You don’t need to catch a 16 hour flight to Japan to enjoy an authentically delicious bowl of Shio Ramen, you can make it yourself at home, and keep it Halal with this recipe! I love a hot bowl of ramen, and as much as I love a quick and easy instant version, that simply won’t do today, we needed more flavor and this recipe brings plenty with the homemade broth, aroma oil, and ramen eggs. There’s a lot to get into with this one, but the final dish is so worth it, so let’s jump in.
If you want an authentic ramen broth, that starts with a big pot of homemade cold brew dashi, and that starts the night before you really start cooking. It’s a savory seafood kind of broth with dried anchovies, shiitake mushrooms, and dried seaweed. If you aren’t a huge seafood fan then worry not, I’m not really either, but this makes an awesome base for the broth, and with everything else that’s going into this ramen, it really cuts down on the seafood flavor. It just has to refrigerate and steep overnight so the pot can get nice and infused with those flavors.
You’ll also want to prepare the ramen eggs overnight as well. We gave a few eggs a quick boil, just long enough for those yokes inside to get nice and jammy, not quite hard-boiled, but mostly solid. After eggs boil, they’re still hot inside and that can overcook them even when they aren’t in the pot, so toss them into an ice bath right away so they cool quickly.
Then the eggs will marinade in a bag overnight. It’s a simple mix of soy sauce, sugar, and water. The sugar serves as a replacement for mirin, a popular sweet Japanese cooking wine, but since we’re keeping this halal, a little bit of sugar will do that job perfectly.
When you’re ready to turn this dashi into your broth, like I said up top, it does smell very seafood forward. But now you’re ready to get it simmer with the ground chicken that will help make it more savory. Some recipes will have you discard the ground chicken when you’re done letting everything simmer, but we can’t waste perfectly tasty chicken; so after we remove everything from the pot and leave just the broth, we picked out all the other lil’ bits from the chicken and kept it frozen until we use it in next week’s recipe (spoiler alert).
The veggies you prep for this broth are also used later; you’ll divide up some green onions into a few different segments. Some get used in the broth, and some will get used in the aroma oil later. And who doesn’t love a nice ramen topped with some diced green onion? So these can be prepared all together so they’re ready to go.
While the broth finishes up, it’s a great chance to start the chicken chashu, a lightly seasoned boiled chicken breast. It’s a simple combo of water, salt, and pepper that makes the chicken perfectly tender, and you can give it a quick sear when it’s done with a butane torch or a quick trip to the broiler. You don’t need to get too crazy with this sear though, boiling the chicken cooks it all the through perfectly, so you don’t need to over-do it here.
A big part of the flavor punch from this ramen will come from the shio tare and the aroma oil. Shio tare is a quintessential seasoning oil for various Japanese dishes, especially ramen, and it’s a mix of some of our dashi with a few things like soy sauce, salt, and sugar, again, as a Halal replacement for mirin. The final dish only needs a little bit of this, so it may seem insignificant, but it is absolutely essential as the flavor it brings punches way above its weight.
Same with the aroma oil, it’s a simple blend of peanut oil, diced garlic, and green onion, but just a little scoop or two in the final bowl brings that wow factor to an already tasty classic dish.
As much as I could yap all day about this recipe, it’s time to actually build the bowl of ramen. All the hard work you’ve put in so far will finally pay off with a hot bowl of broth, your choice of tender ramen noodles, add some menma (or seasoned bamboo shoots), some corn, the chicken, and those tasty lil ramen eggs and you’re ready to dive in.
This is an involved recipe, you may not want to make it everyday but when you do it is so incredibly worth it as a recipe to go all out on every once in a while. It’s a savory bowl of incredibly tasty ingredients that all come together perfectly, if you want to enjoy authentic flavors, this is a great way to do it if you’re willing to take the time to get it right. It doesn’t have to be hard, and I think a meal is always better when you make it yourself!
Give this recipe a try, we think you’ll love it just as much as we did, and come back next week to see what we used that ground chicken from earlier in, we think you’re going to love it.
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