Over the weekend, we made homemade tentamen ramen. That is, ramen with spicy ground beef. (Exceptions to “homemade” were the noodles, egg and chili oil.) The inspiration for making this broth came from Roger who gifted Marco a copy of Let’s Make Ramen!: A comic-book cookbook.
First we started with a yasai broth, which has among other ingredients shiitake mushrooms, carrots, green onions, onions, apples and ginger. After the flavors infuse into the water for an hour you take it off the heat and add a few sheets of kombu dried seaweed for 10 minutes to give it more of an umami flavor. They expanded to ridiculous levels after those 10 minutes. it was crazy!
Lots of mushrooms! But the most unexpected ingredient was the apples.
Skipping ahead, here is a look at the end product:
To make the final product we added “tare” which was a homemade mixture which gave the broth its depth of flavor, plus bok chow, an egg for Marco and Roger, spicy ground beef and dried nori seaweed. Yumyumyum!
Marco and I are already looking forward to the next recipe. We think we’ll tackle a 4 hour broth next, but this time putting it into our pressure cooker (which has way more capacity than our normal pans anyway).
Here’s to Marco, the awesome chef and Roger for the great inspiration!

