One of my favorite things to get at Japanese restaurants is soup. I’m not talking about miso, but those big bowls full of udon, soba, or ramen noodles and vegatables and small pieces of meat. It’s very tasty and probably pretty healthy as well. I figured why not make it at home and avoid restaurant prices.
I’ve been looking over the web and haven’t found much helpful for a recipe. I’m sure it’s pretty easy to figure out on my own, but I’m having trouble with the stock.
The best I can figure is that it’s dashi, which apparently is made from water and some combination of kelp, bonito flakes, and sardines.
The normal/plainest dashi is just kombu and katsuobushi. You can find the former anywhere, the latter at a Japanese/Asian market. With sardines, I understand it is called niboshi dashi.
I didn’t worry too much about the stock but I’m sure I did something wrong. It’s been awhile - some mix? I used ramen IIRC (the real stuff, not Maruchan). Meat was precooked with ginger and scallions, sake, soy sauce, and other things.
I love ordering udon at restaurants. I also hate it because I can never finish it. So it’s only special occasions.
I’ve made dashi the traditional way, and I also often use Hon-dashi instant dashi. Instant is so much easier, and still tasty. They’re not indistinguishable, but both are good.
Dashi can mean the stuff made with bonito and such, or it can mean “stock”. If you see a recipe for ramen that lists dashi as an ingredient, I can tell you from having tried all of the different types that pork stock is what’s used in Japan for ramen recipes.
Shoyu Ramen Recipe (warning: Shirojoyu/white soy sauce is a bit of an exotic ingredient, I’ve never actually found it offline, and online it’s expensive. Substituting normal soy sauce is probably fine).
My breakfast every morning is this kind of soup. The thing is that I don’t use stock, just boiling water from a teakettle. I pour this water over
heaping tablespoon of miso paste
2 cloves sliced garlic
wakame seaweed
3-4 chopped scallions
I boil some packaged somen noodles in a saucepan while I’m pulverizing the miso with my chopsticks. I chop/slice into my hand for easy cleanup, and the whole thing (with a cup of tea) is done in 10 minutes.
Make dashi by soaking a piece of kombu in hot water for 15 minutes. Don’t let the water boil. Remove the kombu and add wakame and/or bonito flakes and simmer for another 15 minutes. Skim out the wakame and flakes. This is your broth. Add soba or udon noodles, then thin slices of carrot, bell pepper, mushrooms, tofu, meat or seafood. Let these simmer in the broth, preferably at the table if you have a hot plate or burner.
Not to nitpick, but udon and ramen is not really healthy. The former is thick noodles of pure white flour and the latter is also white flour noodles that have been fried in oil (not denying their tastiness, though!)
tdn, you don’t happen to have a Japanese store near you by chance, do you? You could always buy some bonito flakes to steep in hot water as a stock. Markets even sell udon cubes (think bouillon cubes with a specific udon flavoring.) Heck, when I’m low on those I just use plain ol’ chicken bouillon! Toss in some spinach, green onion, crack an egg, maybe some fish cake…Japan noodle dishes vary from region to region, so there’s definitely no set standard to go by!
Yeah, but as far as a sporadic treat comfort food goes you could do way, way worse. Whipping up some ramen or udon (especially with the vegetables) is probably going to end up better for you than a double cheeseburger. I also find ramen and udon really filling – so that helps too.
The white flour thing is something that I was concerned about. Surely some noodles come in a whole grain version? Or I can just control the portion size.
I don’t have a Japanese store near me, but there is a large Chinese market. I’m pretty sure that they have Japanese foods there.
Or the traditional route, soba, which are always buckwheat, and thinner than udon. Soba can be put in a soup, or it often is taken out after boiling and made into a salad or other “dry” portion.
Wikipedia says “100 grams of soba yields 344 kcal.” I have no idea if that’s dry or cooked, and can’t picture what 100g is anyway. Doesn’t sound terribly low calorie, though. It’s also “citation needed” so YMMV.
