My spicy tonkotsu bowl is finally ready 🙌 It took a few weeks, and I got lost in the middle there, but I managed to bring it home.

Tasted by three separate people now and unanimously approved ❤️

If you want to start from scratch, this bowl takes one full day to make (8 hours to cook the chicken stock, and the noodles need to rest in the fridge overnight). For best results, you want to let the tare sit for 1 week, and brine your eggs for 2 days, but that’s entirely optional.

Ingredients for one bowl

• 2 tablespoons shoyu tare
• 2 tablespoons of bacon mushroom salt
• 1 tablespoon of karemiso
• 1 tablespoon of aromatic chili oil
• 100 ml bacon dashi
• 300 ml tonkotsu broth
• 1 brined soft-boiled egg
• 1 slice of pork shoulder
• 1 square of nori
• A palmful of spring onions
• 100 grams of ramen noodles

Preparation

1. Warm your bowl with some hot water and then add the tare, mushroom salt, karemiso, and 100ml of bacon dashi and mix everything together.
2. Boil noodles, drain, and add to bowl immediately.
3. Add 300ml piping hot tonkotsu stock and fold noodles over to create a bed for toppings.
4. 1 tablespoon of aromatic chili oil.
5. Assemble the remaining toppings.

Shoyu tare

• 1 cup sake
• 1 cup mirin
• 4 cup soy sauce
• 20g dried prawns
• 20g dried anchovies

Bacon mushroom salt

• 100g mushrooms, sautéd with 8 tablespoons on mirin for 30 minutes, dried in the oven, then powdered.
• 200g bacon, fried, dried out, and then powdered.
• 40g dried shiitake, powdered
• 20g rock salt
• 20g smoked paprika

Karemiso

• 1 part sugar
• 2 parts soy sauce
• 2 parts sake
• 2 parts garlic
• 2 parts ginger
• 6 parts gochujang

Aromatic chili oil recipe

Bacon dashi recipe

Tonkotsu broth recipe

Pork shoulder recipe

Homemade ramen noodles

Soft-boiled eggs

Use the leftover braising sauce from the pork shoulder to pickle the eggs for at least two days. I like my soft-boiled eggs cooked to 4 minutes, but here’s a video to help you pick your preference. If you’re not planning to pickle the eggs, then I like to cook the eggs for 5 minutes.

Enjoy 🍜

Future improvements

I got stuck with this bowl for a while. Tried lots of different toppings. Incorporated chilies in different ways. I’m happy with where this has landed. To take it further, I would like to try combining the karemiso and tare into a single component. I would also like to fold the bacon mushroom salt into the bacon dashi so that it’s a single ingredient.