Ramen Broth Guide: Building a Ramen-Shop Bowl at Home

A bowl of ramen looks like one soup, but in a ramen shop it is not cooked as one pot. It is put together in the bowl, one order at a time, from parts that were made separately. Keizo Shimamoto, the ramen chef who invented the Ramen Burger, explains in a 2023 series for the noodle maker Myojo USA that each bowl gets three liquid parts: tare, a concentrated seasoning; dashi, the soup stock; and komi abura, a flavoring oil. Noodles and toppings go in last. Knowing those parts is the key to making ramen at home, whether the broth starts from bones, from a jar of concentrated base or from a spoonful of seasoning. This guide covers each part, how shoyu, miso and pork-bone bowls differ, and how to build a bowl from a concentrated ramen base (shop the soups collection).

Ramen in five dates

The Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum, which was founded in Yokohama on March 6, 1994 as the world's first ramen-themed amusement park, keeps a timeline of how the dish spread across Japan. Four of its entries, plus one date from Myojo USA, trace the bowls in this guide.

  • 1910, Tokyo. Ozaki Kanichi opened Rairaiken in the Asakusa district. The museum credits the shop with setting off Japan's first major ramen boom.
  • 1922, Sapporo. Takeya Shokudo opened in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido. The museum calls it the origin of Sapporo ramen and notes that its main bowl was a relatively light shoyu, or soy sauce, ramen, not the rich miso ramen Sapporo is known for today.
  • 1947, Kurume. A shop called Sankyu in Kurume, on the southern island of Kyushu, began serving a cloudy pork-bone soup. The museum names it the source of today's Kyushu ramen.
  • 1954, Sapporo. Omiya Morihito developed miso ramen at the Sapporo restaurant Aji no Sanpei.
  • 1996, Tokyo. Myojo USA's history of ramen broth dates the rise of seafood broth to 1996 and credits it to the "double soup" of Yoshinori Haga of Chuka Soba Aoba in Tokyo's Nakano Ward, in which an animal broth and a seafood broth simmer in separate pots and are combined just before serving.

The Japan culture site Nippon.com connects the regional styles to local conditions: people in Kyushu developed pork-bone ramen with the influence of the area's many pig farms, and people in frigid Hokkaido mixed rich miso and lard into their ramen to stay warm.

The five parts of a bowl

1. Tare, the seasoning

Tare (pronounced TAH-reh) is a very concentrated seasoning added to each bowl as it is made. The museum's ramen dictionary calls it crucial in deciding a ramen's flavor, lists soy sauce, miso and salt as its bases, and notes that many shops keep their recipe secret. Shimamoto describes tare as the concentrated seasoning that adjusts the umami, saltiness and flavor of a particular ramen, and says developing one takes a long period of training, which can run from one and a half to three years. The simplest tare is a good soy sauce. Many shops blend several soy sauces and salts, then add mirin (a sweet Japanese rice seasoning), sake, kelp and dried sardines. The three main types are shoyu (soy sauce), shio (salt) and miso (fermented soybean paste), and the lines between them blur: a shio tare can contain some soy sauce, and a shoyu tare some salt.

Shimamoto contrasts this with most cuisines, where stock is made in advance and seasoned in large batches. In ramen the seasoning happens bowl by bowl instead. That split means one pot of broth can become a shoyu bowl or a shio bowl depending on which tare is spooned into the bowl first.

2. The broth

Myojo USA's guide to ramen broth says the soup is made of three parts, dashi (soup stock), tare and fat or oil, and that the dashi carries most of the umami, the savory "fifth taste," that shapes how a ramen tastes. Myojo names kombu, a dried kelp, and dried bonito, a fish, as the two most representative dashi ingredients, with niboshi (small dried sardines) and dried shiitake mushrooms also in common use. Early ramen used a stock of chicken or pork bones paired with a shoyu tare, and Myojo says animal-based broths dominated until the double soup appeared in 1996.

Ramen broths also divide by how they look. The museum's dictionary calls a clear soup chintan, and uses the Chinese cooking term paitan for a milky, very rich one. Paitan is made by cooking pork bones or chicken carcasses for a long time over high heat, and it turns cloudy because the fat and gelatin emulsify into the water. To emulsify is to break fat into droplets so small that they stay suspended in the liquid instead of floating on top, which is why a pork-bone broth looks cloudy, almost like milk.

A culinary textbook by Amelie Zeringue and William R. Thibodeaux of Nicholls State University explains the two forces at work. Bones and connective tissue are high in collagen, a tough protein that cooking converts into gelatin, and gelatin adds richness and body to a stock, a fuller feel in the mouth. The textbook also tells stock cooks never to boil a stock for any length of time: fat and impurities rise to the surface and are skimmed off, while boiling churns them back into the liquid and emulsifies them, and left in, they can make the stock cloudy. A pork-bone ramen cook does on purpose what the textbook tells stock cooks to avoid. The rolling boil is the method, and the cloudiness is the goal.

3. The flavoring oil

Komi abura means flavoring oil: fat or oil with ingredients cooked into it for flavor. Myojo USA lists the common ones. Chiyu is fat extracted from fried chicken skin, and as a finishing touch it adds a mild flavor and aroma. Mayu is a black garlic oil made by frying garlic in lard in stages and grinding it into a paste. Negiyu is made by heating leeks with garlic and oil. Rayu is chili oil, made by heating chili peppers with sesame oil. Myojo gives the oil three jobs: it adds aroma, it helps the flavors cling to the noodles as they are lifted from the bowl, and it forms a thin layer on top of the soup that seals in heat and keeps the bowl from cooling. Chili crisp, a chunky chili oil, can play the same role in a home bowl, and the chili crisp guide explains what it is.

4. The noodles

Ramen noodles are wheat noodles, and the classic ingredient behind their character is kansui. The museum's dictionary defines kansui as alkaline water containing substances such as sodium or potassium carbonate, and says that adding it when kneading the dough produces ramen's distinctive yellow color, chewiness and flavor. Alkaline means the opposite of acidic on the chemistry scale, the same side as baking soda. Recipes vary: the dried ramen noodles linked here list wheat flour, egg powder and salt, and their product page describes them as light yellow, nutty and chewy (shop dried ramen noodles).

5. The toppings

Toppings are the most personal part of the bowl. Chashu is one. The museum's dictionary notes that most of what ramen shops call chashu is pork braised and seasoned with soy sauce and similar seasonings, and a burger made with chashu, which Shimamoto came across while training in Japan, influenced his Ramen Burger. Jacobsen Salt Co.'s mushroom ramen recipe shows how simple a topping can be: dried shiitake mushrooms steeped in boiling water until soft, then squeezed, sliced and laid in the bowl, while the soaking water is seasoned and becomes the broth.

Why the parts work together

The parts of a bowl draw on different sources of umami, and the chemistry shows why combining them pays off. The Umami Information Center names the main components of umami as three substances: glutamate, an amino acid (one of the building blocks of protein) found in large amounts in kombu; inosinate, found in meat and fish; and guanylate, found in large amounts in dried shiitake. In 1908 the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamate in kombu as the source of the taste. The center reports that inosinate or guanylate dramatically enhances the umami taste of glutamate, an effect called umami synergy: glutamate and inosinate mixed in equal parts were judged seven to eight times as intense as either one alone.

That synergy offers one way to read a ramen bowl. A shop that simmers pork or chicken (meat, a source of inosinate) and seasons with a tare made with kombu (a source of glutamate) gets more savory depth than either part could deliver on its own. The 1996 double soup took the same idea further by combining a meat broth and a seafood broth in the bowl. The umami guide covers which pantry jars have the most umami.

Shoyu, miso and pork-bone bowls compared

Two of the main seasonings are fermented foods. Kikkoman explains that its soy sauce is made from four basic ingredients: soybeans, wheat, salt and water. Koji mold, a fermentation starter, is mixed with steamed soybeans and roasted crushed wheat, combined with salt water into a mash called moromi, aged for several months and pressed. Miso, Kikkoman's glossary says, is a seasoning made by fermenting soybeans with salt and koji. Rice miso, made with rice koji, is about 80 percent of the miso produced in Japan, and a sweet rice miso with a high proportion of rice koji is known as white miso.

Bowl Tare Broth Where it took hold
Shoyu Soy sauce, often several blended, with mirin, sake or kelp Early versions used chicken or pork bones Tokyo's 1910 boom; Sapporo's Takeya Shokudo, 1922, served mainly a light shoyu
Miso Miso paste Varies by shop; in Hokkaido, enriched with lard Sapporo, 1954
Pork bone (tonkotsu) Varies by shop Pork bones cooked long over high heat until fat and gelatin emulsify into a cloudy paitan Kurume, Kyushu, 1947

Read across the rows and one pattern stands out. Shoyu and miso bowls are named for their tare, as is shio, the salt bowl, while the pork-bone style is named for its broth. That naming shows how fully ramen treats the seasoning as its own ingredient, not as salt added to a soup.

What a concentrated ramen base is

A concentrated ramen base does in one container what a shop does with several pots: it combines the savory broth, the seasoning and the fat into one liquid, made to be diluted with water before eating. Tsuki sells its professional ramen bases in a 500 milliliter size, about 17 fluid ounces. The product page describes each base as combining ingredients so that a bowl of ramen "can be efficiently composed at home," with a fat content that lets the broth stick to each chopstick pinch of noodles and full, robust flavors "that can be diluted to one's preference." That fat plays the same role Myojo assigns to flavoring oil: it carries flavor from the bowl onto the noodles.

How to dilute a base and build the bowl

Because the maker leaves the strength to the cook's preference, the reliable method is to start lean and build up. Hot water thins the base the way a shop's broth thins its tare.

  1. Boil the noodles in their own pot. Cook them in plenty of water according to the package, then drain them.
  2. Warm the bowl. Fill it with hot water for a minute, then pour it out, so the soup does not cool on contact.
  3. Start with a small amount of base. Spoon it into the empty bowl, the way a shop spoons in tare.
  4. Add hot water and stir. Pour in boiling water, stir until the base dissolves, and taste.
  5. Adjust. Add more base a spoonful at a time until the broth tastes as savory and salty as wanted. Write down the amount that works for the size of the bowl, so the next bowl starts there.
  6. Add the drained noodles, then the toppings. Lift the noodles into the broth, then add toppings and, if wanted, a few drops of flavoring oil.

Two more ways to season a bowl

A ramen seasoning salt

Jacobsen Salt Co. builds its ramen seasoning on fine sea salt from traditional salt ponds in Trapani, Italy. The maker lists the ingredients as salt, sugar, garlic, ginger, organic yeast extract, monosodium glutamate, coriander, chive, chili and white pepper, in an 80 gram (2.8 ounce) jar. Its directions: dissolve 1½ to 2 teaspoons in 2 cups of water or stock, or shake it directly onto a grain bowl (shop Jacobsen Ramen Seasoning). In ramen terms, the seasoning acts as a dry tare. More about the Oregon company is in the Jacobsen Salt Co. guide.

Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, is glutamate, the umami substance from the section above, in the form of a salt. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration describes MSG as the sodium salt of glutamic acid, a common amino acid, produced by fermenting starch, sugar beets, sugar cane or molasses, a process similar to the one used to make yogurt, vinegar and wine. The FDA considers adding MSG to foods "generally recognized as safe," and notes that MSG occurs naturally in many foods, such as tomatoes and cheeses. Jacobsen's own mushroom ramen recipe puts the two umami sources together: three dried shiitake, a source of guanylate, steep in 2 cups of boiling water for about 15 minutes, and the seasoning, with its glutamate, is stirred into that mushroom broth.

A shoyu tare from the bottle

Since the simplest tare is a good soy sauce, a flavored shoyu can serve as one. The product page for Haku Matsutake Shoyu describes it as the work of shoyu makers from Kyoto prefecture who pair shoyu with matsutake (shop Haku Matsutake Shoyu). Matsutake are wild mushrooms. The mycologist (a scientist who studies fungi) Thomas Volk, writing about the American species, describes it growing with pine trees and calls matsutake among the most sought-after and prized mushrooms in the world, especially in Japan and Korea. To use it as tare, spoon a small amount into the bowl, pour in a hot, unsalted chicken stock or kombu stock, taste and add more until the broth is seasoned, then add the noodles. How an opened bottle keeps is covered in the soy sauce storage guide.

Ramen is a soup that only becomes a soup in the bowl. A shop keeps its broth, its seasoning and its oil apart until the order comes in, and that separation is what lets one pot of stock turn into several different bowls. A jar of concentrated base, a spoonful of seasoning salt or a splash of shoyu gives a home cook the same control: the concentrate is the shop's tare, the hot water is the shop's broth, and the bowl is where they meet. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, where visitors can ask staff questions, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com.

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