Ivan Orkin on Hanjuku Tamago, Half-cooked Ramen Eggs

As I mentioned, I like buying things — whether they are kitchen tools, boots, whiskey, brandy, meals, or even writing gear — from artisans who pursue ideals with single-minded focus. In particular, I’ll revisit cooks and chefs who obsess over details. I’ve never visited one of Ivan Orkin’s restaurants, but when he dedicated the bulk of his recent book Ivan Ramen to the proper preparation of one single bowl of shio ramen (at least, the way he makes it), it was as if I’d stumbled across a lost cousin.

Orkin, a New Yorker who founded the small Tokyo noodle soup joint Ivan Ramen in 2007, has made a name for himself not just as a curiosity — a gaijin who makes ramen — but as a cook and restaurateur who makes proper Japanese noodle soup with meticulous attention to technique and ingredients. His book opens with a short biography and is sprinkled with a few interviews of ramen enthusiasts, then dives into recipes, over 40 pages of which detail the construction of a bowl of shio (“salt”) ramen. Forty. One bowl of noodles. Makes Julia Child’s recipes seem terse.

That’s not to say that the recipe for making the bowl of ramen as he makes it in his shop is difficult. Aside from the logistical obstacles a cook in London, Munich, or St. Louis might have finding the exact same chicken or flour, the recipe is straightforward; it’s long because Orkin gives the recipes for rendering chicken fat, for stock, for noodles, for making sofrito and shio tare (the mélange of salt, sofrito, and water that gives a salty flavor to Orkin's “salt” ramen).

And then there are eggs. Some weeks, I’ll slurp down three or four bowls of ramen and, when they are an option, I’ll include cooked eggs either in the bowl or on the side. Shops rarely get the eggs right. Often, they are so overcooked that a greenish-grey ring with more than just a whiff of dog farts surrounds the yolk. You shouldn’t even use those for egg salad or deviled eggs. Maybe for feeding the dog before letting her out of the night. But there’s another way to do eggs: hanjuku tamago, eggs with softly set whites and semi-liquid yolks.

Now these are eggs worth making.

David Chang in his Momofuku cookbook recommends cooking eggs at 5 minutes and ten seconds exactly. Orkin takes slightly longer in his Tokyo shop: six minutes and ten seconds. Get a timer if you don’t have one. Try these eggs. Find a time that works for your elevation, the size of eggs you use, and the degree of gooeyness you like in your yolk. Six minutes works for me about 200 feet above sea level in San Diego.

“My search for perfect eggs, Orkin writes in Ivan Ramen, “took me to innumerable egg farms.”

After an extensive search, I found one that tasted great, had the most brilliant orange yolks, and peeled easily. (Believe me, when you have to peel two hundred eggs a day, that's an important criterion.) Then I spent almost as much time figuring out how to cook the eggs properly as I did perfecting the noodles. But I've got it now: punch a pinhole in the bottom, boil for 6 minutes and 10 seconds, stirring gently for the first 2 minutes, then ice immediately. Once they're cool, the eggs are peeled and soaked in a light shoyu tare...Sliced in half and served at room temperature atop the ramen, the eggs are a perfect supporting cast member for the soup and noodles, adding an extra touch of color and unctuousness to the bowl.

Hanjuku Tamago, Half-Cooked Eggs for Ramen 

50 milliliters (3½ tablespoons) sake

50 milliliters (3½ tablespoons) mirin

200 milliliters (1¾ cup + 1 tablespoon) soy sauce

30 grams (2 tablespoons) sugar

40 grams (3 tablespoons) garlic, chopped coarsely

75 grams (2½ ounces) fresh ginger, chopped coarsely

6 room-temperature fresh large eggs

1 liter (1 quart) water

Simmer the sake and mirin in a saucepan over medium-high heat for 2 minutes to cook off a bit of the alcohol. Reduce the heat to low, then add the soy sauce, sugar, garlic, and ginger and simmer and stir for 10 minutes. Let come to room temperature; you can store the mixture in the refrigerator for up to a week.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. You want a big pot so that when the eggs go in, the temperature won't drop too drastically, and the water will quickly come back to a boil.
Poke a small hole in the bottom (larger end) of each egg with a pushpin.

Gently slide the eggs into the boiling water. Start your timer. Stir for the first 2 minutes. Prepare a large bowl of ice water to shock the eggs.

The total cooking time for a large egg in Tokyo is 6 minutes and 10 seconds. You might decide to adjust that time depending on the size of your eggs, how many you're cooking, or what the chickens were thinking about when they laid them.

Remove the eggs after 6 minutes and 10 seconds, and immediately place them in the ice bath. Stir until there are no pockets of hot water. 

In a large bowl, combine the shoyu tare with the liter of water. When the eggs are cooled completely—after about 15 minutes—peel and soak them in the seasoning liquid for 2 hours in the refrigerator. The eggs will hold in the soak for 3 days.

When it comes time to slice the eggs and add them to the ramen, a taut nylon fishing line gets the job done without losing any of the precious yolk.

Ivan Orkin with Chris Ying, forward by David Chang (2013)
Ivan Ramen: Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo’s Most Unlikely Noodle Joint
224 pages (hardback)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 978-1-6077-466-7
$29.99

Goes well with:

• Ivan Orkin is on Twitter. Check him out. 
• Tampopo, Jûzô Itami’s 1985 "noodle western" that seemingly every ramen enthusiast (including Orkin and yours truly) know and love.
• Mark Robinson's Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook and its recipe for pu-erh glazed walnuts.
• Chris Bunting's great guide to shops, pubs, breweries, distilleries, and drinking customs of Japan, Drinking Japan. 
• How else do we like using eggs around here? In homemade marshmallow creme, in Dutch advocaat (by way of San Diego), maybe a dish of Eggs, William S. Burroughs, and pickled as either Pennsylvania Dutch bar eggs or bread-and-butter pickled eggs. 

Tampopo

Since the early 1990’s, I must have seen writer/director Jûzô Itami’s 1985 film Tampopo a dozen times. Just recently, I watched it again on a flight from Berlin to London. Like John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, it is a touchstone for me, something to revisit every few years, a work of humor, love, and obsession. Several vignettes ostensibly unrelated to the main plot nevertheless touch on it and its themes. One of my favorites involves a shopkeeper and his troublesome visitor...



Until that trip from Berlin. I had not fully appreciated how much the film had grown to inform and shape some of my own values. In it, the truck driver Goro meets Tampopo, a widowed mother who serves mediocre noodle soup in her small shop. Goro and a growing cohort of accomplices embark on a mission to turn Tampopo’s shop into the very best ramen joint around. An old ramen master joins, a canny chauffeur wise in the way of noodles, and a contractor with a secret. Competitors are tricked into revealing their methods and outright spying goes down. Along the way, viewers gain insight into what may make a proper bowl of Japanese noodle soup.

Ramen, as central as it is to the plot, is also a red herring. The movie is a celebration of the dish, sure, but more so it’s about single-minded pursuit of an ideal and that's something I can get behind. My taste is simple; I buy good things. There’s little point in laying out hard-earned money for cheap tools, clothes, food, furniture, or gear of any kind. Not everything has to be deluxe all the time, and I appreciate good value and the occasional quick-and-dirty fix to a problem, but in general I patronize artisans, distillers, designers, and cooks who buy into the pursuit of ideals, too, people and firms with tightly focused skills, whether that’s in barbecue, spätzle, blankets, knives, boots, whiskey, rum, or even paper and pens.

Over the next six to eight weeks, I’ll be kicking out ideas for holiday gifts. Not for me, mind you; I’ve already got most of this stuff. Rather, they will be things I’ve used and like — some booze, some books, a bit of gear and kit, a few ingredients worth having around.

First up: Tampopo. Netflix has it as a DVD or you can score a copy of an all-regions, letter-boxed release with English subtitles through Amazon. 

Cold, Rainy Weather Yields Homemade Noodles

The last two weeks in San Diego have been cold — San Diego cold, mind you, not Schenectady cold — and nearly constantly raining. It’s put me in the mood for nearly forgotten cold-weather cooking I used to do in the Midwest and East Coast.

In particular, I had a hankering for the sort of thick, German-style egg noodles my mother used to serve. Stroud's, a fried chicken restaurant, used a similar thick noodle in their chicken noodle soup. In Kansas City when I was young, a respectable frozen version of the noodles could be had in grocery stores. Respectable version? Ha. I’m being disingenuous. In my middle years, I was a fat little porker and, if given the chance, would have devoured them at every meal.

The recipe I use, however, came to me from my sister who found it among our grandmother’s papers after her death. It is perhaps her own mother’s. In the fat, black book I use to record successful recipes, I call them Noodles for Soup and Buttering. In another house, perhaps one of my more German cousins, they might be called hausgemachte Nudeln — homemade noodles.

I made a batch a few days ago, tossed them with butter in a cast iron skillet, and served them under a slathering of a Stroganoff-style ragout of pork and chanterelles spiked with dill. Every bit as good as I recalled. There’re only four ingredients and the noodles are quite simple to make. Sometimes I use more eggs and cut back on the water, keeping total liquid volume the same.

For the fat little porker in you, I offer

Homemade Egg Noodles

2.25 cups/330g all purpose flour
1 tsp/15ml salt
1 egg
2-6 oz/60-180ml cool water

Sift the flour and add the salt. Mix in the egg with a fork and add enough water, mixing with the fork, to bring the dough together to a ball. Dust a cutting board with flour and roll out the dough to a disc. Allow to rest a few minutes. Dusting as needed, roll out the disc to a roughly rectangular shape a little less than .25”/.5cm (slightly less than a standard No 2 pencil).

Using a long knife, cut the rectangle of dough down the center lengthwise. Then cut each half into many long noodles, each a little wider than it is tall. Separate them as you cut (see the photo).

You may either cook them right away or allow them to rest and air dry slightly on parchment paper or a clean towel for a few hours. When you’re ready to cook, bring a large pot of salted water to boil and add half the noodles. Cook 5-8 minutes, stirring occasionally to keep them separate and to prevent them sticking to the bottom of the pot. Drain, set aside, and repeat with the remaining dough.

At this point, you may butter them, toss them with buttered breadcrumbs, cut into smaller pieces for soup, toss with toasted caraway, or simply plate and eat with the rest of the meal.

Guten Appetit!