How I make restaurant-quality ramen at home

All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Today, we're going to make a spicy seafood ramen bowl. It's gonna be quite interesting. I'd almost say maybe Asian Confusion Infusion, but you're going to be the judge on this. And without further ado, let's start cooking. ♪ One, one, two, one, if I miss my flow ♪ ♪ I'm one of a kind like a white rhino ♪ So, we're gonna try to do this in about one hour, and then we'll check back in terms of where we are in the process. Ideally, we try to do everything in three hours. And we're gonna start this with a really hot pan and grilling our beautiful pork belly. So, we did take off the skin because I think in a ramen dish, you don't want the skin. It doesn't feel so sexy unless you would sort of like caramelize and crisp it up, but that isn't the case here. So, we're gonna add a nice touch of oil. As you can see, the pan is incredibly hot. I'm just gonna flip this in here like that. So, the idea here is that we get a really sort of nice caramelization before we add it into our stock. ♪ Respectfully, I don't want nothing to do with you ♪ ♪ World doesn't spin around, ABC, it rhymes with... ♪ All right, so this is done, and I'm quite happy with it. I think it has a sort of really nice caramelization. If I can get this ****** out. We're just gonna place it here. And now we're gonna move on to our stock. ♪ Feel better in the mood, yeah ♪ Okay, try ******* focus. So, now we're gonna work onto our stock. Our pork is done. We have some classic water, Swiss water, sourced locally here from my local water guy. We have some sake. We have some reduced salted soy. We have some healthy sugar. And then last but not least, if you come a little bit closer, we have some aromatics. So, we have a mix between onions, some cloves, some Sichuan pepper, bit of pear, garlic, ginger, and some cinnamon. It's just gonna give it sort of a nice, sort of aromatic touch to our beautiful pork. And we're just gonna put this in here like that. So, I know you wanna keep looking in there, but this needs to now cook. We're gonna cook this for about, I think, 40 to an hour, but we kinda like want it almost full apart, but not completely, if that makes sense. We have bone marrow pieces, which I think in a ramen soup kind of would make it a little bit more sort of like interesting, gourmet, fine dining, and just kind of cool. Like, just think of that bone piece, fatty bone piece inside of the soup. I think just ******* sexy. So, now, of course, we're doing this restaurant quality. As you can see, we've got to just clean this up a little bit. So, I think just ******* sexy. Sexy, sexy. So, I think. So sexy. I think just ******* sexy. The only reason why I ever felt comfortable eating this is because in the restaurants I've worked for, they were making bone marrow dishes, but also because I watched a documentary about how bone marrow was sort of discovered back in the day, which was quite fascinating. When humans were trying to survive, by accident, they found out that by cracking the bones, there was actually all of this fat that could essentially nourish them. And so, yeah, it was just sort of a discovery thing, and sort of seeing that process made me feel at much more ease sort of to try this thing, which is actually incredibly delicious, and sort of this really sort of silky fat. Okay, so, as you can see, I think I did a pretty nice job. So, we really clean out all the sort of sinew, any sort of additional meat, and just, yeah, it just looks very, very smooth, and that's going to really make a difference. But now we've got to draw out some of the impurities, and we're going to do this with water and some ice. And yeah, that's just going to really sort of clean some of those blood impurities out. Not sure how well it's going to do a good job in the next three hours. And we move to our second prep, which is our stock. All right, so here we have some really beautiful, fresh mussels that we caught the other day. It is also sort of the location where we went spearfishing. If you haven't seen that video before, I highly recommend it. So, really, really hot pan. Mussels go in. Some sake. Lid here, and we're going to let that cook for about two to four minutes for them to open up. And then we're going to strain them, take out the meat, chuck the shells, and then start on the stock. The smell is just absolutely beautiful, and it just smells like the life I wish I had. Smells fresh. That's how you want it. So, mussels done. We have a fine sieve. We have a muslin cloth. Now we want to kind of keep that mussel stock, which is really going to help with some of that stock flavor. And so, yeah, we're just going to strain this, and we're going to move on to the tomatoes. So, we have about nine minutes left. And in terms of where we are, we're just about to start the main stock process. We're a little bit behind schedule in terms of sort of the timing aspect, sort of the mussel picking, the cooking aspect, cleaning just took a little bit more time than expected. So, now we have some bacon, raw bacon. We have some onions. We have some garlic. We have some chilies. We have some tomatoes. This is going to go into the pot in a sort of layered fashion, very simply, and we're going to build those flavors one by one. So, a touch of oil. We don't want this pan too hot. We're going to add our bacon and onions. The pot goes sizzle, sizzle, and we don't want this too hot either. We want this to sort of like gently saute, but we don't want any sort of color on this. It's wrong. So, we're going to put this here. This is just wrong in terms of sort of the flavor building. We actually wanted the chili first, then the onions, then the bacon. So, no big drama. We're all breathing. We're still all living. So, again, touch of oil. Crank up the heat a little bit. We're going to add our chilies. Give this a nice little saute. Next comes our onions and bacon. So, onions have softened. Now we're going to come in with our garlic. We have some smoked paprika deglazed with sake. So, here we have our beautiful mussels. We're going to add that in. We have our mussel stock. We're going to add our tomatoes and some chicken stock. Okay, so we're going to let that cook for about an hour or so. Any impurities that skim up, we're going to skim off and chuck somewhere. I think our pork belly is done. So, I'll just turn off the heat, allow it to cool. Then we're going to take it out and slice and dice, but we'll see that in a second. And before that, we're also going to change our water. So, we have our bone marrow. You can see some of the impurities sort of coming to the surface. But yeah, we're going to change that water, add some new ice in. And then before we plate, we're going to maybe do it one more time. So, before we're going to bring our stock to a nice simmer, we're going to infuse it with some kombu around sort of like the 70 to 80 degrees, just to sort of like add that umami sort of flavor to it. Okay, so now before we start on our sort of like final garnishes, like the ramen noodles, the slow cooked egg sort of ish, and sort of all the sort of finishing elements, we're going to just move our pork belly to the side. All right, so our second hour. Now we're going to move into taking out the pork belly, cleaning it a bit, and then also doing some reduction aspect before moving to all the sort of the other components. So next, we're going to start on our chili oil, which I think we're going to introduce into our ramen broth. And it's going to add a little bit more of a kick, and I think it's just going to work really well with the seafood, mussel sort of stock, and pork belly, ****. So, chili's in, neutral oil. Kind of like wanted as a sort of like almost like a paste. Looks actually quite beautiful. And so we're going to cook this off. We want to get all of that sort of that rawness out, and essentially create this beautiful dark red chili oil. Okay, kombu goes out. It's already simmering here, which is not so ideal, to be honest. All right, so our chili oil is frying quite crazily, so we're just going to cook out that rawness, and we want to sort of like bring a bit of a sort of toasty note through it. So it's going to take about a minute or so. You've got to continuously whisk it, otherwise you might end up sort of like the chili might end up sort of catching at the bottom and starting to burn, and you don't want that. Okay, so this is done. Nice and toasty and nutty. And we're just going to drain this over a fine sieve. Why is it sizzling like that? It's because there's water in there. I didn't clean the bowl correctly. Do not do this at home. So we're going to set this aside, mise en place, closing the distance. Soup is souping, and we're going to do another change of water here. Okay, so next we're going to do our ramen noodles. We have some good flour. We have a mixture between salt and baked baking soda. We're going to give this a nice little whisk. So the idea of this whole process is for us to kind of like add just enough water for the dough to sort of come together. We don't want it too soft. Yeah, you just want to hydrate it just enough for it to sort of like come together. Again, you kind of want it sort of like shaggy and sort of like crumbled pieces of it without sort of any bigger, chunkier. So really sort of distributing that sort of moisture throughout the dough. So as you can see, it is actually quite dry, but that's okay. Again, you really don't want too much moisture. You don't want it to be this sort of like sloppy ramen. It still needs a bit of a crunch. We're going to see that also with the lamination process. So we're going to have to roll this out a touch. Otherwise, the pasta machine won't be able to feed it through it. All right, so this is good. Now I'm going to start with the lamination process. So yeah, the reason why we're doing this constant folding process is A, because we want it to have a really smooth, thin strip. And as you can see, it's kind of like uneven a little bit. It's already getting better, to be honest. But yeah, you have all these sort of like rough edges, but you want to sort of smooth it out, have a really nice, clean sheet. And we also want to kind of laminate the dough. ♪ You a dog when you livin' in D.R. ♪ Press down a bit. ♪ You can run, but you really won't get far ♪ ♪ You Uber, A bulletproof, big car ♪ This is done in terms of the lamination process. And I think I'm quite happy with this. And so now we're going to just trim it a little bit, clean it up. So if there are any Japanese chefs out there or professional chefs that have done ramen, please let me know how I'm doing here. I think you kind of want to have those kind of like streaks. This is a good sign. And the dough is looking beautiful. We have this like machine here that's basically going to create really beautiful, so like almost angel hair style ramen noodles, which I think is going to be very sexy for this particular ramen dish. If you do not have this at home, including the pasta machine, while it's actually really a fun exercise to do and very satisfactory, you can do everything by hand. You can roll it out by hand, you can cut it by hand, and it's totally doable. It's not going to change the taste. Only visually, it might look a little bit less sexy, but maybe a little bit more authentic. ♪ You Uber, A bulletproof, big car ♪ So our stock is finished. And now we're going to blend this. Now this part is quite important from a technical aspect. You don't want it completely into a, so like fine puree. You just kind of want to break the proteins of the meat a little bit. So a bit of a sort of like a thick slurry, but not ultra smooth because we want to then afterwards filter everything and really have that beautiful sort of like silky stock, which we're going to see in a second. Filtration process. It's going to take a couple of steps. First, we're going to go through a much thicker sieve. So yeah, as you can see all of this, you can kind of chuck. Again, we're going to sieve this through. The second part. Again, as you can see, you're going to have to do this sort of like in additions. Again, we're going to chuck this away. Probably in a actual kitchen, sort of professional kitchen settings, we would most likely extract even more sort of like liquid from that. But as we're a bit time concerned, this is just a little bit easier to do. So now we're going to filter it even finer. Here comes the second step. Again, we're going to just gently push this through and not too hard. And I think to me that's done. So now we're going to strain this again through a muslin cloth just to get out any sort of additional grittiness. We're going to pass this through another round. All right, so again, we're going to use that ladle. I'm going to push that through as best as possible just to speed up the process. All right, so we've done the first half. We have a clean muslin cloth for the second half. We're going to clean this pot while this sort of like drains. And then we move into the final stages. Chef's kiss. So I was just placing on the heat just to bring it up to heat a little bit. We don't want it boiling because now we're going to add some bonito flakes. The idea is that we sort of like steep in the flavors in a very sort of like non-aggressive way. So you definitely don't want it boiling. I'm going to let it sit for about one minute. So the other second hour has passed. Now in the sort of like final hour, we're going to start really wrapping up things. Hopefully it's going to take an hour. But yeah, so our stock has infused for about a minute. We're going to strain this again very carefully. Next, we're going to add some red miso paste. Again, the stock is quite warm. And so from this stage, I'm already quite happy with the flavor and taste. I mean, I still got to just check it, but I'm quite confident everything is good. So from here on, we don't need to boil anything anymore. We're also going to just finish it with some aromatics. We have some, whatever that's called, and some shiitake mushrooms. And we're going to let that infuse for about 10 minutes. Stock has nicely infused. It's been about a good hot minute. And we're just going to take this out. We don't want to do it too long either because you just want to have those really subtle aromas of that fresh spring onion and shiitake mushroom. Again, it's all about kind of like having sort of this refined stock. So we're kind of really building and elevating into a really nice place. Clock is hot. Our stock is looking good. It's slowly sort of infusing. In the meantime, we're going to take our pork that has beautifully been resting, and we're going to nicely slice and dice this ******. We have our beautiful reduction stock, which we cooked our pork in. And next, we're also going to add a bit of Szechuan pepper. Now, this is where I'm a little bit confused as to thinking, will this work, or is this too much of Asian confusion infusion? Okay, so we have our spicy chili oil, and we're going to add this into our beautiful stock that is nice and ready. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm going to add everything into it. You know what? Let's go for it. Liquid gold. Okay, so next, everything is kind of like done. We've got to do the ******* eggs. We want them kind of like semi-cooked, so in the soft, the yolk should still be kind of like soft. So we're going to do that. We're going to prep some greenery stuff, quite boring, and then it's really just plate and assemble, and then you get to go home. Okay, so while this is quite boring, I'm going to give you a little bit of a story and a history of as to why I got these scratches here. A lot of people actually ask me as to how I got them, and it actually happened in Australia. I was bush camping. This was, I think, almost like, I don't know, 12 or 14 years ago, and I was quite in a sort of rural area, I think Northern Australia, and basically, I was just eating at the camp, and this dingo that was just incredibly hungry was kind of like sneaking up from behind me. Okay, so next, we're going to do our eggs. Now, to have it sort of like perfectly, sort of like cooked on the outside, the whites cooked, but the center still sort of like gooey, it's going to be exactly six minutes. Okay, so our eggs are ******* done. So if you made it so far up to this point, thank you, Jesus *******, my assistant. So we're absolutely done. Everything's prepped, was quite the rush, but we managed everything more or less within three hours. I think the timer, we have technically 10 minutes left, so pretty good. But yeah, so everything's ready. Now it's about plating. We have two beautiful bowls. Any questions? So you've made it this far, so please stick with me. What do we have in front of us? If you watch the video, you know exactly what the deal is. So without further ado, let's give this a wonderful crack. So as my close friend, Bruce Lee once said, be like water. I really love this ramen dish. I think it has so much flavor going on. It's a bit sort of Asian confusion, infusion, maybe, but I do think it works. Thanks for watching and till next time. ♪ One, one, two, one, if I miss my flow ♪ ♪ I'm one of a kind like a white rhino ♪ ♪ Chase me down like you're trying to catch smoke ♪ ♪ Don't read me fine if I miss one note, one, two, three ♪