Recipes with Butter - Ramen Broth Hack
If we say goodbye to TikTok for good, I will need to find a new place to learn recipe hacks.
After watching over 50 TikToks on ramen, I created a greatest hits recipe (of medium difficulty) that will knock the socks off your next dinner guests. This ramen is a tantanmen meets creamy miso razzle dazzle, and its all because of the butter. Specifically a compound butter. A few notes:
This recipe focuses on the broth only
I included recommendations on ramen toppings and linked relevant recipes for you to follow separately
Prep and cook time:
For the ramen broth - 45 mins, but give yourself 1-1.5 hours if you are prepping other elements of the ramen such as meat toppings, ramen eggs, etc.
Ingredients:
Ramen broth:
3-4 Shallots or 1-2 onions
2 cloves garlic
2 quarts pre-prepared low/no sodium dashi or chicken broth.
I highly recommend choosing a no salt option so you can control the salt content though the other seasonings included in this recipe.
If you choose to make your own dashi, this article provides great options of varying difficulties for making this traditional Japanese broth.
1/4-1/3 cup butter
1/4-1/3 cup white miso
3-4 tablespoons of tahini
Not an ingredient, but in terms of tools an immersion blender is recommended. A blender or food processor can also work for this.
Recommended Toppings:
Ramen noodles - duh! Make sure to give them a cold rinse after boiling before putting the broth in. Gives them that characteristic springy texture.
Aroma oil - see recipe here. I made mine with a combo of chicken fat, grapeseed oil, scallions, and garlic. (10 mins)
Sweet and spicy ground pork - I sautéed mine with salt, sugar, soy sauce, mirin, sweet & spicy Chinese bean paste, garlic, and ginger. There are a lot of recipes for this online, I like this one. (Takes 15 mins)
Enoki mushrooms - make sure to cook these in the broth for 1-2 minutes before serving. Apparently eating them raw can be unsafe. (2-5 mins)
Speared cucumbers - thinly slice and top your ramen. (2-5 mins)
Ramen eggs - this is another recipe that has a lot of online recipes. Here is one example. (Takes 8 hours to overnight. If you can’t be bothered, just make some soft boiled eggs and call it a day)
Chopped fresh scallions. (2-5 mins)
Go nuts!
Broth Instructions
Take butter out of fridge and soften - the earlier the better.
Medium chop shallots/onions and garlic.
Put a tablespoon of butter in a pan melt it and caramelize onions or shallots on medium to low heat, stirring occasionally. Add garlic roughly 15 mins in. Remove from heat once onions are deep golden brown, this should take 20-30 mins.
Add caramelized mixture, rest of softened butter, miso paste, and tahini to a wide measuring cup or tall lipped bowl and use immersion blender to form a paste. (Or use a blender).
On a stove, heat dashi or chicken broth to a simmer
Add the compound butter paste to the broth. I recommend adding this in batches so you can season the taste to your liking- the more you add the richer it will be. Use immersion blender (or blender) to incorporate the paste into the broth until smooth.
Taste and add more paste needed, repeating step 6 until you have an ideal broth taste and consistency.
You may also need to add salt to taste at the end, but is not necessarily needed due to the salt content of the miso.
The broth may separate if left still for more than a few minutes, so make sure to stir before serving with your noodles and toppings.
Let me know how you like this recipe!