The Art of Simmering: A Journey to Flavorful Ramen

As I began cooking this ramen dish, I knew that patience would be key. The recipe called for simmering the pork and aromatics for a half hour, allowing the flavors to meld together like a harmonious symphony. "I'm just gonna kind of walk away for maybe a half an hour let those flavors meld let some of that water cook out and come together as a sauce and then we'll taste it and see what's what," I told myself.

Time passed, and the sauce had transformed into a rich, savory delight. The aromatics had broken down, releasing their full flavor potential. The pork was tender, infused with the deep flavors of ginger and garlic. As I took a closer look, I noticed that the sauce still held a sauciness to it, despite the water having largely evaporated. It was as if the sauce had reached a state of balance, where all the flavors were working in harmony.

With the sauce now ready, I added some cooked noodles and a sprinkle of fresh basil, taking care to not overpower the dish with too much greenery. The noodles, which I had previously tested using spaghetti, proved to be an excellent choice for this recipe. They retained their springiness and texture perfectly, adding a delightful contrast to the rich, saucy broth.

One of the secrets behind this dish's success lay in its use of pantry staples. Soy sauce, sambal oelek, and rice vinegar all played crucial roles in accelerating the flavor development of the ground pork. "The soy sauce and sambal oelek were like helping kind of accelerate the flavor of the ground pork and get us to that beautiful saucy place in a really short amount of time," I reflected.

As I prepared to serve, I couldn't help but think about the importance of controlling the dish's seasoning. Adding a generous pat of butter to the noodles was a masterstroke, bringing everything together with its rich, creamy flavor. "Butter and pasta is like, you know, a classic combination for a reason," I mused.

With the final touches applied, the ramen was ready to be devoured. Taking a tentative bite, I was rewarded with a symphony of flavors that danced on my palate. The dish was a masterclass in balancing flavors, texture, and presentation. It was a testament to the power of cooking and the importance of patience, allowing the ingredients to come together in perfect harmony.

As I sat down to enjoy this delicious creation, I couldn't help but think about the value of honest feedback and self-reflection. "Everybody can't get a trophy just for showing up," I mused. Sometimes, it takes time and effort to create something truly special. But when we push ourselves to be better, to strive for excellence, that's when magic happens. And in this case, that magic was served up in a steaming hot bowl of ramen.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI don't know who is the lady and who is the in this scenario but we'll just let's just go start we're making spicy sweets on ball pork noodles not that anybody asked this question but I feel like this dish is the answer to the question of what would happen if ragout all bolognaise got together with drunken noodles and had a little noodle baby you know because you get like a lot of meat you get a lot of flavor but you're doing it in a very short amount of time thank you Andy I appreciate that man yeah stick around so anyway just want to get that out of the way like what this is and where it came from and first up I'm just gonna get some of my aromatic veg here Tommy insisted that I chopped my own garlic unclear why but we're gonna do it do I have to do look and chop like and II feel like Ben's waiting I don't know you've got your own thing Chris what what is my thing though do I have a thing spoons spoons cool so yeah that's a lot of garlic but honestly this is two pounds of pork and garlic's awesome so it's gonna be fine I don't feel ginger with a spoon it's just I just I use a knife you know I don't know I just feel like life is a little too short to have to sit there like getting in and out of every nook and cranny most of the time all right so I'm doing some like long ginger batons just because I like seeing them in the final dish I just like the kind of texture that they have once you have like your nicely thinly shaved like slices of garlic ginger rather you can go back over them and just make nice little matchsticks here if you wanted to chop it no worries you can totally do that that's like that's nice nothing everything's gonna kind of soften like it so this is it like we're ready to go here so much of this just is like kind of pantry staples you know a few fresh things obviously like pretty minimal prep we're ready to take this to the stove so I'm gonna get this pot pretty hot before I begin now here's the thing so this is a fairly big pot most people at home probably don't even have a pot this size or maybe they do or maybe they use it once a year for steaming lobsters or something I don't know browning two pounds of pork ground meat you know any type is gonna be really hard if not impossible unless you do it in batches or unless what we've kind of done in this recipe is to just sort of take the approach of listen you want to get some amazing flavor development on some of this meat but you don't necessarily need to brown all of it so I would personally rather Brown one pound of it roughly speaking like half of what we have here really well then to kind of try to Brown two pounds of it but kind of poorly and I want to move quickly so I don't really want to do two batches so I'm going to show you what I mean a meal how you doing bud good we're making um sweet and spicy sambal pork noodles sweet and spicy Sam ballpark nose yeah sweet and spicy sambal sweet and spicy sambal pork noodles might be spicy sweet sambal for spicy sweets and ball pork noodles yeah exactly yeah yeah the very thing yeah we were kind of like talking about you a little bit over there just like how you kind of like you're you're looking like a little bit like a character from I don't know like maybe like Wes Anderson film or like okay yep you know sometimes you need to like warm things up a little bit I woke up late today in a panic and I thought the world is too cold all right so oil is rippling I'm getting some smoke and by the way I'm using olive oil here just because I like using it I think it's got delicious flavor I love it it's all good you can use canola oil or vegetable oil if you really want to so I'm only gonna put in about half of this meat and as you can see I'm just gonna leave it sort of dotted around in there I'm gonna use half of it I'm just gonna throw that in there kind of redistribute the oil and just let that ride while I wash my hands and stuff like we're gonna look for like some pretty amazing color to happen on there and like I said like on the back end we're gonna get all the benefit of having the flavor development from all those by our reactions that are gonna be taking place in there without even having to brown this remaining a bit of beep cool so we're just about ready to start turning these kind of nuggets here that's like the kind of brownie that we're looking for here like really deep golden you don't have to go crazy but I just want to get some really nice color and some depth into the sauce and that's gonna be that's gonna be perfect I'm gonna start moving these around and then again I'm just gonna leave them alone for another couple minutes make sure the heats up especially once you start moving them around and whatnot you're gonna start getting like all the liquid that's coming out of this all the water kind of like holding back some of the Browning that's gonna want to happen so like that initial sear that initial browning period is so critical what happens after that like you know you're always usually trying to play catch up to some degree even when you have an overcrowded the pan even when you know you've done a lot of the right things after I turned at that initial time like it took a sec to kind of get back to browning like just to kind of burn off some of that excess water those coming out of the meat so we are back now color is deepening I think we're just about good to go here I'm not gonna do anything more at this point to try to like get more color on this meat I think there's like tons happening in there so I'm gonna throw the aromatics and along with the sugar and on the rest of me so I have the ginger garlic and sugar you know and it's one of those things like the sugar yeah is it gonna want to go dark of course but if it caramelizes a little bit that's not a bad thing you know you kind of want a little bit of that like sweetness and a little bit of that cooked kind of caramely sugar kind of vibe going on in there I'm just getting that like a 1 1 or 2 second head start before I put the rest of the meat in don't get me wrong this meat is gonna get cooked you know it's gonna go in there and cook just fine I'm just not gonna try to brown it the way I did with that initial edition of me so I'm gonna do a little bit of work to kind of break this up as that second edition of meat kind of gets integrated into it the rest of it all right so as you can see everything is just frankly you know just about cooked in that short amount of time I've just done a little bit of work to break up that pork so at this point I am now going to add tomato paste and basil there's a certain thing that happens like when you add basil to hot oil you kind of get like a really nice abstraction of that like some slightly bitter peppery pungent oil you know it sets the color so it kind of stays green it doesn't just turn into that kind of like cut grass you know kind of thing that basil can get or like frankly any herb so I like wilting it right into that hot fat I'm also gonna use tomato paste here the one trick with it is that you have to cook it out like it's even though it's concentrated tomato it's still kind of effectively wrong like the way it tastes is like a kind of raw tinny canned tomato product so it's essential to like get past this point where it's like that great kind of deep brick red and like while you're seeing that visual change happen like that's when the flavor development is happening to colour deepened we're ready for our liquid stuff got unseasoned rice vinegar I've got regular soy sauce and then I've got a good amount here of sambal oelek I'm gonna add water you could just add like the soy the vinegar and the sambal and kind of be good to go but I just want to cook out that meat just a little bit more and kind of bring all these flavors together even though the meat is like technically cooked at this point I want that water to get in there because I want it to come together as a sauce you know and like I was saying I don't want this to be a sauce that you have to spend hours to make but I do want there to be a little bit additional softening of the meat that this is simmering I'm just gonna kind of walk away for maybe a half an hour let those flavors meld let some of that water cook out and come together as a sauce and then we'll taste it and see what's what okay so it's been like almost 45 minutes here sauce is looking really good so a lot of that water kind of cooked out but it still has a sauciness to it I'm gonna be adding some of the pasta the cooking liquid for the noodles anyway that's really good there is so much ginger and garlic in there it's so aromatic but the pork gives you that like meaty kind of unctuous nests and sambal honestly like sambal isn't like my favorite product to use just because I think you know ultimately we could it would be nice to like obviously permit your own chilies or use fresh chilies but man what's great about it is you can use a lot of it because it's not so hot so we put in a third of a cup here so you get like a lot of chili heat and a lot of brightness but all those flavors are kind of like zinging around in there it's like Oh first time take it tasting kind of like salty meaty you know right from the vinegar heat it's all just kind of like happening your taste buds like don't have one thing to just sort of settle in on so that's awesome so we're gonna get cooking noodles put some salt in here I don't think yeah it's unsalted so so these are beautiful ramen noodles from Sun ramen they are so springy and so delightful and they're gonna be friggin amazing in this you could also use spaghetti which would be totally fine and we tested it that way as well and it was great the other thing too frankly is like there's nothing wrong with like getting a package of dried ramen noodles not using the flavor packet and just using those dried noodles as your noodle and cool so that's gonna be a couple minutes check back alright so it's been a couple minutes here and noodles are good honestly ramen noodles have so much spring to them like it can be tricky to judge when they're actually done perfect I'm just gonna scoop these directly into our sauce here it's fine if obviously we capture some of that liquid off of them that's great I'm gonna be adding some of that liquid anyway I just want to be able to control it well alright so I'm gonna fire up the heat a little bit here work these around and now this is the thing that I thought was just like what's this sort of like a little bit over the top not this this butter you don't have to put butter in this obviously you don't have to put butter in anything but obviously it's a great idea to put butter and lots of things both from a flavor perspective but also just you know butter with pasta it just helps bring sauce and pasta together in a way that few other things can but definitely always worth spending a good minute just bring everything together because see how that butter and just the starchiness of those noodles is just making everything coat super nicely there splash more water turn this heat off I think we are good here yeah we're good to take it to the plate all right and then this is where we have our fresh basil which you know no surprise there if you had Thai basil great here we go haven't really had a good space yet how do you try this before so about thing I didn't and I was really mad about it because everyone else loved it and I was like oh cool well um can't wait to try it and then it was empty hmm it's so nice I'm like wha see it's very glossy it's very glossy I was worried about it being greasy but it's not at all yeah so I'm gonna eat all of this one time cool thank you so anyway so the noodles so fast and so easy and you know I think part of how you're able to get from just totally wrong gradients to fetched super flavorful dish like that is we're leaning on our ability to use pantry staples and smart ways so the soy sauce the sambal oelek you know the rice vinegar all of that was like helping kind of accelerate the flavor of the ground pork and get us to that beautiful saucy place in a really short amount of time so Jesse believes I believe you'll believe I need to go get one of those sentiment buttons before they all disappear it's like look everybody can't get a trophy just for showing up you know what I mean like sometimes like things are good and sometimes thinking things can be better you know I think yeah you just everybody has to keep themselves honest this is when we'd cut to someone's sitting with a curtain mind I'm going I didn't come here to make friendsI don't know who is the lady and who is the in this scenario but we'll just let's just go start we're making spicy sweets on ball pork noodles not that anybody asked this question but I feel like this dish is the answer to the question of what would happen if ragout all bolognaise got together with drunken noodles and had a little noodle baby you know because you get like a lot of meat you get a lot of flavor but you're doing it in a very short amount of time thank you Andy I appreciate that man yeah stick around so anyway just want to get that out of the way like what this is and where it came from and first up I'm just gonna get some of my aromatic veg here Tommy insisted that I chopped my own garlic unclear why but we're gonna do it do I have to do look and chop like and II feel like Ben's waiting I don't know you've got your own thing Chris what what is my thing though do I have a thing spoons spoons cool so yeah that's a lot of garlic but honestly this is two pounds of pork and garlic's awesome so it's gonna be fine I don't feel ginger with a spoon it's just I just I use a knife you know I don't know I just feel like life is a little too short to have to sit there like getting in and out of every nook and cranny most of the time all right so I'm doing some like long ginger batons just because I like seeing them in the final dish I just like the kind of texture that they have once you have like your nicely thinly shaved like slices of garlic ginger rather you can go back over them and just make nice little matchsticks here if you wanted to chop it no worries you can totally do that that's like that's nice nothing everything's gonna kind of soften like it so this is it like we're ready to go here so much of this just is like kind of pantry staples you know a few fresh things obviously like pretty minimal prep we're ready to take this to the stove so I'm gonna get this pot pretty hot before I begin now here's the thing so this is a fairly big pot most people at home probably don't even have a pot this size or maybe they do or maybe they use it once a year for steaming lobsters or something I don't know browning two pounds of pork ground meat you know any type is gonna be really hard if not impossible unless you do it in batches or unless what we've kind of done in this recipe is to just sort of take the approach of listen you want to get some amazing flavor development on some of this meat but you don't necessarily need to brown all of it so I would personally rather Brown one pound of it roughly speaking like half of what we have here really well then to kind of try to Brown two pounds of it but kind of poorly and I want to move quickly so I don't really want to do two batches so I'm going to show you what I mean a meal how you doing bud good we're making um sweet and spicy sambal pork noodles sweet and spicy Sam ballpark nose yeah sweet and spicy sambal sweet and spicy sambal pork noodles might be spicy sweet sambal for spicy sweets and ball pork noodles yeah exactly yeah yeah the very thing yeah we were kind of like talking about you a little bit over there just like how you kind of like you're you're looking like a little bit like a character from I don't know like maybe like Wes Anderson film or like okay yep you know sometimes you need to like warm things up a little bit I woke up late today in a panic and I thought the world is too cold all right so oil is rippling I'm getting some smoke and by the way I'm using olive oil here just because I like using it I think it's got delicious flavor I love it it's all good you can use canola oil or vegetable oil if you really want to so I'm only gonna put in about half of this meat and as you can see I'm just gonna leave it sort of dotted around in there I'm gonna use half of it I'm just gonna throw that in there kind of redistribute the oil and just let that ride while I wash my hands and stuff like we're gonna look for like some pretty amazing color to happen on there and like I said like on the back end we're gonna get all the benefit of having the flavor development from all those by our reactions that are gonna be taking place in there without even having to brown this remaining a bit of beep cool so we're just about ready to start turning these kind of nuggets here that's like the kind of brownie that we're looking for here like really deep golden you don't have to go crazy but I just want to get some really nice color and some depth into the sauce and that's gonna be that's gonna be perfect I'm gonna start moving these around and then again I'm just gonna leave them alone for another couple minutes make sure the heats up especially once you start moving them around and whatnot you're gonna start getting like all the liquid that's coming out of this all the water kind of like holding back some of the Browning that's gonna want to happen so like that initial sear that initial browning period is so critical what happens after that like you know you're always usually trying to play catch up to some degree even when you have an overcrowded the pan even when you know you've done a lot of the right things after I turned at that initial time like it took a sec to kind of get back to browning like just to kind of burn off some of that excess water those coming out of the meat so we are back now color is deepening I think we're just about good to go here I'm not gonna do anything more at this point to try to like get more color on this meat I think there's like tons happening in there so I'm gonna throw the aromatics and along with the sugar and on the rest of me so I have the ginger garlic and sugar you know and it's one of those things like the sugar yeah is it gonna want to go dark of course but if it caramelizes a little bit that's not a bad thing you know you kind of want a little bit of that like sweetness and a little bit of that cooked kind of caramely sugar kind of vibe going on in there I'm just getting that like a 1 1 or 2 second head start before I put the rest of the meat in don't get me wrong this meat is gonna get cooked you know it's gonna go in there and cook just fine I'm just not gonna try to brown it the way I did with that initial edition of me so I'm gonna do a little bit of work to kind of break this up as that second edition of meat kind of gets integrated into it the rest of it all right so as you can see everything is just frankly you know just about cooked in that short amount of time I've just done a little bit of work to break up that pork so at this point I am now going to add tomato paste and basil there's a certain thing that happens like when you add basil to hot oil you kind of get like a really nice abstraction of that like some slightly bitter peppery pungent oil you know it sets the color so it kind of stays green it doesn't just turn into that kind of like cut grass you know kind of thing that basil can get or like frankly any herb so I like wilting it right into that hot fat I'm also gonna use tomato paste here the one trick with it is that you have to cook it out like it's even though it's concentrated tomato it's still kind of effectively wrong like the way it tastes is like a kind of raw tinny canned tomato product so it's essential to like get past this point where it's like that great kind of deep brick red and like while you're seeing that visual change happen like that's when the flavor development is happening to colour deepened we're ready for our liquid stuff got unseasoned rice vinegar I've got regular soy sauce and then I've got a good amount here of sambal oelek I'm gonna add water you could just add like the soy the vinegar and the sambal and kind of be good to go but I just want to cook out that meat just a little bit more and kind of bring all these flavors together even though the meat is like technically cooked at this point I want that water to get in there because I want it to come together as a sauce you know and like I was saying I don't want this to be a sauce that you have to spend hours to make but I do want there to be a little bit additional softening of the meat that this is simmering I'm just gonna kind of walk away for maybe a half an hour let those flavors meld let some of that water cook out and come together as a sauce and then we'll taste it and see what's what okay so it's been like almost 45 minutes here sauce is looking really good so a lot of that water kind of cooked out but it still has a sauciness to it I'm gonna be adding some of the pasta the cooking liquid for the noodles anyway that's really good there is so much ginger and garlic in there it's so aromatic but the pork gives you that like meaty kind of unctuous nests and sambal honestly like sambal isn't like my favorite product to use just because I think you know ultimately we could it would be nice to like obviously permit your own chilies or use fresh chilies but man what's great about it is you can use a lot of it because it's not so hot so we put in a third of a cup here so you get like a lot of chili heat and a lot of brightness but all those flavors are kind of like zinging around in there it's like Oh first time take it tasting kind of like salty meaty you know right from the vinegar heat it's all just kind of like happening your taste buds like don't have one thing to just sort of settle in on so that's awesome so we're gonna get cooking noodles put some salt in here I don't think yeah it's unsalted so so these are beautiful ramen noodles from Sun ramen they are so springy and so delightful and they're gonna be friggin amazing in this you could also use spaghetti which would be totally fine and we tested it that way as well and it was great the other thing too frankly is like there's nothing wrong with like getting a package of dried ramen noodles not using the flavor packet and just using those dried noodles as your noodle and cool so that's gonna be a couple minutes check back alright so it's been a couple minutes here and noodles are good honestly ramen noodles have so much spring to them like it can be tricky to judge when they're actually done perfect I'm just gonna scoop these directly into our sauce here it's fine if obviously we capture some of that liquid off of them that's great I'm gonna be adding some of that liquid anyway I just want to be able to control it well alright so I'm gonna fire up the heat a little bit here work these around and now this is the thing that I thought was just like what's this sort of like a little bit over the top not this this butter you don't have to put butter in this obviously you don't have to put butter in anything but obviously it's a great idea to put butter and lots of things both from a flavor perspective but also just you know butter with pasta it just helps bring sauce and pasta together in a way that few other things can but definitely always worth spending a good minute just bring everything together because see how that butter and just the starchiness of those noodles is just making everything coat super nicely there splash more water turn this heat off I think we are good here yeah we're good to take it to the plate all right and then this is where we have our fresh basil which you know no surprise there if you had Thai basil great here we go haven't really had a good space yet how do you try this before so about thing I didn't and I was really mad about it because everyone else loved it and I was like oh cool well um can't wait to try it and then it was empty hmm it's so nice I'm like wha see it's very glossy it's very glossy I was worried about it being greasy but it's not at all yeah so I'm gonna eat all of this one time cool thank you so anyway so the noodles so fast and so easy and you know I think part of how you're able to get from just totally wrong gradients to fetched super flavorful dish like that is we're leaning on our ability to use pantry staples and smart ways so the soy sauce the sambal oelek you know the rice vinegar all of that was like helping kind of accelerate the flavor of the ground pork and get us to that beautiful saucy place in a really short amount of time so Jesse believes I believe you'll believe I need to go get one of those sentiment buttons before they all disappear it's like look everybody can't get a trophy just for showing up you know what I mean like sometimes like things are good and sometimes thinking things can be better you know I think yeah you just everybody has to keep themselves honest this is when we'd cut to someone's sitting with a curtain mind I'm going I didn't come here to make friends\n"