Understanding how to structure your ramen soup

akira
When you get to taste a bowl of ramen that wows your brain, you wonder how it is made. The level of sodium. The strength of pork flavor. The hint of scallop flavor. The level of sweetness. The scent of garlic. And the temperature of the soup. Every single ingredient and variable helps create the entire sensations of how the bowl tastes. It may take years of training, actual practices and cooking, and disciplines to reach the culinary level of creating such a bowl of ramen on a consistent basic for business. And that's actually how many of the existing ramen shops and restaurants have come to be.
But you wouldn't have to go through the years of training. You wouldn't even have to come to Japan to get apprenticeship at some famous ramen shops. You can now simply go online and learn all the methodologies, sciences, and data at this ramen school. Because Yamato Ramen School uses this culinary method, called "Digital Cooking", you wouldn't have to rely on your cooking experiences or senses to create a bowl of ramen that wow others. You can simply rely on solid blueprints that guarantee superb bowls of ramen over and over. Because everything is digitized, you wouldn't have to encounter unwanted surprises but have stable outcomes that delight your customers.
Here's an example of how we digitize ramen development.

Structuring ramen soup

We've already talked about how a ramen soup is structured in other articles. A ramen consists of 3 components, base stock, motodare, and flavored oil. Base stock is like a vessel that carries the foundational taste of soup. It is made out of various ingredients, animal-based like pork bones, chickens, seafood, vegetables, and even fruits.
Motodare is basically seasoning that is added to the base stock. With motodare added to the base stock, it tastes like a ramen soup. There are 3 basic motodare, which are soy sauce, salt, and miso. Each has varying degrees of salinity level and sweetness. And, flavored oil is like a stimulant that adds aroma to the soup.
This is a very important part to a ramen soup. Because to our brains, a taste is a fusion of a food's taste, smell, and touch, a smell plays am important role in how we experience a taste. And our sense of smell is responsible for 80% of what we taste. We cannot underestimate the role a flavor oil plays in shaping our ramen soup.
So, how do we go about structuring a ramen soup? First you'd need to decide a rough image of what your ramen would be before you begin. Is it going to be a thick, greasy animal-based soup, coupled with strong and thick noodles? Would it be clear and light broth with a hint of aromatic soy sauce and flavorful seafood, coupled with elastic, medium-sized noodles? Once you have the image, the rest is easy because we have created formulas for almost all the ramen types imaginable over two decades of conducting our Ramen School.

Correlation between ramen stock and motodare

We have made hundreds of different types of ramen at our Ramen School. Because each student (over 2,100 graduates) brings his or her own ideas for what kind of ramen they want to develop, in every course we conducted, we created new types of ramen and recorded the exact recipes of them. And we've found the relationship between the amount of motodare added to the base stocks and base stock density. Basically, the higher the density of base stocks, the smaller the amount of motodare we need to add to base stocks to have a well-balanced ramen soup.
This makes sense because a base stock that is high in density carries a larger amount of umami and needs a small amount of seasoning to taste great. But a base stock that is low in density needs a larger amount of seasoning to compensate for the shortage in the taste.
The exception may be some ramen types like tsukemen and mazemen (soup-less ramen) that focus more on noodles. For example, the soup for tsukemen or dipping noodles need stronger taste because it needs to give enough impact on the noodles dipped momentarily. If the taste is insufficient, we would not be able to taste the soup when biting into the noodles. So, the soup for tsukemen tends to be high in both soup density and the amount of motodare.
And we cannot emphasize enough that all of these structuring and formulation wouldn't be possible without Digital Cooking methods by measuring the soup densities and weights of each motodare we add. This is just one example of how you can use and structure your own bowls of ramen, using Digital Cooking Method.

Your Own Ramen Discovery starts here

Unlock and maximize your ramen potentials today by signing up for Yamato Online Ramen School, which gives your the shortest path to your unique craft bowls of ramen.
Write your awesome label here.
Write your awesome label here.

Master the Ultimate Ramen Fundamentals

Complete Ramen Course is here! You can start learning the essences, principles, and great ramen techniques you can start practicing today. Today is your best timing to start.