(part of the Secret Pro Techniques ramen style research series)

@Elvin Yung <@shikaku.ramen>

Tsukemen predated Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken, but it was there that it graduated from makanai staff meal to menu item, thanks to Yamagishi Kazuo, and became a full-fledged food group of its own. But at Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken, the food item was still in the early embryonic stages of development, and it's this in-between product of morisoba and modern tsukemen that we're most interested in here.

Some important features of this style that we're trying to replicate:

• The tsukejiru (つけ汁, dipping liquid) has a unique sweetness and acidity (甘酸っぱい, amazuppai), which apparently makes it easy to finish large portions of the dish.
• The soup is neither a chintan nor a paitan. In terms of body, it's lighter than the modern noukou tonkotsu gyokai soups, but (usually) not as light as the modern tanrei tsukemen soups. The soup is based on pork and chicken, then steeped with gyokai components near the end. Because the entire stockpot is kept heated and uncovered over the course of the service, the soup naturally reduces over time (which means the body is variable and therefore up to preference).
• The noodles are high hydration with whole egg. They're much thinner than more modern noukou tonkotsu gyokai tsukemen noodles (e.g. Tomita/Rokurinsha styles), but still with plenty of chew and slurp, as well as koshi (こし, roughly "elasticity").
• The chashu is lean, but tender. It's been said that out of all the shops in the Marucho-Taishoken lineage, Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken was the first shop to serve its chashu in large slabs instead of cut into sticks.

In this recipe I'm specifically trying to replicate Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken's tokusei morisoba, but as a nomenclature sidenote, I'm going to refer to the general style as Marucho-Taishoken-kei, which helps differentiate it from Eifukucho Taishoken and Ningyocho Taishoken, which are completely unrelated noren wake lineages. Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken is a noren sibling of Yoyogi-Uehara Taishoken, and both are descended from Nakano Taishoken, which is descended from Marucho and Marushin.

Soup

The primary source I used for the soup was from Tomita-san's notebook from Ramen Heads, which was taken from when he was training at Higashi-Ikebukuro Taishoken. This is likely the most complete primary account of how the soup was made at one point in time. I made a best-effort interpretation of the recipe as the first version of my soup (see appendix below), then further iterated it to my liking (mainly to bring up the pork elements and rebalance the gelatin).

Here are some of the reasons that this recipe differs from the original:

• Some of the numbers are really weird or specific. 3 hours and 30 minutes is a really short amount of time to cook a pork stock, but it works if you're running a shop and your stockpot is on all day. It also helps that they're essentially bootstrapping the soup with some of the previous day's soup.
• Most of the gyokai elements are hard to access outside Japan. I've come up with a version of the spec that works for me, but if various ingredients are still hard to access, your mileage may vary in terms of substitutes. (For example, in the case of the mixed bushi, I suggest upping the amount of niboshi instead of substituting with katsuobushi, but I don't have the numbers.)
• Based on a few primary and secondary resources, Yamagishi-san's real method varied from the Ramen Heads recipe in multiple notable ways. In particular, Yamagishi-san fortifies the soup up with ground pork, fish powder, and a few other "secret" ingredients during service, as well as topping the stockpot up to taste with more of the base ingredients. In a way, this shows how truly impossible it is to recreate the Taishoken soup, since the product would have been directly tied to Yamagishi-san's palate.
• The soup also naturally changes constantly via "continuity" (e.g. yobi-modoshi 呼び戻し and/or tsugi-tashi 注ぎ足し), which is another interesting concept with interesting variations at ramen shops that I'll be writing more about.

1. Doubutsu-kei ingredients:
   • 680g pork femurs
   • 680g pork backs
   • 390g pork necks
   • 200g chicken backs (roughly 1 chicken back, dependent on chicken)
   • 200g chicken feet (optionally removing toes)
   • 400g pork trotters (roughly 2 trotters), sectioned into disks
     • A minor note: based on some recipe testing, it seems like it is difficult to replace this without negatively impacting the product. Reducing the amount of trotters will negatively impact the body, and replacing the trotters with chicken feet will negatively impact the porkiness.
   • 3L water
2. Vegetables
   • 120g onion, roughly ~1/2, stems and tough outer layer removed
   • 80g negi, roughly 1.5 stalks
   • 25g garlic, skin removed, (optionally) germs removed
   • 70g carrot, peeled, ends removed
   • 10g ginger, sliced