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Recipe: Tim Anderson’s One Hour Spicy Ramen

***Rachel Khoo would like to thank all the inspiring people who helped make the Khoollect studio a hive of creativity. Although the Khoollect studio’s doors have now closed, you can keep up with Rachel’s newest adventures on RachelKhoo.com and on Rachel’s Instagram and Facebook pages – and, continue to enjoy the Khoollect website’s stories and recipes, which will remain available.***

Ramen is great but making ramen is not. It’s long, it’s usually requiring a lot of different steps and rarely compares to what you’ll get at your favourite restaurant. With this recipe however, that all changes.

Taken from Tim Anderson’s latest cookbook storm JapanEasy, this ramen is the answer to your prayers.

He explains: “Good ramen is pretty simple to make at home, but really good ramen is almost impossibly difficult. Our ‘basic’ ramen at the restaurant is a complicated two-day process and the finished dish has eight different toppings, most of which are made in-house and involve quite a lot of labour in and of themselves. So even though ramen is my favourite food, I almost never make it at home, and when I do, it’s pretty much always instant ramen from a packet gussied up with a few simple toppings. But a few years ago, I was doing some consultancy for a new Japanese restaurant that wanted to make ramen, but didn’t have the time or space to dedicate to producing large quantities of rich broth and lots of toppings.

“At first I thought: Bah! It can’t be done. There are no shortcuts to great ramen. But then I recalled a ramen shop in Sapporo called Keyaki that I visited in back in 2007. They did something I had never seen before, which produced an immensely flavourful and deep ramen in a matter of minutes: they stir-fried a combination of miso, pork mince and other seasonings in a rocket-hot wok before combining it with their broth, which browned the meat and caramelised the miso until the mixture was nutty and rich. I decided to give something similar a go, and it worked wonderfully. So here it is: a truly excellent bowl of ramen that can be made from scratch in under an hour. This, to me, is as rare and exciting as a unicorn.”

JapanEasy by Tim Anderson (Hardie Grant, £20) Photography © Laura Edwards.

One Hour Spicy Ramen Recipe:

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WRITTEN By:
Maria Bell

Maria Bell is a photographer and editor from the Isle of Wight. Talk to her about food and/or photography and she'll always be listening.

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ingredients

1.4 litres (47 fl oz/5½ cups) unseasoned chicken broth (not from a stock cube!)
100 g (3½ oz) miso
2 bok choi, cut into quarters
150 g (5 oz) bean sprouts
4 teaspoons sesame oil
4 portions of ramen noodles – dried is good; instant is better; fresh is best
salt or soy sauce, to taste (optional)
50 g (2 oz) Parmesan cheese, grated (optional, but it’s soooooo good)
4 Soy-Marinated Eggs halved
For the spicy miso pork mince
1 leek, washed and trimmed
40 g (1½ oz) miso – use red or barley miso if you can get it
1 tomato
½ onion, roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, peeled
1 fresh red chilli
2 teaspoons dried chilli flakes
2 cm (¾ in) piece of fresh ginger, finely sliced (no need to peel)
½ tablespoon toasted sesame seeds
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon Szechuan pepper or ¼ teaspoon sansho (optional)
2 anchovy fillets in oil (optional)
250 g (9 oz) pork mince – not lean please!
2 tablespoons oil
50 g (2 oz/3½ tablespoons) butter

Image: Laura Edwards.

1.

Get a large pot of water on the boil and bring the chicken broth up to a simmer in another pan. Add the miso to the stock and whisk to dissolve. Next: the spicy miso pork mince. Cut the leek in half, and roughly chop the greener half. Finely shred the whiter half of the leek, and soak in very cold water until needed.

2.

Put the green half of the leek, the miso, tomato, onion, garlic, red chilli, chilli flakes, ginger, sesame seeds, pepper, Szechuan pepper or sansho and anchovies, if using, in a blender or food processor and blitz to a coarse paste. (If you don’t have a food processor, you can grate or mince everything by hand, or use a mortar and pestle.)

3.

Work this mixture into the pork mince to make a delicious pork paste. Now here is the important part: you need an EXTREMELY HOT pan or wok. So get your best, most reliable pan on a high heat a good 5–10 minutes before you intend to cook.

4.

Add the oil to the pan and then add the pork mixture, stirring frequently until it turns a rich brown in colour. (Don’t shake or lift the pan – keep it on the heat!) Once it’s all browned nicely and cooked through (should be about 10 minutes), remove from the heat and stir in the butter. Keep warm until needed.

5.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil and blanch the pak choy for 1 minute. Remove with a slotted spoon to a bowl. Blanch the bean sprouts for 20-30 seconds and remove with the slotted spoon to the same bowl. Pour over the sesame oil and mix well.

6.

Cook the noodles in the same boiling water following pack instructions and drain well.

7.

Divide the miso-chicken broth between four deep bowls and add the noodles and divide half of the pork mince to each and stir well. Taste the broth and adjust the seasoning with salt or soy.

8.

Top each with the remaining pork mince, parmesan, if using, drained shredded white leek, pak choy, bean sprouts and marinated eggs. Enjoy piping hot, and don’t forget to slurp!

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Shimrit 6 years ago

Sounds great, but the recipe appears to be missing several steps.

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Maria Bell 6 years ago

Thanks for the spot, not quite sure what happened but all there now! Let us know how it goes.

Janine 6 years ago

Hello Team,

Are you going to share all the steps to the recipe? It stops at step 4 and seems to be missing the last part.

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Maria Bell 6 years ago

Thanks for the spot, not quite sure what happened but all there now! Let us know how it goes.

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