Japanese shoyu ramen

Today is a ramen day and it is ramen for one!

There are many types of ramen broth in Japan, the most common four categories being miso (fermented bean paste), shio (salt), shoyu (soy sauce) and tonkotsu (pork). Apart from the tonkotsu one, I am going to show you how to cook them all one-by-one in the future so let’s begin with the shoyu one.

In Japanese, shoyu means soy sauce so a typical shoyu ramen simply means broth with soy sauce. In a perfect scenario I would say it’s best to make your vegetable broth from scratch. However, being realistic, I can’t afford hours to cook the vegetable broth from scratch and most of my ramen meals are rather unplanned, last-minute ideas. Therefore ingredients that can be timelessly stored in the cupboard like a dried mushroom, kelp, and bouillon powder(I use Marigold organic vegan one, they are gluten-free) are the solution.

I use the bouillon powder to accelerate the cooking process but also add dried shiitake mushroom and kelp to enhance the broth with real flavours. It’s great for giving an extra dimension to the broth. However, you really don’t need to be fussy about the broth, you can just use bouillon powder + soy sauce to do the trick (not recommended but understandable ?).

First, wash the dried shiitake mushrooms, then soak them in 250ml of boiling water until they expand and turn soft.

This usually takes 10 minutes, but it depends on the thickness of your mushroom. If you have thick mushrooms, you might need to soak them for longer or slice them in half to reduce the soaking time.

While you are waiting, you can chop the spring onion or prepare your topping ingredient.

Remove the shiitake mushrooms from the water. KEEP THE WATER and set aside.

Squeeze out the excess water from the shiitake mushrooms and trim the stems.

Pour 250ml boiling water and the mushroom water from earlier into a medium saucepan.

Drop in all the shiitake mushrooms, kelp, salt, and bouillon. Cook for 10 minutes.

After soaking the mushrooms for 10 minutes, it will be full of mushroom flavour, and it will enhance the taste of the broth. Beware! Don’t pour to the end, it contains some sand from the dried mushrooms.

Meanwhile, combine sesame seeds, half of the chopped spring onion, soy sauce, and sesame oil in a ramen bowl.

Boil the noodles in water. For a cooking time, take away 1 minute from the instructions on the noodles’ packaging.

Don’t cook the noodles entirely as they will continue to soften in the hot soup – you don’t want soggy ramen!

Pour the noodles to a sieve, shake through to remove excess water.

Add the noodles to the ramen bowl with soy sauce mixture.

Once the broth is ready, remove the shiitake mushroom and kelp, and pour on them on top of the noodles. If the noodles have been set for too long, you may want to used chopsticks to gently pull them apart in the soup.

I topped my noodles with sweetcorn, shiitake mushrooms (the ones from the broth), menma bamboo shoots, spring onion, and bean sprouts plus nori sheet. Feel free to swap these to any of your preferable toppings – be creative! 😀

You may also interested to check out the menma recipes here.

Not too sure if you noticed but this is a recipe for one. Why just one? I am at the beginning of my zero-waste journey and practically I don’t like to waste food. Typically, for most of the food I cook for a photo shoot, half becomes my lunch and the other half becomes King’s lunch box for the next day. However, it is not possible to preserve ramen in soup, so even though 2 bowls of ramen may look prettier for the photo shoot but I decide to just make one for the shoot and myself.

Also, I think perhaps it’s good to create some recipes for just one person because we do not always eat with people. It would be great if I could have a variety of recipes for different needs. If you want to cook for 2 or more, it is straightforward, just multiply the recipe to what you need.

This recipe was created for Veahero, a cool new (free!) meal planning platform for vegans and vegetarians.

If you have followed and made this recipe, let me know! Leave a comment and take a picture, tagging it with #k33_kitchen and share it on Instagram! I’d be very excited to see what you come up with. Cheers, hope you enjoy my recipes!