Dave's House O' Ramen

Suggestions

The best standalone ramen comes with three or more packets. Generally these packets will contain one or more of:
  1. Soup base
  2. Dried vegetables
  3. Dried Seaweed and other flaky stuff
  4. Hot oil
  5. Rice wine
It wasn't long before I realized that there was plenty of great Ramen that didn't have rice wine or hot oil packets. Now when I make Ramen I have a supply of these on hand since they are easy to add to give a ramen a fuller and sometimes hotter flavor. Add the rice wine and oil when you are heating up the water.

If you are willing to put more effort into your Ramen, consider adding in egg. This requires that you cook the Ramen on a stovetop. When the Ramen is almost done, bring it to a boil, and then pour a scrambled egg into the Soup. Give it just a few seconds, and then stir the egg into the soup. If you do it right, you'll end up with egg trails in the soup, like egg drop soup. If you stir too soon or too fast, you'll mix it in too much and just make the soup 'eggy.' If you don't stir soon enough or fast enough, then you'll have large egg chunks in your soup.

When you are cooking your Ramen, make sure the noodles don't get too thick. This means they have absorbed too much water and will be soggy. While this is a personal preference, I happen to like my Ramen too be slightly Al Dente, to steal an Italian term.

If I have any cooked rice lying around, and I'm particularly hungry, I'll often dump that into some Ramen I've made with a little bit more water.

The simplest suggestion I have for making Ramen easily, though, is to remove the packets from the packaging, and then semi-crush the noodles in the packaging before dumping it in the water. Makes it much easier to mix and eat.

For more recipe ideas, see Matt Fischer's Ramen site

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