If you want near-instant ramen that’s way better than anything out of a packet (and comparable to what you can buy at a good local shop), then this recipe is for you. After developing the recipe for pork bouillon cubes, I immediately thought of using them to make a riff on instant ramen. And while I’m most familiar with tonkotsu ramen—the kind of ramen that uses a milky, emulsified pork stock as its base—I knew there are clear-soup styles of ramen, and I figured that my pork stock could be used to make one of those. I turned to my colleague Sho Spaeth, our lead writer and editor, for advice—Sho loves chintan (clear-broth) ramen, and he’s currently working on a ramen cookbook. He suggested doing a soy sauce-flavored soup, and that I should play around with adding some gyofun—a powder made from a variety of Japanese dried fish products—to the soup. He also noted that ramen shops will typically season their soup in each serving bowl, using a set amount of seasoning (called “tare”) and fat for a set amount of broth. With that advice, a bunch of frozen noodles, and the beautiful broth my pork bouillon cubes produce, I went to work, trying different ratios of ingredients for the tare and gyofun. With a little sweetness from mirin, some inosinic acid from fish sauce, and a sufficient amount of soy sauce, the tare is well-rounded and soy sauce-forward with a ton of umami. For the gyofun, I settled on a mix of katsuobushi (shavings of cured and dried skipjack tuna; also known as bonito flakes), niboshi (boiled and dried baby sardines; often labeled as dried anchovies), and sababushi (flakes of dried mackerel), which gives the soup an incredible depth of flavor. Don’t worry: It doesn’t taste “fishy” so much as it just tastes amazing. The dried mackerel is a little hard to find, and if you can’t find it, you can omit it or sub in an equal amount of niboshi (the niboshi and katsuobushi are relatively easy to find online or at Japanese and Asian markets). Putting a bowl together is super simple: Reconstitute the pork broth, add it along with the tare, the gyofun, a spoonful of melted lard, some fresh grated ginger and garlic, and a drop or two of sesame oil (for that classic instant ramen flavor profile) to a bowl, slide in some cooked noodles, add some toppings—a [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/cured-ramen-eggs-you-can-t-stop-eating ramen egg], some [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/char-siu-tender-cantonese-style-barbecued-pork sous vide char siu], whatever—then top it all off with some sliced scallions. It’s way-better-than-instant ramen, and it takes about the same amount of time to prepare.

Picture this: You’ve just spent the last 24 hours cooking, eating, and sleeping. You’re exhausted and your stomach hurts. Your fridge is filled to the brim with pie and other delights, and dinner rolls and biscuits are everywhere. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and your tryptophan hangover is in full force. It was a holiday after all—you were allowed to indulge! You could go for the ceremonial leftovers sammie, crusty bread piled high with everything and slathered in gravy. [link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2xi7B3mkr0 In some households, the leftovers sandwich is more important than the Thanksgiving meal itself]. But let’s be honest: after a full day of overeating, don’t you just want something light and refreshing? Better yet, something that showcases the outstanding turkey you spent hours cooking? Author, culinary instructor, and friend of ChefSteps Andrea Nguyen’s got you covered with this recipe for (leftover-) turkey pho. Traditionally served for breakfast at Vietnamese market stalls, pho is the perfect post-holiday meal. It’s light and refreshing even when made with hearty meats, and with sweet-and-savory broth, long, slurptastic noodles, and fresh herbs, this is one bowl of comfort food that won’t put you down for the count. *OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS: A New Series from ChefSteps
At ChefSteps, we love to cook. And we love to share our top tips and techniques with you. But we’re not the boss of everything, and we learn from our friends and colleagues every day. That’s why we created Other People’s Ideas, a new series starring our favorite subject experts. These talented folks are here to help you tackle everything from soup dumplings to pizza pie—and have a ton of fun along the way. You down with OPI? Yeah you are. Let’s do this.*

Our beef bouillon cubes are super convenient for making tasty pan sauces and aromatic, warming sipping broths in minutes, but they can also be reconstituted and used whenever you need some good stock, like when you’re making beef stroganoff. My dad’s beef stroganoff was one of my favorite dinners as a kid: tender steak and cremini mushrooms swimming in packaged powdered beef gravy, served over egg noodles. This version is pretty similar, although I put a few of my own twists on it. Chuck has a lot of flavor, and if you brown and then cook it in a pressure cooker, it’ll become juicy and tender without falling part in just an hour. I also add dried mushrooms—shiitakes, morels, or porcini will all work—to bump up the umami of the stew, since dried mushrooms have a lot of guanylic acid, which combines with glutamic acid (from the beef and the bouillon) to create a deeply savory flavor profile. And while the best part about most stroganoffs is the buttered noodles coated in sauce, the real star of this dish is the reconstituted beef bouillon. Try using this same recipe with some other beef bouillon cube, or subbing in the prepared, store-bought “beef” stock made with artificial flavoring and caramel coloring, or even our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/chicken-bouillon-cubes chicken] or [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pork-bouillon-cubes pork bouillon cubes], and you’ll see the difference. The stroganoff will still be pretty good (the recipe is solid), but a stroganoff made with our beef bouillon cubes will be far better, because they have real beef flavor and a truckload of gelatin, and they’re seasoned perfectly with salt and MSG. The stew will taste beefier, the sauce will be silkier and richer, and those buttered noodles will taste so much better.

Imagine a noodle that has the flavor of potato gnocchi, and a texture that’s somewhere between an udon noodle and a rice cake. It’d be pretty cool, yeah? Imagine no more. This recipe relies on the concept of using potato starch for chewiness and potatoes for tenderness and flavor—otherwise known as a winning combination. The texture, thickness, and overall visual appeal of these noodles is pretty killer, too. The trick to this recipe is perfecting the dance between potato starch and potatoes, since the water content of potatoes varies. It’s the same reason you may find this recipe a tad more challenging than a traditional pasta dough. Even if you don’t nail this recipe right off the bat, these noodles are going to be something you enjoy eating. Because noodles.

Hor fun are thin, wide rice noodles that are perfect for stir-frying, and they’re the foundation for one of the most iconic dishes in Cantonese cuisine: Beef Chow Fun. Slightly porous, which makes them excellent at absorbing sauce, they’re also resilient enough to survive a spell in a ripping hot wok while retaining a pleasing chewiness, a perfect example of what Taiwanese call “Q” texture (basically, “al dente” for Asian people). You can buy hor fun noodles at any Chinese supermarket but making your own is worth the effort. Store-bought noodles tend to be brittle before cooking and mushy after, and they often get mangled during the cooking process. Making them from scratch isn’t complicated at all: Steam a thin layer of batter made from a combination of rice flour and tapioca starch until the starches fully gelatinize to produce smooth, slippery noodles with no hint of graininess. (The process is nearly identical to making [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/wheat-starch-noodles-liangpi liang pi].) Straight out of the steamer, these noodles might appear almost too chewy. But once they’re boiled in a soup or stir fried in a sauce, they hydrate further and soften slightly. Just make sure you make enough, since you’ll want to have these noodles in everything.

Where does ramen get that famous chew and stretch from? You might think it’s some rare type of flour or some technique you could never master at home, but you’d be wrong. You probably have everything you need in your pantry to make these stretchy noodles right now. The thing that makes ramen noodles different than any other kind of noodle is that they are alkaline—this means they have a higher pH than seven. There are many ways to raise the pH. The easiest and fastest way is to use an ingredient called lye water—a mixture of potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate. But don’t worry, if you don't have lye water just sitting around, we’ve got some hacks for you. So here we go—let’s make some ramen noodles.