In the Kitchen: Ramen Edition

So, I love cooking. I don't do it every day (or even every week) because I don't have the energy for that, but I love it. Because moving is super stressful I haven't really cooked in months, but this weekend I finally got back into it, with some delicious results.

A couple weeks ago I was stressed, and as a coping mechanism I started looking up information on making tonkotsu ramen at home. I didn't end up making it that weekend, and it got sort of shuffled to the back of my head as a fun future project. Last week while I was doing my grocery run, I planned to get stuff to make chicken broth, but didn't have any luck. What the market did have, though, was pork bones and pork belly, so Operation Homemade Tonkotsu Ramen was a go.

The broth spent all day Friday boiling—a full, rolling boil for twelve hours—and it made my apartment smell so good. The resulting broth is such a beautiful color, and it's so smooth. It's certainly the prettiest broth I've ever made.

The pork belly needed to cure for twelve hours, so I put it together at about 8pm on Friday so I could cook it late Saturday morning. It's a 50/50 salt and sugar cure, and then I cooked it at a low temperature for a couple hours. Again, my apartment smelled incredible, and the pork belly came out beautiful.

The finished ramen was such a treat—I normally just make my ramen with some homemade vegetable bouillon and a spoonful of miso, so this was a nice change, and the broth and pork belly both came out so good. I had two bowls over the weekend, and I have about six bowls' worth left of the broth and four servings of pork belly in the freezer for the future.