Jesse's Cookbook Reviews: Ramen Otaku and Ivan Ramen
Ok, so like all trend-conscious chefs, of course I love ramen. Unlike most trend-conscious chefs, I have like a 2-5 year backlog before I get to a project. So I'm late to the ramen party. But I'm REALLY late to the write-about-ramen party. As you can probably notice, there's been like 3 articles on this blog in the last 2 years. It's just been a real bitch to keep up. During the pandemic, it was SO EASY to keep punching out content. But once we all had jobs again, it was a substantially bigger challenge. So I'm sitting on a MASSIVE pile of backlogged content, waiting to get written up. It's an impossible task. So for this review, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm doing 2 books at once, and I'm not following my normal format.
Here's what happened:
1) I bought Ramen Otaku, by Sarah Gavigan, a Tennessee-based ramen impresario.
2) I enjoyed the book, and decided to make some recipes out of it. They came out nice.
3) I noticed some glaring errors in the book, and had an astoundingly frustrating email exchange with Ms. Gavigan (more on this later).
4) Spurred by this frustration, I sought out a book (Ivan Ramen) by someone whose superior ramen knowledge Ms. Gavigan constantly deferred to, Tokyo-based, NY-born ramen warlord Ivan Orkin. Also, her book didn't cover how to MAKE noodles, and I wanted to try that.
5) I read it, and wowsers, what a read! And then I spent $250 making two bowls of ramen. There were no survivors.
6) I learned stuff.
Okay, so to start:
What's good about Ramen Otaku? Well, for starters, it's a good, fun, relaxed read. It's very approachable, and didn't call for any ingredients I couldn't find at my local Asian grocery (which is, admittedly, very well-stocked). It introduced the basics of a ramen-bowl-build, from the broth, the salty flavoring agent that gives the broth character (the tare), the flavorful fat that's invariably added to slick the broth, the garnishes, pretty much everything except the noodles. She assumes you'll outsource the noodles, and that's honestly fair enough, they are a whole thing. The recipes come together with ease (unless you've been hamstrung by bad editing, more on this later). Here are some dishes I cooked out of the book! At the top of the article, you see a miso ramen bowl, where sticky tonkotsu broth is mixed with briny, complex miso tare, and served with pork belly, corn, and a knob of butter.
This is shoyu ramen, where koji-marinated chicken breast and a soy-based tare dress up simple chicken stock and ginger-laced chicken fat.
This is a fun idea called Tennessee Tonkotsu Ramen, where some store-bought BBQ (mine's from Rodney Scott's), sea-salt-based shio tare, pickled wood-ear mushrooms, and burnt garlic oil dress up that sticky, gelatin-rich tonkotsu broth.
The book also has a couple recipes for dishes that aren't traditional ramen bowls. This is tantan mazamein, thick noodles in a spicy sauce, served chilled. (The pork belly was added on by me, because there was leftover from other recipes, and because hell yeah I want pork belly.)
See what I'm getting at? The book did a GREAT job of breaking ramen down into a series of building blocks, and then showing different ways to put them together.
Oh, and one more REALLY good thing about Ramen Otaku: it has the BEST recipe for soft-centered boiled eggs I've ever encountered. Boil 3 quarts water, dissolved with 1 C of white vinegar and 1/2 C salt. When it's ripping, gently drop in a dozen room temp large eggs, boil for 7' and shock. BOOM. They are perfect. The whites are a tiny bit rubbery, but that actually works, because the yolks are so soft they really benefit from the additional structure. The yolks are nice and liquid-y, and the super salty, acidic water makes the shells super-brittle, so peeling is a snap.
What wasn't so great about Ramen Otaku: there were some legit recipe problems. I'll just cover two of them. First, the tonkotsu broth. I CANNOT overstate the importance of this recipe in this book. This book ingeniously presents various ramen bowls as simple variations on a formula, the combination of simple building blocks. The broths are the most fundamental of these building blocks. I knew I was going to try for a bunch of different recipes, so I know I needed a lot of tonkotsu broth (a broth made by [counterintuitively, to a western cook], boiling the hell out of the bones, to extract and dissolve all the collagen, fat, and connective tissue. You know how in cooking school you learn not to boil your stock, because it will cloud? This takes that principle and runs as far as possible in the opposite direction. Anyway, I knew I wanted to make a lot of the stuff, so I doubled the recipe up.
I want to clarify that I am REALLY REALLY good at following directions. I have made many Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz recipes from written direction. I don't screw stuff like this up. But after making a double batch of tonkotsu broth, which should have yielded 16 cups (aka 1 gallon), it actually yielded about a little under half that. WHAT? Ok, that's annoying, but more annoying because tonkotsu broth is pretty time-consuming to put together, and includes ingredients that one has to go to specialty stores to find (kombu, pork marrow bones, pig feet). This means I had to put my entire project on hold, go back out, get more goddamn femurs and kombu, and start over. And I followed the recipe to the LETTER a SECOND TIME, and got the exact same result. This was annoying. (Note: I had a similar problem with the sake dashi recipe, with the yield being way low, but it wasn't worth writing up twice.)
Ok, so now I had big eyes, and I was looking for more errors. I found my other BIG one in the shio tare recipe. Shio tare is based on sea salt. All the tare recipes have a listed yield of about a quart. The shio tare recipe calls for 2.5 CUPS of salt, the same amount of dashi, a cup of chicken broth, and 2.5 cups of sake lees. That's like 8 cups of stuff. It has you adding the 5 CUPS of sake lees and sea salt AT THE END, after it's off heat!! This simply can't be right.
So I emailed her. She said there were some issues with the broth yields, and that ramen isn't an exact science. I mean, it is, though, isn't it? Cooking is just applied chemistry. But okay, benefit of the doubt and all that, she doubled down that the shio tare was meant to have 2.5 cups of salt in 4 cups of tare. This simply cannot be right. The tares are all salty liquids, but 2.5 cups of salt in a 4 cup batch of tare isn't a salty liquid, it's liquidy salt. I wasn't going to argue with her, but some part of this recipe is lying. I'm inclined to believe it's the insane amount of salt, and not the yield, that was similar to all the other yields in its chapter. So I decided she was an unreliable narrator.
So I needed a second source. Plus, I wanted to try my hand at making noodles, so I got Ivan Orkin's book.
What's Great About Ivan Ramen: Well, it's just a great read, with great photography. The story, itself, is fascinating. Ramen Otaku's story was basically "I decided to learn to make ramen, and it was hard, but I did it, and it was great!" That's fine. It was a fun read. But Ivan's story was more "Through a complex personal history of adolescent confusion, career confusion, personal tragedy, and inspiring triumph, a Jewish kid from New York City moves to Japan, finds meaning and family, and opens up a successful ramen shop, in a city that's not known for kindness to foreigners." GREAT, inspiring read.
Also, the details! There are fewer recipes, but they go WAY HARDER. They are presented in excruciating detail. The dude's dashi (one component of the chicken-and-seafood 'double soup' he's known for) has SIX different types of dried seafood in it.
But beyond that, he actually goes into how to do the noodles, and it's pretty fascinating and fun, if time-consuming.
What's Not So Great About Ivan Ramen: Well, the difficulty, really. Not just production, although that was pretty unforgiving. But the sourcing! The ingredients were NOT easy to wrangle. The dashi alone cost me like $200. I spent 3 weeks chasing obscure dried fish parts all over the internet. But it'll all be worth it, right?
Nah. Honestly, the much simpler dashi I learned in Otaku was just as good, and about one eighth the cost.
But what about those home-made noodles? Eh, they were a lot of hassle, and they just weren't that good. I'm not surprised. Ivan Orkin himself said that ramen was a labor of love, and that it was going to take several tries before the ramen came out right. Turns out, ramen really is an inexact science. I could almost hear Gavigan laughing at my hubris. I get that it was silly of me to expect great results on my first time out, and if I wanted to get good at this, I'd need to really commit.
Only after making a single bowl from this book, my resolve is completely broken. I've got a milk-crate's worth of dried Japanese fish products in the next room, though, if I ever decide I want to get back on the horse.
But I am vindicated: Ivan's shio tare recipe was FAR more reasonable/not-insane. 48g of salt for a 2.5 cup batch of tare. I can't believe Gavigan wouldn't cop to that typo. It's just bewildering.
The Final Verdict: Ramen Otaku is a good book for a beginner wanting to learn to make ramen, as long as they take note that the broth yields are wildly out-of-line with reality and the shio tare recipe is ALL-WRONG. I can't recommend a book with such errors without mentioning them, and I DO recommend it. Ivan Ramen is a great, inspiring read, but the recipes are pretty unforgiving, and the bowl of ramen I made out of it was pretty lackluster, especially considering the investment of time and money involved. An accessible and fun primer, and if you want to become a serious ramen student, go for it, but Ramen Otaku was more my speed.
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