One Ramen, Hold the Butter

How (and why) to plan and host a Ramen Night for your family and friends

Ramen was never something our Japanese American family made for dinner at home. We were always more of a udon noodle family until we reached adulthood and started sampling delicious ramen at restaurants on our travels. So when a new ramen restaurant opened its doors in our California hometown last fall, we were excited to plan a family ramen night when all of our relatives visited for the holidays.

Those expectations were quickly dashed when my sister and I stopped by the new restaurant for a late night dinner a few days before Thanksgiving. She is trying hard to adhere to a dairy free diet and confidently navigates any restaurant menu to find a meal that meets her dietary needs. She knows where all the dairy ingredients might be hidden and, with easygoing charm, can negotiate an order that omits one ingredient or substitutes another. That is, until we sat down at the ramen restaurant which we later learned is part of a restaurant chain.

My sister was puzzled when the server checked with the kitchen and reported back that almost everything on the entire menu contains dairy. “What kind of dairy?” my sister asked. “Butter” was the reply. My sister smiled and said “well that’s fine, if you could just leave the butter out of my order that will work for me.” “I’m so sorry, we can’t,” was the reply.

Not that they didn’t want to, but apparently this chain restaurant uses premixed formulas for all of its food. The butter is already in the mix and there’s no way to separate it out like they could at a restaurant where the seasoned dashi is made in house. I can see the practicality of that for a restaurant chain, to serve up consistently flavored food, but it essentially put 99 percent of the menu out of play for my sister.

There was one menu item that didn’t include butter so my sister gamely ordered it despite my suggestion that we just go somewhere else for dinner. It turned out to be a bowl of sad looking gruel with a piece of kamoboko and couple of lonely vegetables floating inside - nothing like the colorful showy bowls of glossy noodles pictured all over the menu, generously garnished with toppings that looked like colorful gemstones.

As we slurped and spooned through our dinners (which didn’t take very long for my sister because she had little more than broth to eat), we wondered how we never realized before that ramen has butter in it. Well, later that night we discovered that it doesn’t need to.

At home, I dug out a ramen cookbook that someone had gifted to my mom. It had beautiful photos but we’d never read the recipes in it or cooked anything from it, since we had always been an udon-centric family.

I curled up on the sofa for a late night read of the ramen cookbook, and I learned so much! The book is Ramen Obsession: The Ultimate Bible for Mastering Japanese Ramen by Naomi Imatome-Yun and Robin Donovan. I highly recommend it to you.

This cookbook explains the history of ramen and the regional variations in flavor that developed all over Japan and beyond.

The authors clearly dissect the six components of ramen - Soup/broth, Tare (the secret sauce hiding at the bottom of your bowl under the broth), Aromatic Oils/Fat, Noodles, Toppings and the Bowl. Each bit of flavor we can taste within a bowl of ramen has a specific origin - with sauces and ingredients prepared and layered into the bowl alongside the noodles and the broth. You can’t differentiate between them when you look at the bowl, but your tongue certainly knows they are there. I better understand umami now and will never eat a bowl of ramen the same way again, forevermore I will be searching for glimpses of those flavor layers.

I scoured the cookbook to find out where the butter was hiding - and it wasn’t even there. There are some rendered fat and oil components that take 30 to 60 minutes of preparation time, so perhaps the restaurant chain decided that butter was an acceptable and less expensive shortcut. This was hopeful news to me, as I could clearly see a pathway to making a dairy free ramen for my sister and our whole family.

Armed with the cookbook, I started planning a family ramen night we could enjoy at home together over the December holidays. The cookbook offers an easy to follow “toolkit” and flavor variations to choose from - so you can make numerous varieties of ramen by shifting different components. With some advance planning and my sister’s shopping help to obtain a few specialty ingredients from an Asian grocery store in San Francisco, ramen night was back on the family calendar.

Family Ramen Night is definitely something you can plan and prepare for a group of your family or friends, using Ramen Obsession as a guide. We had a dinner party of eight and had plenty of food for everyone with enough leftovers to have a second ramen party for a handful of guests a few days later.

Assembling the ingredients and reviewing the recipes in advance helped me figure out a batting order for making each of the sauces and toppings. A few things were slow simmered over the stove, others were mixed up quickly and set aside. After making the broth the day before the party and substituting commercial noodles for handmade noodles, It took me about two hours to make all of the food, while the rest of the family was off playing tennis and pickleball one afternoon. We set up the ingredients buffet style on the kitchen counter and stove, and I walked each person through the line as they assembled their bowls. High fives all around, and we each learned about the different flavor components by assembling the ramen bowls ourselves.

I think you could easily do a ramen night potluck style, by asking each guest to prepare and bring one of the six ramen components from the toolkit, ready to be served. The recipes have varying degrees of difficulty so if you match the recipes to your guests’ cooking abilities, everyone can contribute successfully. The broth is probably the most complex to make and the tare is relatively simple. You could have guests make multiple types of broth and tare to share. The oils and toppings were fun to make and I was able to use them up in other dishes after the ramen party. Delegating the food prep to several households means you won’t run out of gravy boats and cream pitchers to serve from, as I did. I improvised with canning jars and they were easy to close with lids and store in the refrigerator until people were ready to have another bowl of ramen the next day.

It was so satisfying to make a dairy free ramen that everyone could enjoy and allow diners to adjust each flavor to suit their own personal tastes. I think we will all learn more about ramen now that we can make it at home and change up the proportions in each serving. I’m already thinking about ingredients I can add to the mix at our next ramen party. If you come, please bring along a couple extra gravy boats and cream pitchers!