Beef Ramen – the ultimate comfort food

Ramen is essentially noodles in soup with various toppings. However in the west we tend to think of this as instant noodles or super noodles. Trust me, it’s not the same and after trying this quick, easy and gorgeous version, you’ll never reach for the instant noodle packets again.

I doubt there is anything properly authentic about my version of ramen, I don’t always use ramen noodles for a start, but it is a tasty and comforting dinner that’s incredibly versatile and really can be made in 15 minutes, unlike some other recipes claim.

For two big bowls of ramen you will need.

Ingredients

For the broth:

• 1 litre of chicken stock or miso soup base
• 3 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 thumb size piece of ginger, chopped into fine match sticks
• 4 chopped spring onions
• a small pinch of chilli

The extras:

• 1 pack noodles, if you can get ramen noodles use them, however udon noodles work great too
• 1 decent steak
• 10 chopped mushrooms – shiitake are best
• 300g green leaves, baby spinach leaves work great but so do shredded brussels sprouts
• handful of green beans
• 5 or 6 sliced baby sweetcorn
• 2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and halved

Method

You will have 3 pans going on the stove at once, frying pan or griddle for the steak, pot to boil eggs and a big pot to make your broth. So get them on now to get hot (including your water to boil the eggs).

First, in your big pot fry off the mushrooms and then add the garlic and ginger and fry for a minute or so just to get the flavours going.

Next add your chicken stock, the green beans, baby sweetcorn and spring onions and let it come up to a simmer while you prepare everything else. Give it a minute or so then add your leafy greens.

While your broth is simmering, get your steak onto the hot frying pan and get it nice and caramelised. Cook your steak how you like it, I like mine rare so it doesn’t take long.

Pop the eggs into the boiling water in their pot and put your timer on for hard boiled eggs (about 4 mins).

While your eggs and steak are cooking, add your soy sauce and oyster sauce to your broth, give it a good stir and taste. You can adjust this to your taste, add more oyster sauce if you want a deeper flavour or less if you want a lighter, fresher taste. You can also add a pinch of chilli powder if you want a little background heat.

Lastly drop your noodles into the broth, if they are fresh or “straight to wok” noodles you only need to heat them through, if they are dried noodles give them about 3 minutes to become soft.

Once the steak is done, slice it thinly against the grain and leave it to rest while you peel and halve the eggs.

Plating up

Half the joy in this recipe is how amazing it looks in the bowl, it makes you want to tuck in, so I like to plate it up so that you get a peek at everything in there, I put the noodles into my bowl piled up on one side, then all the veggies piled on the other so both will peak through the broth a little. The I add the slices of steak on top and the two halves of boiled egg opposite, again sitting on top.

There you go, dead easy and dead tasty.