Hachiya (蜂屋) Ramen Pack & Making Char Siew!!

When I went to Japan, I received a ramen pack from Hachiya (蜂屋), a renowned shoyu ramen store in Asahikawa with over 60 years of history.

As usual, the pack contains only noodles and the soup.



So, its time for me to try my cooking skill again!
I've attempted to make tamago last time, so its time to try the next key ingredient...

Char Siew!!

Starting with some pork belly, I followed a recipe, tying the chunk of pork up, boiled, pan-fried and stewed it.

And, beyond my expectation, it was quite tasty!

Homemade char siew!

The piece of pork belly that I bought was quite small, so it was hard to slice it up.
The char siew didn't came up as a round piece as I would have wanted.

But, it was actually easier than I thought, compared to making the perfect runny tamago.
Will definitely try it again soon, recording the process in more details.

Well, back to the ramen.
With the homemade char siew and some boiled spinach, here's my dinner...



Itadakimasu!

Making Ajitama (味玉)

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/188024

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.

Next, add the ingredients for the sauce (water, soy sauce, etc) into a tupperware. It already looks delicious at this stage!

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!

Yoshimuraya (吉村家) Ramen Pack

This week's ramen adventure takes me ... home!

Today's task is to cook the ramen pack that I bought at the Meidi-ya Ramen Fair that just ended.

From the fair, I bought this pack from a ramen shop call Yoshimuraya (吉村家), a Yokohama ie-style (家系) ramen. Said to be the origin of the ie-style ramen, Yoshimuraya has on the average 1500 customers per day. Amazing!

The pack contains 3 servings of noodles.

Soup paste and noodle

Taking a closer look at the noodle, Yoshimuraya uses thick straight noodles.

And the tonkotsu soy sauce soup comes in 1 packet....

Putting it into a bowl, coincidentally I've created the yin-yang pattern out of the 2 layers of soup and oil pastes!

And the soup is done by adding about 200ml of boiling water. The layer of oil is pretty thick.

Next, the noodles.

Preferably the water should be boiling hot. But it is hard for the fire to be so strong at home most of the time...

After 3 mins and tested that its al dente, I drained the noodles in a sieve...

Putting the noodles into the soup, and topping it with long cabbage, santouka char siew, spring onion and seaweed... voila! My original Yoshimuraya Ramen.

With the char siew ready on hand, it was actually quite simple to make it. Its just like instant noodles, except that the noodles are not fried noodles but raw noodles, and the soup is more proper.

Buying such a ramen pack is quite a good way to enjoy near restaurant standard ramen in the leisure of home. I found the cooking process fun too, that I can "act" as a ramen cook for a day.

I'll challenge myself to make the tamago next time.