A celebration worthy of homemade ramen
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 25, 2019
- 1059
“There’s a ramen place in Uniontown you gotta try,” said the dentist as he stuck the needle into my wife’s gums last week. “It’s really good.”
We decided to give it a shot over the Easter weekend, which we were giving over to celebrating the landmark first wedding anniversary, with less focus on the holiday.
Someone slapped Easter right on the same day, and I feel secure in God letting us off the hook to pay attention to our own celebration. Come to think of it: Doing a lot of thinking about having a cross to bear wouldn’t really mix with happy marriage thoughts, now would it?
So once we’d done the Good Friday church service, we planned to visit the recommended soup restaurant on Saturday and then cook up something fun and delicious, just for us, on Sunday, leaving work and phones pretty much behind us for three glorious days, maybe do a little shopping even.
And then the weekend was derailed when she came down with a major cold or flu or some other germ attack, and the whole three days were spent with her justifiably on the couch and me solo shopping for juice, tissues and medicine rather than replacements for all six of the wine glasses we’ve managed to smash since the beginning of the year.
But we did sneak out for the soup, which is healthy when you’re sick anyway. I didn’t catch whatever bug invaded the house, but there’s no harm in giving immunity a boost with good Asian broth.
Looking over the menu for ramen katsu green online, we were confused and had to do some catching up. Like many of you, I’ve always thought of ramen as a 30-cent lunch out of a packet with boiling water, a kind of purina college student chow you can buy by the truckload for less than a single meal at a burger joint.
But there are different varieties of Japanese ramen, which are tied to the flavor profiles they deliver. Shio ramen is a salt-based, light or clear broth and is the oldest and most common variety. Shoyu ramen gets its flavor from soy sauce and also is a very old variety.
Miso ramen is flavored with fermented soybean paste while tonkotsu ramen begins as a broth made from simmered pork bones. All have noodles and can have any kind of meat or seafood added for more flavor with plenty of fresh toppings and spices.
We chose the miso variety and an umame fried chicken ramen, which also brought the new knowledge that “umame” refers to a distinctive, inviting smoky flavor. Both were quite good with tiny mushrooms, hard-boiled egg, seaweed, scallions and several other added ingredients. The experience brought a little education along with a full belly and plenty of leftovers.
If you do a little research, you’ll find the four types above are just a sampling of the regional flavors found in soups across Japan. That means any time you spot a menu with ramen noodles on it, you’re going to get something pretty unique as the flavors and preparation techniques diverge in hundreds of directions with each kitchen coming up with its own stamp.
Ramen is a whole lot bigger deal than one would expect and is much more than the over 100 billion of those little, dried packets that are sold worldwide each year.
Back home it was back to medicine, juice and naps. So we didn’t skip out on Easter because we were selfishly celebrating our own thing but rather because of illness. God gave us a sick slip, this one time. She understood.