Miso Ramen, Take 1

The third recipe that we tried from Takashi's Noodles was the Miso Ramen on pg. 19. Now if your only experience with ramen is with those dirt cheap instant noodle packs, let me tell you.. there's a whole other world out there! That's like going through life having only eaten pizza in the elementary school cafeteria, not knowing it also comes in a million varieties, & the difference good ingredients can make. Ramen shops in Japan usually make their own noodles, might spend 20 hours making the broth, can mix up lots of variations, and guard their secret recipes.

One day I'd like to go crazy and spend a few days trying to make everything from scratch, but for now I figured Miso Ramen would be a good choice for a simpler version. Since I'm not making my chicken broth from scratch, adding the miso & other Japanese seasonings would give it plenty of flavor.



Once again, I found Takashi's ratios to be a bit off. He has you mix up the Miso Base, but then you only use 2/3 of it for the recipe (he tells you can refrigerate the rest for later). This really could have been re-written to make the 2/3 batch that you need without altering the ingredient ratios much. There was enough Miso Base for 8-9 servings, enough broth for 6, enough noodles for 5, etc. I enjoyed making this as kind of a foundation recipe, but will be making some heavy tweaks next time. We ended up making a 3rd dinner out of this (without touching the extra miso base) and changed up the toppings slightly with some great results.

While this dish turned out *really* good, I did make one bad mistake with this recipe, and I knew it was risky. I looked all over the store & could not find ground pork, so I grabbed some pork sausage and hoped it would not be too seasoned. I've cooked an Asian dish with country sausage before and the seasonings are so wrong for it! I should have just grabbed ground chicken or turkey instead. The ramen was tasty, but I can't wait to try it again with some actual ground pork and see what a difference it makes.