Hand made ramen with three broths.

Soy sauce based ramen soup.

Japanese tastes and flavours have been cropping up in my kitchen on a regular basis recently.I have been making my own sushi as well as using matcha as an additional flavour in my baking. How wonderful then to be asked to join a ramen class at the Sozai Cookery school in Aldgate. 

Miso based ramen soup, with minced pork.

I have to confess I have eaten only two forms of ramen. One from a large chain restaurant and the other in a pot that gets covered in boiling water (!) I’ll hand back my food blogger accreditation as I get my coat……

Char sui pork resting before being sliced and slid onto our ramen.

During my evening at Sozai I was introduced to soy based ramen soup served with char shu pork and ramen eggs, miso based soup with minced pork and a dressing for cold ramen noodles too. Added to this a recipe for chicken stock soup and the chance to make hand made ramen noodles too. Not only did I come away from the event with recipes, my stomach was full too as we ate the ramens and sauces we had made for supper too. I need to thank Akemi Yokoyama for both her patience and her constant explanations, anecdotes and asides. She is a fantastic teacher and made the time fly.

Using pressure cookers to speed up the cooking process fascinated and terrified me in equal measure. This cooking method did allow us to see the cooking of the char shu pork from beginning to end. A wonderful byproduct of char shu pork are the ramen eggs. Infused with the soy and pork flavours but still runny in the middle they were the reason all the cameras and phones came out at once to record the moment they were cut in half. Given that there was a room of food bloggers there, that must tell you how fabulous the moment was.

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Despite the fact that ramen are rarely made at home, they were surprisingly simple. Baking is chemistry and so it seems is noodle making. With the correct amounts of flour, water and bicarbonate of soda, a little cornflour and a pasta machine you CAN make ramen simply and easily. I certainly will be making them again – soon.

Sourcing good quality authentic products can sometimes make cooking world foods tricky but Yutaka provided Sozai Cookery school, myself and my fellow bloggers with great ingredients for our ramen lesson and some to take away with us. I use Yutaka rice when making sushi at home myself so was immensely pleased to find out that they have so many other products  for me to use too.

Yutaka products we used in our ramen lesson.

I was invited to participate in this event via the Ladies in Blogging group. I was not asked to write a positive blog post. I was not paid to attend and all photographs and words are my own.

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