After an afternoon’s experimentation we have arrived at a preliminary recipe. It’s reproduced here for anyone who wants to duplicate it and/or try tweaking it.
Powdered ramen mix:
- 4 t salt
- 4 t onion powder
- 4 t garlic powder
- 4 t fine chile powder (preferably Korean, but MUST be fine powder and not flakes)
- 2 t ginger powder
- 1 t sugar
- 1 t MSG
- 1 t white pepper, or black pepper if you prefer
- optional: <1 t wasabi powder, a tiny bit of black salt, anything else you like
Per 1 pint of boiling water, add 2 1/2 tsp of this mixture, plus soy sauce and sesame oil to taste; we recommend 1-2 t of the former and just a dribble of the latter.
And now a rant: We are posting this not-very-well-tested recipe because it was utterly impossible to find a recipe for a DIY ramen seasoning mix that was not hedged about with various nonsense about avoiding MSG by substituting other substances: chicken broth (naturally contains MSG, even the ones that say “No Added MSG” or that you made yourself), miso (naturally contains MSG), soy sauce (…), kombu (…!) — you get the picture. (The exception to this was one recipe which was generally reasonable except in using a 1:1 ratio of MSG to salt, which we’d already proven to our own satisfaction to be wildly excessive.) The upshot of it was, though, that everyone else was also trying for that addictive processed-food quality, just as we were, and all their clever strategies for not admitting that they wanted to add MSG were swamping my Googling efforts. It was reminiscent of the time that I searched for Bragg’s Liquid Aminos to figure out how you made soy sauce without fermentation, and all the hits I got were of people asking each other breathlessly whether it was true that Bragg’s was made using CHEMICALS. Which, in case you were wondering, turned out to be freaking hydrochloric acid. Yeah. Protons and chloride ions, apparently, are totally unacceptable if you’re a serious natural foods enthusiast. I hope they don’t dress their salad with salt and lemon juice.
So why did we want to make our own ramen seasoning mix, if not to substitute the straight MSG with various MSG-containing substances? Two words: (1) Salt, and (2) Packaging. Packaging is obvious, especially since everything but the MSG and wasabi powder were already in our spice cabinet, and a gallon’s worth of soup mixture is now in a little jar in the cupboard instead of in five hundred brightly coloured foil packets. Dropping the salt content from “pickles” to “soup” also makes the broth drinkable, which is nice. But in the process of concocting this, we came up with a good (3): Better noodles. Switching out the usual fried noodle cakes for the big bag of “Not Fried in Oil” noodle cakes from the noodle aisle of the Chinese grocery store turned out to be both a substantial amount cheaper and much tastier. Don’t know if they’re better to begin with, or if the frying process just ruins the gluten, but these were much more substantial and chewier, while not losing any of the addictive instant-ramen flavour we were trying for. And it also gave us the opportunity to switch out the frying oil for a drizzle of toasted sesame oil, which does not need my advocacy.
The point is this: these ratios are tasty, but they may end up getting changed slightly as we tweak the recipe, possibly in the direction of slightly less MSG. A little of that stuff goes an incredibly long way. It’s magic, but you have to be careful with magic.
The other point is this: if you are going to refuse to eat a particular chemical compound, for goodness’ sake do your best to not sound like a total fool about it. I understand weirdly specific protein allergies, believe me, but if you were allergic to glutamate you would be dead. That’s like being allergic to serotonin. Sheesh.
