With a few key ingredients, making ramen noodles from scratch can become your new norm.
Why It Works
- Using bread flour, which has a high protein content, gives you a noodle with a good amount of chew.
- Supplementing the protein content of bread flour with vital wheat gluten produces an even chewier noodle.
- Using baked baking soda (sodium carbonate) in the dough gives the noodles their characteristic elasticity, springiness, and glossiness, as well as their flavor.
- Running the dough sheets repeatedly through the pasta rollers both develops a strong gluten network and aligns it horizontally along the sheet, giving the noodles their “bite.”
You can’t have a bowl of ramen without wheat-based alkaline noodles, and while it’s possible to purchase high-quality noodles from noodle manufacturers like Sun Noodle, you can also make excellent noodles at home, so long as you have a few key but common ingredients: high-protein bread flour, vital wheat gluten, and baked baking soda.
These noodles are meant for use in shoyu ramen and miso tori paitan, and are best paired with relatively light-bodied broths, though they can feasibly be used with most any ramen recipe. This recipe makes four portions of noodles, and is based on the following formula for a single portion of noodles (the recipe can be scaled up or down as desired using this formula):
- 99g King Arthur bread flour
- 1g vital wheat gluten
- 1g kosher salt
- 1.5g baked baking soda
- 40g water
We received a bunch of advice from three noodle experts during the development of this recipe: Kenshiro Uki, vice president of operations for Sun Noodle; Keizo Shimamoto, owner of Ramen Shack and Shimamoto Noodle; and, especially, Mike Satinover (a.k.a. Ramen_Lord).
