Tadashi Ramen: Pork, Beef and Chicken Dashi, Pork Belly Sous Vide, Pickled Shiitake Mushrooms

From Hugh Amano

Serves roughly 10

The dashi found in last year’s Pork Dumpling Gang has been developed and enriched here with the addition of roasted beef and pork neck bones, chicken feet and pig trotters. The broth gets a huge bolt of smokiness from bacon ends from Benton’s in Tennessee, but a standard bacon can be used–the smokier the better. The pork belly is cooked sous-vide, meaning it is sealed in an airtight bag, which is placed in water and cooked low and slow, essentially braising in its own juices. There’s more at Hugh’s blog, Food on the Dole.

For the dashi:

Ingredients

2 pounds beef neck bones
2 pounds pork neck bones
2 large pieces of Kombu
1 pound chicken backs or bones
1 pound chicken feet
2 pig trotters
1 pound smoky bacon, the smokiest you can get
2 ounces dried shiitake mushrooms
2 onions, diced
2 carrots, peeled and diced
1 bunch scallions, sliced
2 star anise
1/2 cup cane vinegar, or to taste
1/2 cup soy sauce, or to taste

Preparation
Heat oven to 400°. Put beef and pork neck bones on sheet pan and roast in oven for 30 minutes. Flip bones and roast for an additional 15-30 minutes, until bones are deeply roasted.

While bones are roasting, put kombu in large stock pot and cover with 20 cups of cold water. Bring to a boil, then remove from heat. Let steep for 10 minutes. Remove kombu and discard or save for another use.

Put raw chicken backs or bones, chicken feet, pig trotters and bacon into the kombu water and return to the stove over medium heat.

When the beef and pork bones are done roasting, pour off any melted fat and save for another use. Add roasted bones to the water. Put roasting pan over a high flame and pour a cup or so of water into the pan to deglaze it. Scrape the pan with a spoon or spatula to remove any flavorful bits that are stuck to the bottom of the pan. Pour all of this goodness into the stockpot with the bones. Be sure bones are submerged. If more water is required to submerge bones, add whatever it takes.

Bring stock just to a simmer, and allow to simmer slowly (a bubble or two every couple of seconds) overnight, occasionally skimming any scum that forms on top. Naturally, water will evaporate from the pot, so take note of the liquid’s starting level and replenish every hour or so as necessary.

Add mushrooms, onions, carrots, scallions and star anise. Simmer for one more hour.

Remove from heat and let fully cool under refrigeration or, if it is winter in Chicago, on a porch/stoop/fire escape. When cooled, the stock will be separated into solid fat at the top and gelatin beneath the fat. Scrape solidified fat from the top of the stock and discard, or save for another use, then reheat the stock until it is liquid again. Strain the stock through the finest strainer available. Reserve mushrooms for the pickled shiitake mushrooms and discard everything else.

Taste stock and add cane vinegar and soy sauce. Stir stock completely and taste again. Adjust flavor using additional amounts of these two seasoning agents. This broth should last about seven days.

For the pork belly:

Ingredients
2 pounds boneless pork belly, skin off
2 stalks celery, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 star anise
Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation
Place all ingredients in plastic bag designed to be vacuum sealed, evenly spacing ingredients. Vacuum seal bag, then place in an immersion circulator set around 142 degrees and cook for 12 hours. Let pork belly cool, then place in a pan, still in the bag. Cover with another pan, then weigh this pan down with heavy cans and refrigerate overnight. The idea is to compress the pork belly into a compact “block”. After pressing, remove belly from its bag. When ready to serve, sear pork belly on a hot cast iron pan over medium high heat, 3 minutes per side. Let cool slightly, then cut into thin slices.

For the pickled shiitake mushrooms:

Ingredients
Reserved shiitake mushrooms from dashi, sliced thin
1/4 cup dashi
1/2 cup cane vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon sambal (chile paste)
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger

Preparation
Bring all ingredients but the mushrooms to a boil. Pour over mushrooms and let cool. Cover and keep refrigerated. This’ll keep for about a week.

To assemble dish:
Good quality packaged or homemade ramen noodles (available in most Asian markets)
pork, beef and chicken dashi
pork belly sous vide
pickled shiitake mushrooms
scallions, sliced
radish Sprouts
nori

Simmer noodles until cooked, then rinse in a bowl of very hot water. Drain, then place in a bowl. Add a few slices of pork belly and a few pickled shiitake mushrooms, arranging in an attractive manner. Sprinkle scallions and radish sprouts in bowl. Place a piece of nori in the bowl. Present to your guests. At the table, ladle hot dashi into each bowl. Serve with chopsticks.

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Sincerely yours, Soup & Bread

People talk a lot about “community building,” but in the case of Soup & Bread, I think what we’re up to could better be called “community revealing.” Building implies a master plan — a certain top-down intentionality. But on soup nights like the one this past Wednesday what happens in the back room of the Hideout is nothing more structured than the spontaneous illumination of pre-existing relationships whose true detail had been perhaps in shadow until the light of soup was shone upon them.

In that room there was a gardener who ran the program at the school where the parents’ children grew peppers. She was working on a new project with the editor, who was friendly with the social worker, who knew my friend the mom, who brought her friend the musician, who brought bread to donate to the table. The writer was working on a project with the editor, who lived up the street from the gardener, and used to work with the other writer, who was pals with the restaurateur, who had hired the bartender (the other bartender) to paint his shop. And, well, you get the gist. It was all very six-degrees-of-soup-separation.

It feels silly sometimes, writing about soup week after week.  Doubly so lately, because when not trying to find new ways to describe something that’s both very simple and yet, like all good communities, can be much more than the sum of its parts, I’m finishing up work on the new edition of the Soup & Bread Cookbook. A girl can only handle so many labored soup metaphors in a day.

But nights like this one make it not seem so silly after all. I often don’t get to experience Soup & Bread in the moment: there are drinks to be made, and ladles to be washed, and bread to be cut, and when it’s all over I just sit there and think, “Did that just really happen?” (My consistently terrible photo documentation doesn’t help, though I take some pride in being responsible for possibly the blurriest photos on the internet.) But this was really something, and even I could see that.

To a backdrop of tunes spun by Sound Opinions producers Robin Linn and Jason Saldanha, we had a densely complicated oden from Mike Sula, who came in disguise, and Elizabeth Gomez (above), who was in Japan most of last month and flew home from Tokyo the day after the earthquake. We had refreshing tomato, basil, and white bean soup from Laura Fox and her mother, Monica. Laura’s been helping me wrangle recipes for the cookbook for the last few months, and without her I would be lost. And we had a hearty white bean and smoked sausage soup from James Sapytka, who is a standup guy and friends with our equally standup, if elusive, door guy Al.

We had savory roasted onion soup from Sarah Steedman, and roasted beet soup from Cleetus Friedman, above in the apron — beet soup that had the ability to send a seven-year-old boy back for thirds. (A million thanks also to Cleetus for the sandwich, which I desperately needed later on.) We had ramen from Hugh Amano, next to Cleetus, whose support of Soup & Bread is only equalled by his superlative soup-making skills.

And we had not one but two soups — a tangy Pakistani chicken soup and a zesty Haitian “Independence Day” soup full of butternut squash — brought by the ladies from the Marjorie Kovler Center for Treatment of Survivors of Torture at the Heartland Alliance, the beneficiary of this weeks’ soup donations. We (by which I mean “you”) raised $570 on their behalf, and as staffer Mary Black wrote me later, “Most of the clients who come to Kovler are political asylum applicants who live without work authorization or access to government subsidies (such as a Link card) until they are granted asylum — this can take years! So having access to healthy food is primary, as you can imagine. $570 is a tremendous help!”

There are just three weeks left of Soup & Bread this year, and we’ve got some heavy hitters on the docket. More info to come about next week’s lineup. In the meantime, earnestly, honestly, thank you. Without you we’re nothing.

Sincerely yours,

Soup & Bread

Soup cooks 3/23

Oooh, it’s going to be crowded on the soup line this week! In the house:

Chicago Reader food columnist Mike Sula and roller derby queen Elizabeth “Juanna Rumbel” Gomez

City Provisions empire-builder Cleetus Friedman

Food on the Dole writer and chef Hugh Amano

Artist/crafter Sarah Steedman

Former door guy Al’s friend James Sapyta (how’s that for networking?)

Writer and recipe-wrangler extraordinaire Laura Fox — and her mom

And two (and possibly three) soups contributed by volunteers from the Heartland Alliance’s Marjorie Kovler Center. Proceeds from this week’s Soup & Bread benefit the Kovler Center’s efforts to aid survivors of torture from around the world, and help them and their families build new lives in Chicago.

That is a * lot * of soup, folks. And don’t forget the bread, from our friends at La Farine Bakery. Musical entertainment provided by our DJs, Sound Opinions producers Robin Linn and Jason Saldanha.

See you there, then. Come hungry!

Week 6

L-R: Hugh, Roger, Robin, Kelly, the masked souper

Thanks to the snow we had a small but cheery turnout this week — which just meant there was plenty of soup to go around! And, thanks to my poor communication skills, we were down one soup from the planned six, but, thankfully, Mike Sula covered the gap with a surprise second soup that … well … I think he’s going to write about it eventually so I’ll won’t steal his thunder. Let’s just say it was a Soup and Bread first. And very boney.

Mike’s already provided the recipe and backstory for his other soup, a Slovak mushroom-sauerkraut concoction adapted from a recipe pinched by his father’s cleaning lady from her sisters-in-law, over on the Reader’s food blog. I’ll get that up over here  whenever I get over this godawful cold and manage to dig out from under a sudden avalanche of recipes. Not that I’m complaining. Bring on the recipes!

Also on deck:

The talented and eloquent Hugh Amano, of Food on the Dole, with a pork dumpling soup built around a Frankenstein’s stock of pork neck, chicken bones, extra lamb stock, and dashi.

Personal chef Roger Greene, with Linguisa Sausage, Cheddar Cheese, and Oranjeboom Lager Beer Soup, possibly the most snowstorm-friendly pot ever.

The Vegetarian Librarian Kelly Reiss, with not just a hearty vegan white bean soup but delicious vegan cornbread and adorable preprinted recipe cards to boot. The recipe’s already up on her own blog, over here.

And, last but not least, Sound Opinions producer and soup fan Robin Linn, whose roasted garlic soup with spinach and Parmesan was really terrific. In her words, “Not suitable for Valentine’s Day, but great for colds.” I wish I had some right now.

We also had a dense, rich chocolate tart baked by Celeste, and lots of bread donated by our friends at La Farine Bakery on Chicago Avenue, as well as breads and cheesecakes from Rae Hill and her fellow students at Illinois Institute of Art. Rae’s given me a pile of bread recipes to transcribe, and let me tell you the very first one is going to be for the amazing Parmesan bread. Seriously, Rae. People were moaning.

As I said, it was a mellow crowd, but those who did manage to dig out and make it to the bar also dug deep into their pockets. I was pleasantly surprised to empty the donations bucket and find $250 in there. It’s all going to Casa Catalina, the food pantry run by Holy Cross/Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Back of the Yards. Thanks, y’all.

See you next week!