Tsuru Ramen Rokuban me Tonkotsu 2 and Nanban me, Seafood

We worked hard to improve our tonkotsu ramen after your feedback last time and came up with a richer, stinkier, heavier broth (no collagen shot side orders yet @going with mygut) and we’re pleased to say that you liked it! It took over 18 hours of boiling and combining ingredients to make the stock and so it means a lot that so many of you took the time to tell us what you thought on both occasions, we’re now happy for it to go onto the menu when we open our ramen bar in London his year.

For those who missed it, here’s a picture to drool over…

Seafood ramen last Saturday was a different challenge altogether. People had imagined (and were dreading in some cases, I found out!) seafood ramen to have a light and therefore a bit bland fish stock soup. Come on, you know us better than that by now, surely! Our seafood ramen was flavour-packed, rich and complex with an umami punch and topped with seared seabass, prawns, clams and of course a marinated runny-yolked egg. Even hardcore Tonkotsu guzzlers were satisfied with it!

There's nothing fishy about this ramen

Thanks to our regulars, of which there are quite a few now. We’ll be announcing the name of our restaurant in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully see you at one of the remaining events: Tokyo Spicy 3rd March or Shoyu on March 17th. Both of these events have now sold out I’m afraid, but if you didn’t manage to get tickets and would like to come, email me to go on the cancellations list: ramen@tsuru-sushi.co.uk.

Tsuru Ramen, Yonban Me: Hokkaido-style, January 21st 2012

We were looking forward to this one. The usual 15 hour pork and chicken stock, this time with a hint of fish stock and topped with marinated, rolled pork belly and egg, sweetcorn, bean shoots and a slab of butter.

Yes, that is a block of butter

Hokkaido is famed for its dairy products, so no surprise to see it on the northern island’s version of ramen.

Our next three events: Tonkotsu 2, Seafood and Tokyo Spicy have sold out. But you can buy tickets to Classic Tokyo Shoyu Ramen, on March 17th, with an additional sitting at 6pm. Remember to let us know which sitting you’d like when you book – email details on the ticket page.

Tsuru Ramen, Sanban Me: Tokyo Spicy, January 7th 2012

Tokyo Spicy Ramen

If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know the deal: until we find the perfect site for our – London’s first – ramen restaurant, we are offering a different variety of our very own ramen soup at lunchtime events (plus, by popular demand, a couple of repeats!) at Tsuru Bishopsgate, details of which can be found on our events page.  For each occasion, a pigs’ trotter and chicken stock is lovingly simmered and skimmed for 15 hours and used as the basis for a unique Tsuru ramen dish.  Last Saturday we served a hot Tokyo Spicy ramen soup with shredded pork and our home-made chilli oil that was filled with flavour and rather cheeky level of heat.  Alongside were freshly hand-made gyoza or a cucumber and wakame salad. Oh, and barrels of honjozo sake from our friend Wakana Omija at  Akashi Tai.

Many thanks to all who came along and appeared to have a lip-smackingly good time.  Your feedback points overwhelmingly to the Tsuru Tokyo Spicy having been our best ramen so far, so it’s very likely it will be making it on to our restaurant menu.  The event was also our most drunken so far, thanks to Wakana’s sake. Having arrived at 3pm, some guests had such a good time they didn’t leave until 10pm. That’s a long lunch.

By our next event on 21st January – sold out… again!! – at which we’re serving up a buttery Hokkaido ramen, we’ll have been to Tokyo on our 5-day ramen research trip, where we’ll be hitting 6 ramen joints and picking up tips from the pros.  We’ll post the pics here when we’re back, so keep your eyes peeled!

Our next two ramen events – Hokkaido and Tonkotsu 2 – have both sold out, however there are a few tickets left for our Seafood event (18th February) and Tokyo Spicy 2 (March 3rd).  Don’t forget if you make it to three of our events we’ll invite you to our restaurant launch – we know several folk who’ve made it that far already!

Thanks to Jason Bailey for the snaps.

Tsuru Ramen, Niban: Tonkotsu, 10th December 2011

Our second – and once again sell-out – ramen event was a celebration of Tonkotsu, the serious ramen-lover’s holy ramen grail.  So, no pressure.  This was the most exciting (and intimidating) ramen dish Ken and I have turned our hands to creating and it took several attempts to understand how to free the collagen from the pork fat and create that intensely flavoured, lip-smackingly fatty soup that Tonkotsu is famed for.

Ken started cooking at 7.30 on Friday morning. When I returned at 4, there was porky condensation dripping down the windows, a delicious aroma pushing its way through the kitchen doorway and one very happy Japanese man skimming an immense pot of tonkotsu soup in the kitchen. It took another six hours of cooking and some final tweaking on Saturday morning to complete the dish.

We’re serving traditional, freshly hand-made gyoza with our ramen, and on this occasion we also added some crisp and juicy chicken kara-age alongside. 

Thanks to Akira @nonusual for the awesome pics… www.nonusual.com

Ken and I were thrilled to see the gleeful faces of our guests as the bowls of ramen arrived…

Thanks to everyone that came, we hope to see you at our next events. Keep talking to us as we develop and improve our ramen as your feedback is invaluable to us. We particularly like the ideal of adding a ‘collagen shot’, Singapore style, for those who like their ramen extra rich. Email ramen@tsuru-sushi.co.uk.

Look forward to seeing you at Tokyo Spicy on Jan 7th when Wakana Omija from Akashi Tai is joining us with her warming honjozo sake. On 21st Jan we’ll visit the buttery, fishy Hokkaido-style ramen, then returning to Tonkotsu on Feb 4th.

For those of you without tickets, I’m afraid these next three events have sold out, but there are to more lunches planned on 18th Feb and 3rd March - buy tickets on our events page – and more events to follow in 2012. Watch this blog for details.

Tsuru Ramen, Ichiban: Shoyu, 26th November 2011

It’s all about the stock. Well, mostly: there’s also succulent meat to think about, a lovely gooey egg and perfectly cooked noodles.

The stock-making began at 12pm on Friday – 65 litres of water with 10 kilos of trotters takes a while to boil.  Ken spent the next eight hours skimming the liquid and adding vegetables, chicken and fish to create what we think is our best soup stock so far. We took it off the boil at 8pm but 11 hours later, the stock was back on the heat with a slab of pork belly bobbing away just beneath the surface.  Only 5 hours to go until our guests arrived!

After cooking, the pork belly and eggs were marinated in the shoyu base for a few hours. Thankfully I over-ordered the eggs, because they were so tasty we snaffled a few before service.

Our first guests arrived at 12.45 and the freshly-made pork gyoza began to fly off the plates; four hours and 70 helpings of shoyu ramen later, our first Tsuru Ramen event was over and all that remained was a huge stack of empty bowls and a scattering of chopsticks and spoons. We absolutely loved it and hope everybody else did too.

EmptyBowlsHappyPeople

That was some serious pork cooking. On Sunday morning, Ken’s wife told him he still smelled like ‘sweet pig’. We were exhausted, but managed to crawl over to A Little of What you Fancy for one of the best Sunday lunches in London.  Tickets are now on sale for our next four ramen events through Wegottickets – have a look at the Events page for more details.  The king-of-ramen Tonkotsu event on December 10th is already sold out, but there’ll be another one on 4th Feb for which there are still tickets available (just!).

For what we are about to receive… Ramen

Our first ramen cooking day a couple of weeks ago at Ken’s house went pretty well. We spent most of the day boiling and skimming stock and invited a few friends over to try it. Since then we’ve tweaked the recipe and made it again in the kitchen at Tsuru Bishopsgate on Saturday for the Tsuru team as a true test. We went with a Tokyo-style shoyu base this time.

Trotters, chicken and vegetables were boiled and skimmed all day to create a rich, clear stock.

The style of eggs was up for debate, but we settled for old school soft(ish) boiled with a gooey centre marinated in soy and some other goodies for a few hours. We couldn’t stop eating them…salty and rich with a ganache-like yolk.

The ultimate comfort food. So satisfying. Yuki-san, a sushi chef from Tsuru Bankside (who’s been with us for four years) approved. He’s from Tokyo, so slightly biased when it comes to shoyu base…

It was a good job it was wholesome because after eating it, we headed over to the Waterpoet pub on Folgate Street with the Tsuru team and drank them out of vodka.

See the events page for details of our ramen events. £10 for a bowl of noodle soup and an Asahi.