I think Polly and I came up with this idea back when I visited her family in Edinburgh last fall—to do a ramen tasting. Polly loves her some ramyeon (the Korean pronunciation of ramen, which is the Japanese pronunciation of la mien, Chinese soup noodles). Since it’s ESC, though, we had to try to make ramen from scratch in addition to trying out some varieties of Buldak ramyeon, Polly’s favorite brand of instant noodles. Normally I can’t even do a full packet of the chili sauce for the black buldak, which is the lowest level of heat—much less the red buldak, which is 2x spicy. Your girl can handle some capsaicin, but there’s something about the buldak sauce that I just…can’t. But I’d never tried the carbonara, and Polly has her own special way of fixing it with extra mayo, cheese, veggies, etc. So, we started with that, and it was great! Not too spicy. Then, we moved on to the experimental portion of the evening.
I made these noodles, but subbed wood ash for the baking soda b/c I happened to have some on hand for making posole. They turned out surprisingly well given what a mid pasta-maker I usually am. It very much helped having the KitchenAid pasta roller as the dough is STIFF to say the least with all that gluten sprung tight from the alkalizing kansui or lye water.
Gina & Tim made a shoyu broth from a couple of different recipes, so I can’t point you to just one. And Nicole made chashu using this recipe—it turned out fantastic. We had an assortment of usual accompaniments such as narutomaki (fish cakes), nori sheets, shichimi togarashi, scallions, corn, miso, etc., and folks just customized their bowls as they liked. We even had enough noodles left for kaedama, which is where you get an extra serving of noodles to finish up your broth.
I made carrot makgeolli for spring, with some fresh carrots I picked up at the Santa Rosa farmers’ market when we were out there for ESC 50: it turned out a little soapy in my opinion, but folks seemed to like it OK. And the girls made sobak hwachae, which was beautiful in its bowl (wish I got a pic!) and very refreshing after all the hot and spicy food. Overall a really successful bonus ESC!
The Rookery 