Only, this was less of a challenge for me, who got to sit back and relax and more of a challenge for Justin, who worked the whole day & night before on the broth and then came to my house to complete the final touches (and feed me).
Embarrassingly, even Justin's guests worked harder than me for this soup! A big THANK YOU and welcome to my new friends Sandy and Jason, who brought their ramen making and taste-testing expertise to help us keep it authentic.
With that, I will let Justin share his experience, and most importantly, his recipe with you in his own words:
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Ingredients
10 lbs pork neck bones
2 pork shoulder blades
1 onion
2 shallots
3 scallions
3 carrots
2 inch knob of ginger
~15 cloves of garlic
12 inch piece of konbu
1 package of dried shiitakes (4 ounces bag perhaps?)
drippings from my pork shoulder, consists of pork jus, fish sauce, white soy sauce
*large handful of bonito ~1/2 cup
Flavorings
White soy sauce
sesame oil
fish sauce
white pepper
Toppings
ramen noodles (not sure where else to put this)
chopped scallions
soft-boiled egg (in theory)
nori
Process
Neck bones were roasted in batches, fist for 300F for an hour and then 400F for another 45 minutes. My oven is far from calibrated, so it's a bit of a guessing game. It's also why I turned it up. The marrow was dissolving, but there wasn't maillard reaction I wanted.
While that was happening, I heated up the stock pot and placed the konbu and a bag of dried shiitakes in to the bowl for about an hour and then removed them.
I deglazed the pans with sake and threw them in to a stock pot with the aromatics over high heat, then lowered the heat when I was about to go to sleep.
Every so often I would check the water level and would refill the stock pot as needed. Somewhere in the middle of the night I removed all the bones and strained the broth. I was planning on salvaging whatever meat that could be gleaned from the neck bones, but that was far too tedious of a chore. The bones would shatter and mix in with the meat. I transferred the bones without the meat into a pasta insert and put that back into the stock pot.
I might have added an onion to the bones.
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Above was the prep that I didn't see. Once at my house, Justin was hard at work again preparing all the fixings. We tried to soft boil some eggs... Maybe next time. And Jason prepared our noodles in batches. Justin tricked out the broth with a variety of ingredients.
And then we ate.
And how was it? Delicious! Just ask Ed!
And how did the expert taster rate it: Pretty good for a first try. And based on the feed back, Justin has some lessons learned to share.
ALWAYS add bonito/hon dashi to ramen. Earlier tonight I made some ramen from the leftover broth and added a large handful of bonito. I felt like it made a huge difference and will always add it to my ramen.
I would have liked to have parboiled the bones before roasting them. I feel it would have produced a cleaner, clearer broth.
As Mrs. Matsui advises, season in layers. Adding just a bit of salt to the aromatics and bones would have pulled more flavor out of them.
After I boiled the konbu, I read somewhere that konbu should be cooked from 120 - 150 and not a full boil. It apparently excretes a slimyness that is unpleasant. I didn't detect that as I was going, but who knows. Personally I feel that every time I see a recipe that calls for konbu, it isn't nearly enough time to extract all the flavor out of it.
When using Sun Noodles for ramen, use the Shoyu noodles over the pork ones - they're not nearly as tasty
Thank you all who ate and helped. A special thank you to my guest chef, Justin Lanska for my first bowl of homemade ramen!!! What an awesome treat!!!
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