Our Kai wants to have Hakata ramen which has a rich and creamy pork bone broth with very thin noodles and 3 or 4 toppings. You know Miss Yip loves veggies so I added a few not-so-traditional toppings to my special edition. Hope this is not offending any Japanese chef if I still call it a Japanese ramen.

In my opinion, the broth and the meat are the souls of ramen. We can definitely make them from scratch. Now we stay home every day. Anything complicated can become easy to handle.

The essential ingredients for the broth include pork bones, chicken bones and a combination of soy products like miso or soybean paste. It is the layering of different types of umami flavours from those bones and fermented products which makes the world fall in love with Japanese ramen.

To make the broth taste authentic, we'd better use miso but I couldn't find it from Fanling so I replaced it with a similar fermented product which is Puning Bean Paste 普寧豆醬. I prefer this one over brown bean paste because the shape and the colour look similar to fresh soybeans. They should be an acceptable alternative for miso. I was actually quite happy with this broth as it tastes so Japanese even without a single Japanese ingredient. (Again, no offence to Japanese cooking.)

For the meat rolls, we can use any combination of meat as long as one piece is thinly sliced and the other is a thick fillet. I used sliced pork and boneless chicken leg to make the wrap. And usually we would use cotton twine to tighten the roll but I couldn’t find it so I used sewing threads instead.

The entire cooking process reminds me of how organised Japanese people can be. A good ramen takes time and patience. The coming Easter holidays will be a good chance for us to do some complicated cooking like this and train our organisational skills. :)