My First Ramen — Easy Jiro-Style Ramen For Beginners

A refined recipe of my very first ramen. Perfect for getting started if you never made ramen before.

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Serendipity

There’s a word to describe an unexpected lucky discovery: Serendipity. Something that was unplanned but turned out great. A “happy accident” some people would say.

And my very first bowl of ramen was, almost by a case of serendipity, a Jiro-style bowl.

At that time I had a pretty rooted aversion to following recipes. Not saying that it’s bad! I still do cooking by intuition, just that I was completely reluctant to use any technically written guide as a base, even for the most complex dishes.

Instead, I liked making up recipes, guessing every part of it. I might be reading here and there for a dish description, putting things together in my mind, and coming back at it… a week later.

Like many, I initially thought ramen was merely a simple broth with some soy sauce and soy-marinated meat.

So what did I do? I started marinating meat in soy sauce and, since I didn’t want to waste it, using that same brine to season my broth… Turns out this was a rudiment of Jiro ramen making!

My easy Jiro-style bowl.

Jiro-Style (a nerdy section)

To be precise, initially, Jiro was not properly a style.

Ramen Jiro is a chain of ramen shops that make a particular type of traditional ramen. Eventually, the Jiro name started to identify the style of this shop.

The soup is something in between a Chintan (clear soup) and a Paitan (cloudy soup). What is at the base of this style, though, is the old-school technique of cooking the soup and the chashu together, which is also why it’s suitable for beginners.

Some people hate it. Most people love it. Jiro ramen is a crazy umami-packed flavor bomb, an explosion of shoyu with loads of meat and veggies. Jiro is not a sophisticated elegant ramen. It’s a warming, heavy, and thrifting guilty pleasure. Some describe it as junk food!

Differently from other styles of Ramen, Jiro uses a lot of tare. We’re talking around 45-60 mL of tare per 300 mL of soup. Again, Jiro is not a complex and refined ramen: it aims to be a flavor monster hitting right there.

If it wasn’t enough, traditionally, Jiro bowls are served with tons of… everything. Tons of noodles, tons of tare, tons of toppings.

Sometimes, you’ll see bowls about to explode. A mountain of bean sprouts and cabbage over so much soup that it looks about to spill out of the bowl at any moment!

Not joking. This is what an actual Ramen Jiro bowl looks like… Lots of everything! Yum.

The unorthodox nature of Jiro ramen and its straightforward approach call for slight interpretations, and make it perfect as a beginner bowl.

If this is your first time making Ramen, you won’t have to worry about cooking the soup and the chashu separately, nor do you have to worry about making a fancy tare soaking elements overnight. Jiro ramen can easily be done in almost an afternoon of cooking, actively working for just a couple of hours, since the broth cooks by itself.

Recipe

Soup

Ramen soup-making mostly requires bones. Some are not used to using spare bones in the kitchen, or they can even be difficult to find in some areas.

While specific bones are essential to certain ramen-making, Jiro-style ramen is, in a way, forgiving on the cut you use.

Think of neck and femur bones as the best pick, though any pork cut with bones and cartilage attached will work. For example, I used the very final part of some spare ribs. I want to stay true to myself and the iterations I did on this recipe, so I suggest using the final part of pork ribs.

Ingredients

• 2 kg of pork bones (use whatever you can find, I used the final part of spare ribs)

• 4 L water

• 1.5 kg of pork loin (or any boneless pork cut, like shoulder), cut into 6-8 centimeters wide strips

• 0.5 kg backfat (optional)

• Aromatics:

  • 6 garlic cloves, lightly crushed

  • 1 onion, split in half

  • 4 coins of ginger

Procedure

1. Roast the bones by cooking them in the oven at 220 degrees Celsius for 45-60 minutes. This is required so not have to skim any floating scum later on while boiling the soup, plus it will help with flavors.

2. Add the bones and the water into a pressure cooker and cook for 1 hour under high pressure (or cook for around 4 hours boiling in a standard pot). Then de-pressurize.

3. Add the pork loin and backfat to the pot, then cook again under pressure for 1 hour (or 4 hours in a standard pot). Then de-pressurize.

4. Remove the cooked chashu and backfat, reserving until needed.

   1. For chashu, add to the tare.

   2. For backfat, chop into fine little pieces and store in a sealable container until needed.

5. Add the aromatics to the soup pot (garlic, onion, and ginger), bring the content to a rapid boil, and let it cook for 30-60 mins. This doesn’t have to be done under pressure.

6. Strain.

7. The final yield should be around 3 quarts of the original liquid, i.e. the result should be 3 L of soup. If it is less, add water to get to this.

8. Thoroughly chill the soup as quickly as possible by portioning it into small containers and using an ice bath.

   1. While this should be done for every food, ramen soups have a high protein content and no salt, which is easier for bacteria to attack. As long as you’re consuming your ramen shortly after making it, you should be safe, if you’re storing it for much later instead, this is an essential process. If you’re interested in details, read this comprehensive guide to food safety with temperature.

9. For a lighter-colored soup, skim and discard the solidified fat on top of the soup after chilling. For a cloudier soup, keep all fat and blend with an immersion blender to combine. For something in between, remove some fat and blend, etc…

Bones (short-ribs) have to be roasted in the oven.

Tare

Ingredients

• Chashu, cooked in broth until tender

• 400 g Soy Sauce

• 100 g Mirin

• 25 g MSG (optional)

Procedure

1. Combine the soy sauce, mirin, and MSG in a sealable container. Stir to dissolve.

2. Add the cooked chashu to the container. The liquid should cover it. If the chashu is not covered by the liquid, remember to flip it from time to time to make sure it’s thoroughly seasoned.

3. Reserve in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

4. After a couple of hours, remove the chashu and reserve it aside for eating.

5. Store the liquid tare in a sealed container for up to 2 months.

Toppings

All toppings are actually optional. Don’t like garlic? Avoid it. Want to replace bean sprouts with cabbage? Go for it. You get the idea.

• Chashu. Heat the chashu you left marinating and cut thick slices of it. Add as much as you’d like in the bowl.

• Green onion. A lot of it. Cut in thin rounds.

• Garlic. Peel and mince some garlic, then add it directly to the top of your bowl.

• Bean sprouts. Quickly boil for 30-60 seconds or stir-fry in a wok for about 1-2 minutes. They should still be crunchy. Optionally season with a pinch of salt and a couple of drops of sesame oil.

• Cabbage. Same as bean sprouts. Some cook them together in the same pot.

• Backfat. Chopped into little pieces, served right on top of the bowl. Some find it gross, beware.

Aroma Oil

Usually, for Jiro, there is no need for additional aroma oil. The emulsified fat in the soup is more than enough and is also quite distinctive of this style.

However, I have a suggestion for your next bowls. If you decide to skim some solidified fat off the chilled soup from point 9, you can use that as the base for another aroma oil. Just cook it in a pan with some shallots and ginger and save it for later. Want something more spicy? Try my five spices aroma oil (free post).

Noodles

Jiro usually involves pretty thick and chewy noodles with incredibly low hydration. This kind of noodle is everything but easy to replicate at home.

It’s no news that noodles are the most laborious part of ramen to make at home anyway.

My suggestion is for beginners to buy the noodles. Always choose fresh ones over dried ones and make sure they contain Kansui among the ingredients (sodium carbonate or potassium carbonate, E500 and E501 in Europe, sometimes referred to as “raising agent” in ingredients lists).

If you feel like experimenting and making them at home, though, here is a fantastic recipe by none less than Ramen Lord himself in his book.

Assembling and Serving

When it’s time to serve, be sure you have prepared everything from above and assemble your bowl.

1. Get your mise en place ready (cut the green onions and garlic, clean your workspace, re-heat the chashu, cook the vegetables, get the tare out of the fridge and ready).

2. Have some water boiling (for noodles).

3. Preheat the bowl at the lowest temperature in the oven. If your bowl is cold, it will cool your ramen.

4. Heat the soup.

5. Start cooking the noodles. Then proceed with the next steps right before the noodles are done. Don’t let the soup sit in the bowl for too long or it will lose the heat!

6. Add 45-60 mL (3-4 tbsp) of tare at the bottom of the bowl.

7. Around 300 mL of soup goes in the bowl.

8. Strain (very well) the cooked noodles and add them to the soup.

9. Add your toppings as the last thing.

10. Serve!

Final Thoughts (and Make Soup In Advance)

Ramen is not an easy dish to prepare.

If some out there claim for any “10 minutes ramen recipe”, unfortunately, they are most probably wrong. Either it’s not the real thing, they are referring to instant noodles hacks, or they are skipping some essential step that defines ramen differently from any other noodle soup.

Soup itself is the most extensive preparation in the list, and almost can’t take less than 2 hours to make, so that’s the minimum time you can aim for. The good part, though, is that it’s the easier part to store.

I usually suggest (and I do that, too!) making a batch of soup in advance, portioning it into containers, and freezing them. This way, you get ready-to-use soup for every time you need to cook up some ramen, so you can focus on the other preparations that have to be fresh! Good soup keeps almost without any noticeable difference from fresh ones for up to 3-6 months when frozen.

There’s nothing wrong with it!

I hope my story, recipe, and tips will inspire you and help to start your Ramen journey. If you never made ramen yourself, struggle with the complexity, and want to start somewhere, this is your starting point.

For any feedback or question, please drop a comment! I’ll be happy to follow your notes.

Until then, happy slurping!

— The Ramen Bowl - ◡ -

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