Asian Noodle Soup

Recently we've been watching "The Mind of a Chef" on Netflix, which covers a lot of Japanese food culture and the many amazing things they do with ramen over there (which has very little to do with our concept of cheap packaged ramen noodles in the States).

The effort that goes into a bowl of authentic Japanese ramen really got me thinking it's something we should try, but I wasn't ready to jump in with both feet quite yet. As a sort of practice run, we put together an Asian noodle soup that's a little less involved.

To start our soup, we're of course making our own stock. Luckily we had made a whole chicken the week before and had the carcass ready to go. Here we're boiling the chicken bones with carrots, bell peppers, and minced garlic in about four cups of water.

For our soup we needed some Asian style ingredients outside the norm of what we're comfortable cooking with, so we picked up a head of bok choy and some rice noodles.

We also wanted to try some more exotic mushrooms, so we went with shiitake and oyster. These are more expensive (between $9 - $12 a pound), but we only needed a handful so it ended up being less than two dollars total for them. We're also using red onion, a red chili pepper, and a bulb of fresh ginger (the gray looking guy in the middle underneath the onion).

We diced or tore up most of the ingredients, which will get cooked on the stove top. The bright yellow slices in the back are the ginger. We've never used fresh ginger before, which has a very interesting taste that's "sharp" without being spicy. Before slicing it you also have to peel off the barky outer skin.

Our soup is going to be topped with slices of meat, and we went with a very thin beef steak. I didn't want a traditional steak flavor though, instead wanting flavors from other cultures, so I coated the beef in cumin instead of pepper or other seasonings.

The steak gets pulled off the heat after it's browned, and then we toss in our diced vegetables to soften.

What's this goop down here? That's our finished stock after it's been strained and placed in the fridge overnight to let the flavors set in.

Our soup will have rice noodles (we used Maifun), which is cooked a bit different from regular pasta. To cook this, bring a pot of water to boil, throw the noodles in, then turn the heat off and let it sit for 10 minutes. It's ready immediately, so if the rest of the meal isn't prepared yet, strain out the water and then toss the noodles in a bowl of ice.

The rice noodles are tossed in directly with the vegetables, and then we ladled in a few cups of stock. Everything cooks for a few minutes so the stock can flavor the noodles.

Here we start constructing our soup bowl by spooning in a handful of noodles and vegetables.

Next we ladle the stock over the noodles - just enough to cover them, but not enough to fill the bowl.

We finish off the bowl by layering on sliced beef and cracking open a beautiful soft boiled egg. For more heat you can also drizzle on some sriracha hot sauce.

Despite all the interesting ingredients going on here, the end result was a subtle and somewhat bland flavor in the soup itself, and unfortunately Megan didn't like it at all. I actually enjoyed it, but if we do this again I'll definitely change up some of the seasonings for a stronger flavor. I'm glad we made this though, as the experimentation was worth it and the fresh slices of ginger were fabulous.