Wheat noodles made with alkaline water, served in a hot broth that has been built over hours or days, seasoned with a tare of soy, salt or miso and finished with slices of pork, a soft egg, spring onion and nori: ramen is Japan's everyday noodle soup and the most argued-over bowl in the country. It arrived from China in the late nineteenth century as shina soba, became a cheap post-war meal built on American wheat, and split into regional styles that still define the map: Sapporo's miso ramen with butter and corn, Hakata's tonkotsu with thin straight noodles in milky pork-bone broth, Tokyo's shoyu with a clear chicken and dashi base, Kitakata's thick wavy noodles, and dozens more. The instant version invented in 1958 is the same name and a different food. A ramen shop usually makes one style and is judged on that style alone.

A bowl has five parts and each is a separate job. The broth is simmered from pork or chicken bones, sometimes with dried fish and kelp, for anything from six hours to two days; tonkotsu is boiled hard until the collagen and fat emulsify into something opaque, while a shoyu or shio broth is kept clear. The tare is the concentrated seasoning spooned into the bowl before the broth, and it is where the shop's identity lives. The noodles are wheat, water and kansui, the alkaline salts that give them their yellow colour, chew and ability to stand up to hot soup, cooked to order for between forty seconds and three minutes depending on thickness. Aroma oil, chicken fat, black garlic oil or chilli oil, goes on top. Toppings are chashu pork braised in soy and mirin, an ajitama egg marinated so the yolk stays jammy, menma bamboo, negi and nori. The bowl is assembled in under a minute and eaten in under ten.

Taste the broth alone first: it should be deep, with body you can feel on the lips, properly salted by the tare and tasting of what it was made from, not of MSG alone or of stock powder. Then the noodles, which should be springy and distinct, not soft or starchy, and matched in thickness to the broth. The egg should have a set white and a soft, seasoned yolk; the chashu should be tender enough to break with chopsticks and have some fat. Mark down a thin or greasy broth, noodles that were cooked ahead and have swollen, a cold or hard-boiled egg, dry grey pork, and a bowl where the soup has gone lukewarm before it reaches the table. Slurping is expected and the noodles should be finished before they soften; a bowl that takes twenty minutes to eat is being eaten wrong, or was served wrong.

Tia Min

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