. So the pork bones and chicken are on the stove on a medium high heat. That will take about 45 minutes to an hour to come up to a simmer. All the extra pork that's in this much meatier broth that we're making is going to require a lot more skimming. So we'll keep skimming this as it comes up to temperature, then I'll cover it and cook that for about five hours. After five hours, what needs to go in, same as before, just carrots, just take the ends off, just cut it into a couple of pieces. Onion, just halved like before. The shiitake mushrooms, I'll just leave whole as they are and we'll throw this in and we'll let that go for about another three hours. But what I really wanted to talk to you about here was this stuff here. We're using different dried seafood than we did before. The katsuobushi that we used was very, very simple. This stuff here requires slightly different preparation. The kombu, not so much. We're going to put that straight into some cold water, but instead of putting it straight onto the heat now, because this is going for five hours over here, I'm actually going to put this in the fridge for a few hours. You can do it overnight. I could have put this in yesterday and come back to it today, but the low temperature extraction of the taste from the kombu is actually a really, really nice thing for ramen. So I'll put this in here and throw that in the fridge. Now for the seafood. Just from small dried fish like this, you do get a lovely, lovely flavour. The important part is to know how to clean it. With the katsuobushi, nothing to do. Pick up a handful, throw it into your soup, and you're pretty much done. But for these, obviously they're dried still with their intestines in there, and that can actually, in the cooking process, become quite bitter in ramen. So the process for preparing these is take off the head, and then with a pinching action, you pinch out essentially the stomach. You're not left with very much, I have to say. It's just kind of the backbone and the tail of the fish. It's a labour-intensive process, but this does give you the best flavour. I mean, some people do just throw it in. They don't mind the extra bitterness they get from leaving the guts in there, but certainly if you are making your kodawari ramen and you want things to be as best as they possibly can be, you should be taking out the intestine. So slightly labour-intensive, but still worth the effort. The difference in flavour that we get from using the sardines, the iriko, is very, very different from just using katsuobushi. So I'll just combine that with my prawns and this fish maw, the swim bladder. The reason I'm including this is, I guess it's a bit of the philosophy or humour of ramen. This is a key ingredient in a famous dish from Shandong, one of Confucius's family dishes called Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea. And so I wanted to include it in here just for that. It does add a great flavour too, but I do think that it's important to have, I guess, a story that goes behind the ramen. It's not just a combination of ingredients. The reason that you choose to do certain things is really important in ramen. You know, if you like stronger, oilier fish, then these sardines are fantastic, much stronger in flavour than the tuna that's used for bonito flakes. And I guess you can see the similarity in process between this and the first soup that we made. The first soup was very, very simple, just a couple of ingredients. We're getting a bit more complex now with this one. And I wanted to show you that because the process is quite similar. We do need to do some things quite differently. You know, this will be boiled in our seafood gyokai soup for about 45 minutes rather than just dropping it in like the katsuobushi. Obviously, the pork bones are cooking for an awful lot longer than they would be if we were just using chicken like we did in the first one. But that then allows us to do things a little bit differently again. Ramen is about understanding the areas where you can be creative. That's the artistic side of ramen. And then you've got the scientific side, which is, I guess, in terms of our ramen log, trying to understand how we can recreate those flavours and adjust them as time goes on. It's like chess, a lot of moving parts. So while our meat broth goes for the last three hours of its cooking time, it's time to finish off our seafood broth. The term for a seafood broth in Japanese is gyokai. And this is a very similar gyokai to the previous one that we made, but we're using different dried seafood. The kombu has been soaking in cold water in the fridge for about six hours. So I put that on a very, very low heat and allow this to come to temperature over about an hour. When it's just starting to steam and the kombu is looking very, very soft, I can turn the heat up, remove the kombu immediately, and then bring this to a simmer and add in my dried seafood. That needs to simmer for about 45 minutes. So it's about nine hours since we started and the stocks are about the point where we want them to be. Our gyokai stock, the seafood stock, is really, really strong and pungent, very strong seafood aroma. But our pork stock or our mixed meat broth is really strong and fragrant, dare I say, ramen-y. And it's about blending the two of those things together that's gonna give us a good balance in our ramen. So that's all I need to do. Strain both of these, can be quite a process in terms of getting the liquor where you want it to be. Combine them both in a large pot, reduce it ever so slightly. You can just see how different this meat broth is from the previous light chintan that we made. It actually looks a little bit grey and cloudy, but a lot of that's due to the fact that this has just cooled down a little bit. So there's a bit of fat globules there that aren't letting the light go through, giving it that slightly grey appearance. But as this gets warmed back up when we're actually making ramen, it will still be quite brown and quite clear rather than this grey colour. The difference between this long-cooked, deep, rich stock that we have here rather than the short-cooked, light chintan that we made a couple of weeks ago is not just the flavour. There's a much meatier aroma and flavour that comes out of this, but also the texture. There's so much more gelatin that's been broken down into this soup. It's thick. When we put this in the fridge, it will solidify. There's that much gelatin in there. And that's what gives you that sort of lip-smacking type of ramen that you might get. Even, I've got a little bit of it on my fingers now, I can feel the texture, it's sort of sticky. So this is gonna be a much richer ramen than the light chintan we had. Now to add in my gyokai stock, blend the two together. And that is our rich double stock. It's about 10 litres that we've got here. You can see it's completely different from the light chintan that we made before. This is suited for a much richer, meatier ramen. It's still not a paitan, it's not a cloudy stock. This will clarify when it gets heated up because we haven't cooked it at high temperature. This is the difference between cooking at high temperature where it's rolling boil, extracting and emulsifying a lot of those fats and proteins, or keeping it at a low temperature where we can still get a relatively clear stock. From the lighter kind of shio ramen style chintan that we made before to this really thick kind of sticky, gelatinous double broth, you can see that there's a lot of difference to the broths that you make in ramen. So what we've got to do next week is turn this into a bowl of shoyu ramen.