alternate title: “muri”-soba (無理そば)

2022-07-13 (revised 2022-07-19)

I learned a lot from my experience executing my first popup serving a take on morisoba, or old-school style tsukemen. Many of the lessons I learned are applicable for things outside ramen. I want to divide my learnings into three categories: learnings directly applicable to ramen, learnings about time management, and learnings about building remarkable products. You don’t have to read these in order, so jump to what you’re interested in first.

I. Ramen Hot Takes

I’ll start this reflection with what I assume most ramen nerds are here for, which are the learnings I have about ramen, some of which I’ve been thinking for a very long time.

I should explain what I mean by hot takes. Because this was my first popup, my thinking was that I had nothing to lose — I’m a ramen nerd and no one could ever take that away from me — so I might as well serve something that I would feed to ramen nerds like myself. But this also represented a somewhat risky bet that the audience in the general would be open to trying a bowl intended for ramen nerds. The hot takes are essentially the risky bets that I made in this popup. At some point, implicitly, I decided to see how far I can push people’s expectations of what ramen is.

Morisoba, the old-school style of tsukemen or “dipping noodles”, is a weird thing to serve for a popup in America. People are familiar with ramen as noodle soups, of course, and tsukemen is one step different because the noodles are separated from the soup (among other minor differences). But the tsukemen that most people are familiar with is tonkotsu gyokai tsukemen, with a thick pork and seafood soup and thick noodles, and often topped with gyofun fish powder for an extra punch. So this morisoba is a further step different from that kind of tsukemen, because both the noodles and soup are so thin and light in comparison. So morisoba is two steps different from the ramen that people are already familiar with.

Nerd that I am, two years ago I took a bunch of screencaps from a notebook detailing the style in the documentary Ramen Heads, translated the recipe, made it and iterated on it a bunch of times, eventually publishing a writeup on the style and history. I felt like this was a ramen style that we could reasonably execute, and furthermore, reasonably execute given Yume’s space and equipment.

To introduce this bowl to the audience, I needed to introduce both tsukemen and morisoba in the same speech. Optimal or not, I eventually gravitated on these talking points:

this is a really old school take on tsukemen or “dipping noodles”
the soup is more like a sauce than a broth, but after finishing the noodles, we prepared a separate broth (soupwari) to make the leftover soup enjoyable to drink
you may notice a few things different between this and modern ramen (or even tsukemen) that you’re familiar with, such as the egg being hard boiled with a yolk that’s creamy instead of jammy, and the some of the chashu being lean instead of fatty. I stressed that many of these were developed before those newer techniques were available, but I still think they’re a great match for the noodles and soup.

But under the tip of the iceberg, there’s so much more.

Throughout the process of developing this bowl, one of the things I focused on was to continuously discover interesting tricks or ways that I could present a component not only differently from how people expect them to be made or served, but also serve them in better or more remarkable ways. Here are some of them:

Ramen nerds treat the ability to make low hydration noodles as a status symbol, but low hydration (~25-33%) is a good fit only for a few specific ramen styles, and medium hydration (~34-41%) is often boring. Beyond that is a general trend I’ve noticed: the higher the hydration, the better the chew. This is why shops like Shichisai and Nonokura have noodle hydrations of around 50-60%. Most people already knew this, they just haven’t really thought about what it means. What I think it means is that going super high hydration is an easy way to make for a remarkable noodle experience.
Believe it or not, I’m convinced that pork trotters are the most important ingredient in tsukemen soup. This gives the soup a ton of body without needing to reduce a lot, which is expensive and unpredictable in both time and yield. This soup used a lot of trotters, over 30% of the bone mix. Because it is still true that trotters mainly just provide gelatin and are light in pork flavor, I relied on another trick from Yamagishi-san’s book, which was to add ground pork to the soup at the end to adjust flavor.
The chashu is a simple nikomi style braise, with some caveats. The main thing that makes Taishoken different is that they use their finished soup in the braising liquid. This is a very easy way to give the tare more complexity without having to steep dried fish ingredients directly into the tare. I had some trouble getting one or two of the logs of lean chashu to exactly the right level of collagen breakdown, but largely this method worked beautifully and allowed for great control as well. I then adjust the salinity of the leftover liquid after straining it. I find that this is one of the most elegant ways to make chashu and tare.