Tonkotsu Ramen with Chashu by Priyanka Blah

Everyone loves Ramen. It’s one of the most popular Japanese dishes across the world. Unfortunately, that means it’s also a dish that has been distorted and reinvented and lost any sort of integrity or resemblance to the real thing. From ready to eat boxes to any sort of noodle soup, everything is Ramen. Technically, that may be true but the dishes that usually pass for Ramen have only the most fleeting resemblance to the magical bowls filled with care and skill and knowledge that you get in Japan. It’s because standalone restaurants can’t afford top of the line ingredients or give the process the necessary time, while the 5 star hotels that can afford to do so just don’t seem to be interested. 

Priyanka Blah has been working on recreating the perfect Ramen for almost year now. It’s taken patience and trial and error and frustration and nuance and many, many iterations. But the Tonkotsu Ramen with Chashu she made this week is easily the best I have had in India. Taking over two days to make, it was a marvel of layering where you could taste every single element. 

The dish consisted of:

• Bone broth
• Shio Tare (the salt seasoning that is flavoured with seafood)
• Aromatic oil
• Chashu pork 
• Shiitake mushroom 
• Ajitama

First the pork bones were soaked overnight before cooking it for 6 hours. 

Tare is a seasoning sauce usually made from soy but not in the case of ramen. It’s the only real salt element in a ramen bowl made by steeping seafood and Konbu overnight and then combining the liquid with salt. 

The Chashu pork is a piece of rolled pork belly that is braised in water with umami ingredients like shiitake and Konbu. This was braised for 3.5 hours and then refrigerated before grilling to serve.

Ajitama is a soft boiled egg that is seasoned, in this case in the pork braising liquid.

The whole process takes 2 days because of all the overnight soaking procedures and then the long cooking time of the elements. Also, the broth has to go through a cooking process after cooking so cannot be consumed immediately. In Priyanka’s version it was cooled and recuperated overnight. 

Finally all the elements are layered together on day three and garnished with seaweed before eating. 

A labour of love, artisanal in its truest sense. This is as far as you can go from restaurant Ramen in India without buying a flight ticket to Tokyo.