Growing up, a steaming bowl of ramen was my panacea to mend a cold, the balm demanded to sooth my angst, and the pick-me-up needed after a rough day at school. Those perfect bowls of creamy porcine soup brimming with curly noodles were, for me, the quintessential comfort food. This is probably why I took it with such great offense when hipster New York ramen joints started offering meatless abominations on their menus.
To me, a ramen broth made without bones, cartilage and fat was not ramen at all, but some impotent hack undeserving of the title "ramen". My thinking at the time was that since chicken noodle soup without chicken would just be a vegetable noodle soup, who gave these plant-wielding cretans permission to call their soulless creations ramen?
Well, I'm here today to apologize for being an elitist douchebag and for being wrong. Perhaps it's my Kyushu roots, where "ramen" is synonymous with tonkotsu (pork bone) broth, or the fact that I've seen far too many misrepresentations paraded around as Japanese food, but what I failed to realize is that the essence of ramen isn't about meat, bones and fat, it's about the intense umami, richness and aroma that comes from them.
In my defense, most attempts at vegan ramen I've seen to date have been vapid bowls of vaguely Asian noodle soup, but after realizing my error, I figured the only way to make up for my sins was to make a better plant-based ramen.
So how do you create a rich broth laden with umami without using meat? Well... it's not as hard as you might think and it's actually a good deal faster than simmering a pot of bones for hours
The first challenge is to create a rich milky soup to mimic the sort of broth you'd get from the breakdown of collagen and fat. The keyword here is "milky" because while you can spend hours boiling cartilage and fat to create an emulsion, there's a more direct route by adding milk... in this case, soy milk. I know, it sounds crazy, but trust me it works
While soy milk will give us the rich creamy texture, it's woefully devoid of the kinds of flavors we want in a really great ramen. Building a concentrated vegetable and mushroom stock will get us the umami and may even give us the hint of porky funk that we need, but the problem is that the soy milk will attenuate the flavor and umami in the stock, while the stock will water down the richness of the soy milk.... a lose-lose proposition.
My solution is to use a 100% soy milk for the stock, and then make a concentrated taré (sauce) that can be used to add all the other flavors and tastes. Rather than spend the time to make a vegetable stock and then reduce it, I decided to start with concentrates. Namely amino acid rich liquids such as soy sauce and sake, along with amino acid rich dried foods like vegetables, kelp and mushrooms.
By powderizing the dried ingredients and reducing them with the liquids, you end up with an ultra-concentrated sauce that packs a stunning amount of umami into just a fraction of a drop. Combined with the soy milk, you'll have a broth that will have even the most jaded ramen critics scratching their heads in disbelief that there's no meat, dairy, fish or MSG in it.
Lastly to capture the savory sweet aromas of the caramelized aromatics in a great tonkotsu broth, I opted for an oil infused with burnt garlic, ginger, and scallions. I know I probably lost a few of you at soymilk, and a few more of you have your mouse pointers hovering over the "x" on your browser, but hear me out. Thanks to the Maillard reaction, the more you caramelize aromatics, the more complex the flavors become. At some point though, as the sugars turn to carbon, the mixture will become bitter. This is a bad thing if all you're eating are the aromatics, but with ramen, that's not the case. The burnt oil is just a small fraction of the liquid and the creamy broth paves over any bitterness in the oil, allowing the fully realized potential of the aromatics to shine through. If you're still not convinced, consider this: Mayu (burnt garlic oil) is a legitimate topping in Kagoshima-style ramen, and it's the charred aromatics that give a great pho its characteristic flavor.
So how does this vegan tonkotsu ramen taste? Unctuous, with a lip coating stickiness that helps the blast of umami linger on your tongue as you contemplate its deliciousness. Put simply, it's nothing short of miraculous, and it's proof positive that even the meatiest of dishes can be made from plants. Mind you, it's not going to taste exactly like a pork-based tonkotsu ramen since it doesn't actually have pork in it. But does it capture the spirit and essence of ramen? Absolutely!
Perhaps the most compelling reason that should get non-vegans excited about making this plant-based alternative is the fact that this ramen can be put together in about 45 minutes. I'd like to see someone pull that off with a bag of bones.
📖 Recipe
Units
Ingredients
for mayu
- ⅓ cup vegetable oil
- 40 grams scallions white part only (finely minced ~3-4 )
- 30 grams garlic (grated)
- 20 grams ginger (grated)
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
for tare
- 4 grams dried shiitake mushrooms
- 4 grams dried porcini mushrooms
- 3 grams freeze dried corn
- 2 grams dashi konbu
- 5 grams nutritional yeast
- ⅓ cup white soy sauce
- ¼ cup sake
- 1 teaspoon salt
for ramen
- unsweetened soy milk
- nerigoma (see the note at the bottom of the recipe)
- ramen noodles
Instructions
- To make the mayu, add the oil, scallions, garlic and ginger to a small saucepan and fry over low heat, stirring occasionally.
- Once the sizzling starts to subside, stir constantly to brown evenly. Keep frying until the mixture is chocolate brown. Turn off the heat and then carefully add 1 tablespoon soy sauce (it will bubble up and spatter).
- Turn the heat back on and continue to fry until the sizzlingly mostly subsides and the mixture is coffee brown in color. Remove from the heat and let the mixture cool.
- Use a stick blender (or a regular blender) to puree the burnt aromatics and oil.
- Crumble the shiitake, porcini, corn and dashi konbu into a spice grinder and grind until it's a fine powder. Add the nutritional yeast and continue grinding until you have a mixture that's the consistency of powdered sugar.
- Add the powder to a small sauce pan along with the white soy sauce, sake, and salt. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook for about 3 minutes to burn off the alcohol. Your tare should be about the consistency of gravy.
- Boil a pot of water for your noodles.
- For every 1 cup of soy milk add 1 tablespoon of tare and 1 teaspoon of nerigoma to a blender. For each bowl of ramen you need about 1 ½ cups of soup, so if you want to make 2 bowls of ramen, use 3 cups of soy milk, 3 tablespoons of tare and 3 teaspoons(1 tablespoon) of nerigoma. If your soy milk is very rich, you may need to cut it with a bit of water. Blend until smooth and then strain the mixture into a pot through a fine mesh sieve to remove the bubbles and sediment. Heat the soy milk mixture over low heat and make sure it does not boil.
- Prepare any toppings you plan to use as the noodles will stretch in the broth if you take too long to get the toppings on. I used menma, woodear, scallions, benishoga, and sesame seeds.
- Boil the noodles according to the package directions. I like to boil them for 1 minute less than what the directions say as they will continue to cook once you add them to the broth.
- Drizzle some Mayu on top and finish with the rest of the toppings. Serve immediately.
Herr Yamamoto says
Thanks so far, maybe half of the soymilk?
Marc Matsumoto says
You might even want to go less than that. It depends on how rich you want your miso ramen to be.
Herr Yamamoto says
okay i made it ....it worked out perfectly, srsly just like miso ramen with tonkotsu base. Awesome!!!
Joy Liu-Trujillo says
Hi Marc, what type of sake do you recommend for this recipe?
Marc Matsumoto says
Whatever is available to you is fine. Something like a Junmai Daiginjo will give you the most flavor but they tend to be very expensive, and you probably won't notice a huge difference in the end product.
Korra says
Can you please post the recipe using conventional measurements such as teaspoons and cups? A lot of people
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Korra, there's a unit conversion feature being built that should be ready in about a month that will let you convert the metric to imperial measures. That said, it will not convert mass based measurements(grams, ounces pounds) to volumetric measurements (cups, tablespoons, etc). That's because volumetric measurements are an extremely inaccurate way of measuring things that are not liquids (like flour, vegetables, etc) since the amount that fits in a cup depends on how small things are diced, how much you pack the ingredient in, etc.
Dante Consonero says
can i omit, and or, replace the freeze dried corn?
Nadine says
Same question here! It is hard to come by in my location.
Marc says
Hi Nadine, you can substitute vegan creamed corn that's been pureed and passed through a strainer to remove any skins from the kernels.
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Dante, you can replace the corn with creamed corn that's been pureed and strained. I would not omit it as it is responsible for a lot of the umami and sweetness in the soup.
jm says
What brand soy milk do you recommend?
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi JM, if you live near a Japanese market, I'd recommend this one: https://photo.kenko.com/E378258H_L.jpg If you don't have a Japanese market near you but you're in the US, you can order it on Amazon by searching for: "Kikkoman delicious adjustment-free soy". Kikkoman also sells a US version of it's soy milk but it is not the same.
Sakiko says
Hi Marc
Sakiko says
Thanks for the recipe. As a native Japanese living in a rural town without Ippudo, I really appreciate your postings! I have a quick question, do you happen to know what the Japanese name for white soy sauce is? I am wondering if it is usukuchi-shouyu or shira-dashi. Couldn't quite figure out on my own, and those are two different things...
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Sakiko, white soy sauce in Japanese is shiroshoyu (白醤油). It is different from usukuchi and shirodashi. It's a very mild flavor that has a light amber color.
Giftz says
Replacement for Sake? I cannot use it in recipies for religious restrictions.
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Giftz, the sake is there to add sweetness and umami, so you could use some kind of soup stock (such as vegetable stock) along with a bit of sugar. It's obviously not going to taste the same, but will have a similar effect (like the difference between adding chicken or beef to a soup).
Gaby says
Can you substitute the corn for something else?
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Gaby, the freeze-dried corn adds a mild sweetness and a ton of umami producing amino acids to the soup without having a strong flavor of it's own. I can't really think of a single good substitute, but you could probably get a similar benefit by adding some sugar, and other umami-rich freeze-dried vegetables such as cabbage.
Nadine says
Incredible! I won't need to introduce this as a good 'vegan' ramen to guests – I can just say it is my favourite ramen recipe, period. Surprisingly easy to make, too!
Marc says
I'm so happy to hear you enjoyed this Nadine! I know what you mean vegan Pho (https://norecipes.com/vegan-pho-recipe/) has become the default pho in our household.