This week's ramen adventure brought me to... making my own ajitama (flavoured egg)!
I went around the net to look for some recipes on the net, and found these few that I referenced the egg-making journey from.
(In Japanese)
http://cookpad.com/recipe/212285
ingredients...The ingredients are:
Egg (of course!) .............. 6 pcs
For the sauce where the eggs will swin in:
Ginger ...................................................... several pcs
Garlic ........................................................ 2 cloves
Green parts of leeks ............................... 2 stalks
Soy Sauce ................................................. 50cc
Mirin ......................................................... 50cc
Water ........................................................ 100cc
Sesame Oil, Chili Oil, Dashi Stock .......... a little
First, chop up the garlic, ginger and leeks. I guess these will give additional flavour to the sauce.
The sauce bath is now ready! Moving on to making the soft-boiled egg, which I guess will be one of the most tricky part of making ajitama.
Following the instruction, I started boiling the egg from room-temperature water...
... and prepared a ice bath to cool down the eggs for easy peeling after the egg is boiled and also to stop the cooking process.
About 4 minutes after the water started boiling, I took the eggs out and cooled them in the ice water bath.
Next comes the peeling of the shell.... and it was hard!
I guess some of my steps in preparing the egg was not right, and several of them became casualties along the way...
Because the eggs were half-boiled, the eggs were very soft and delicate. As I was peeling off the shell carefully, the egg white broke off for a few of the eggs, and the semi-cooked egg yoke oozed out. Oops!
I must try out other methods to make this step work...
Well, moving on, the survivors are put into their soaking bath. This looks good!
The recipe recommends to soak it for 3 days.
It was a long wait, and I was eager to find out how my first attempt in making ajitama went.
Took it out every day to see how they are doing.
This is after day 2... the eggs picked up quite a bit of color!
On day 3, it is ready to be eaten...!
It has totally taken on the color of the sauce, and looks like what it is served in the restaurants.
... and the moment of truth to see how it the critical part of the ajitam - the yoke - went.
Hmm... it is not as flowy than I've expected.
But nonetheless it look pretty good, and it tasted good as well!
According to the receipe, the yoke will harden in the process of soaking in the sauce. I think I have to control the length of boiling and the soaking time accordingly to make the yoke harden in the right way at the end.
Will be trying to make ajitama again and perfect it!
