World-Class Beef Pho
Most beef pho recipes have you toss bones, spices, and aromatics into a pot and simmer everything together for hours. That approach works, but it limits what you can get…
You can make a world-class bowl of ramen at home using ingredients from any grocery store. I spent weeks testing this homemade ramen recipe, and the techniques that separated the good batches from the great ones had nothing to do with specialty Japanese imports. They were details that most ramen recipes don’t bother explaining.
The biggest one is a concept called peak extraction time. Every ingredient in a broth reaches maximum flavor at a different rate: pork takes about 6 hours, chicken takes 3-4, vegetables take about 1. Throwing everything in the pot at once means your vegetables are mush before the pork is finished. Staggering each ingredient so it finishes at its peak made the single biggest difference in the final broth.
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This recipe has several components: the broth, the tare (seasoning), the noodles, the aroma oil, and the toppings. Each one is straightforward on its own, and most can be made days ahead of time.
For the broth: You need pork bones, chicken wings, and chicken feet. Chicken feet are what give the broth its rich, silky texture because they’re loaded with collagen. If your store doesn’t carry them, the broth will still taste good, it just won’t have the same mouthfeel. The aromatics are standard: onion, carrot, scallions, mushrooms, garlic, and ginger. Mushrooms and bacon (4 slices) are both there for umami. The bacon specifically is our workaround for katsuobushi, giving the broth a similar smokey, salty quality.
For the tare: Kikkoman soy sauce is the base. If you can find the Shoyu version at your grocery store, even better, but regular Kikkoman soy sauce works well. The rest is sake, rice vinegar, a small amount of sugar, kosher salt, and MSG. If you’re not comfortable with MSG, just increase the salt slightly. Most ramen shops use it, for what it’s worth. Accent brand seasoning salt is MSG.
For the noodles: Grab a box of DeCecco thin spaghetti or angel hair pasta and some baking soda. That’s it. The baking soda makes your boiling water alkaline, which transforms regular wheat pasta into something close to actual ramen noodles.
For the aroma oil: Neutral vegetable oil and the white parts from two bunches of green onions. The green parts become your curly scallion topping, so nothing goes to waste.
For the egg marinade: Soy sauce, sake, water, and a little sugar. The eggs are just standard large eggs from any grocery store.
For the pork: A 3-pound pork shoulder, kosher salt, and sugar. Pork belly is the traditional cut for ramen, but pork shoulder makes a really good carnitas-style shredded pork that works well as a topping. It gets a simple salt-sugar cure, then roasts low and slow for 6 hours until it shreds apart with a fork.
This is a multi-day project. The broth takes about 6 hours of simmering, the pork shoulder needs an overnight cure plus 6 hours of roasting, and the eggs need at least 6 hours in the marinade. Plan for 2-3 days of prep before your first bowl. Once all the components are ready, assembly takes about 10 minutes.
Make the broth. Start by blanching the pork bones in boiling water for 10 minutes, skimming the scum as it rises. Drain, rinse the bones under cold water, and set aside. Do the same with the chicken wings and feet, but only for 5 minutes. After blanching, tear each wing at the joint into 2-3 pieces. Clip the toenails off the chicken feet and cut an X into the palm of each foot. This exposes more surface area so more collagen gets into the broth.
Place the pork bones in a large pot with 6 liters of filtered spring water. Bring it up to about 190°F and hold it there for 2 hours. You want just a random bubble popping up here and there. Never a rolling boil, or the broth goes cloudy. After 2 hours, add the chicken wings and feet, bring it back to 190°F, and set a timer for 3 more hours. Keep skimming any scum that rises to the surface.
In the last hour (6 hours total), add the roughly chopped onion, carrot, scallions, mushrooms, garlic, ginger, and bacon. After that final hour, strain through a chinois or cheesecloth-lined strainer. Cool the broth as quickly as possible. I set the pot in a large bowl filled with ice and stir until it’s cool, then refrigerate overnight.
The next day, scrape the solidified fat off the top. If the broth underneath looks like jello, you nailed it. That’s all the gelatin from the collagen, and it gives the final soup a rich, silky texture.
Make the tare. Combine soy sauce, sake, rice vinegar, sugar, kosher salt, and MSG in a small pot. Bring to a boil, immediately kill the heat, and whisk until everything dissolves. Taste it. You want it to be very salty, almost aggressively so, but to still taste good. The tare is the only seasoning for the broth and noodles, so it needs to be concentrated. Adjust salt to your preference. Stores in the fridge indefinitely.
Make the noodles. Bring a few quarts of water to a boil. Add salt for seasoning, then about 1 tablespoon of baking soda per quart of water. Drop in the pasta and cook for about 2 minutes longer than the package directions. Fair warning: the water will foam up from the baking soda and you’ll quickly have a situation on your hands. Lower the heat and stir the foam back down. The result is a noodle that’s chewier than regular pasta with a slight yellow tint. Better than any dried ramen noodle on the shelf.
Make the aroma oil. Add 1 cup of vegetable oil and the white sections from 2 bunches of scallions to a small pot. Cook over medium heat until the scallions turn golden brown, about 10-20 minutes. Strain into a container. Keeps in the fridge for about 6 months.
Make the soy-marinated eggs. Mix 1 cup soy sauce, 1 cup sake, 1 cup water, and 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar in a small pot. Boil for 30 seconds, kill the heat, stir to dissolve the sugar, and cool completely. For the eggs, bring water to a boil and prepare an ice bath. Use a bent paperclip to poke a small hole in the bottom of each egg. This lets air escape so the egg holds a more uniform shape and peels easier. Lower eggs into boiling water for exactly 7 minutes, stirring gently for the first minute to center the yolks. Transfer to the ice bath, then peel under water. Submerge the peeled eggs in the cooled marinade for 6-24 hours. After 24 hours they start getting too salty.
Make the pork. Mix 2 tablespoons each of kosher salt and sugar. Rub all over a 3-pound pork shoulder, cover, and refrigerate for 6-18 hours. Discard the accumulated liquid, place on a baking sheet, and roast uncovered at 250°F for 6 hours, basting with rendered fat every 2 hours. Shred with two forks when done.
Make the curly scallions. Slice the reserved green parts of the scallions in half lengthwise, then slice as thin as you can. Drop into a bowl of ice water for 10-15 minutes and they’ll curl up. Dry on a paper towel before storing in a container in the fridge for up to 3 days.
Assemble the bowl. Warm a bowl in the oven on the lowest setting. Boil your noodles and heat your broth. In the warm bowl: 2 tablespoons tare, 1 tablespoon scallion aroma oil, 1 1/4 cups hot chintan broth. Add about 5 1/2 ounces of alkaline noodles, a handful of shredded pork, one halved soy-marinated egg, and a small bunch of curly scallions.
Start with filtered spring water. It costs about a dollar a jug at most grocery stores. Tap water works, but dissolved minerals mute the flavors you spent 6 hours extracting. For the price of three jugs, it’s the biggest improvement for the least money in the whole recipe.
Keep the broth below a boil the entire time. Around 190°F is the target. A few lazy bubbles rising to the surface every few seconds is what you’re looking for. If the broth hits a rolling boil, the fats emulsify into the liquid and your clear chintan broth goes cloudy. No thermometer? Just keep the heat low enough that you only see a random bubble pop up here and there.
Blanch and rinse the bones before starting the broth. This removes myoglobin, the red protein in blood, that would otherwise cloud the broth and leave a slightly metallic taste. Ten minutes for pork, five for chicken.
Tear the wings apart and cut the chicken feet. More exposed surface area means more collagen gets into the broth. That collagen converts to gelatin, which is what gives the finished soup its silky texture. If the broth sets up like jello when you refrigerate it, you got the most out of your bones.
Always make more eggs than you need. There’s always going to be one that comes out looking terrible. Make 2-3 extra and keep the best ones for the bowl.
Store leftover broth as a concentrate. If you don’t have freezer space for a full batch, boil the strained broth until it reduces by half. Freeze the concentrate in smaller containers. When you want ramen, heat up equal parts concentrate and water. Same flavor, half the storage space.
Broth: 3-5 days in the fridge, up to 3 months in the freezer. For the concentrate method, reduce by half before freezing and reconstitute with equal parts water. The same broth-making principles here work for other soups, too, like wonton soup.
Tare: Stores indefinitely in the fridge. The high salt content preserves it.
Aroma oil: About 6 months in the fridge.
Soy-marinated eggs: Up to a week in the fridge after removing from the marinade (3-5 days is ideal). Don’t leave them in the marinade past 24 hours.
Shredded pork: Up to 3 days in the fridge. Mix in some of the rendered fat before storing to keep the meat from drying out.
Noodles: Cook fresh each time. Leftover cooked noodles absorb liquid and lose their texture.
You can get about 80% of the way there. Adding baking soda to the boiling water raises the pH, which mimics the alkaline mineral water (kansui) used in traditional ramen noodle dough. The pasta comes out chewier than normal and takes on a slight yellow color. DeCecco brand thin spaghetti or angel hair works well for this. It won’t be identical to fresh ramen noodles, but it’s better than any dried ramen noodle you’ll find at the grocery store.
Tare is a concentrated seasoning liquid that ramen shops use to flavor the broth. Instead of salting the broth directly during cooking, you add tare to each individual bowl. This lets you control the seasoning per serving and keeps your base broth neutral so you can take it in different directions (shoyu, shio, miso). A shoyu (soy sauce) tare is the most traditional starting point.
No. Increase the kosher salt by about half a teaspoon if you leave it out. Most ramen shops use MSG because it adds umami that salt alone doesn’t provide, but the tare will still taste good without it. Accent brand seasoning salt is MSG, if you’re looking for it on the shelf.
The broth, tare, aroma oil, and shredded pork can all be made days in advance. The eggs need 6-24 hours in the marinade. Noodles should be cooked fresh each time. This recipe is ideal for weekend meal prep: make everything on Saturday, eat ramen through the week.
They’re not mandatory, but they’re the best source of collagen for the broth. That collagen converts to gelatin, which is what gives ramen broth its silky, coating texture. Without them, the broth will taste good but feel thinner. Most grocery stores carry them in the meat section near the wings.
