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Something I’ve been meaning to make for a long time: pasta salad. While reading the newspaper at work I came across a recipe that looked tasty, so I wrote down the basics, stuck it in my pocket, and forgot about it.

A few days later, I deciphered my scribblings into this:

Friday’s Spurs-Timberwolves game was made all the better by lots of beer (not mine), some fantastic homemade brownies (not mine), and some tasty hamburgers (mine). The burgers went something like this (everything but the beef & egg is approximate):

I think what ended up making these so good was the salt — I usually don’t add salt straight to the meat. That got me thinking about adding various salty things as seasoning to hamburger meat, and the most immediately intriguing that I came up with was miso. I’m curious to see how well the miso flavor comes out through the beef & salt, and how the miso changes the texture. Definitely on the to-cook list.

EDIT: John remembered some cheese in these burgers, and of course he’s right. I’ve updated the recipe accordingly.

The most important part of my previously mentioned tonkotsu ramen quest will, of course, be the soup itself. My first two attempts were… edible. Perhaps that’s a bit harsh — they were good, but I think they’d be outshone by your run-of-the-mill dried ramen + flavor packet.

This first attempt was disappointing — probably more an effect of my expectations rather than the soup itself, which was servicable but firmly in the “nothing to write home about” category. Basically, there just wasn’t enough flavor; it definitely needs more salt (I didn’t pay very close attention to how much I put in) and should probably be reduced more, maybe down to 1/2. Alternatively, increasing the stuff/water ratio may have the same effect.

The bones I used were from Clancey’s Meats & Fish, engagingly described in the City Pages by incognito Carleton grad Dara Moskowitz. They were large (I think four pieces total) and mostly meatless, though they had a decent amount of fat on them. I wonder if chopping them up more would help with flavor extraction… perhaps it’s time to go cleaver shopping.

Before I’d even tasted Tonkotsu Soup 0.0.0 (a mistake), I began working on…

As it turned out 0.0.1 was even worse than 0.0.0 — I’d consider it an alpha release at best. Way too weak — note the 4L water here vs. 3L in 0.0.0. This needs to be addressed quickly.

The bones in this version were from Rainbow, the local chain grocery store. Compared to the ones from Clancey’s, these were frozener, chopped into smaller pieces, had much more meat on them, and were far cheaper ($0.75/lb vs $2.50/lb, approximately). I’m particuarly curious to know how the meat/bone ratio might affect the flavor, but that’ll be hard to determine until I stop watering it down so much!

The canned chicken stock was added after I read a recipe that called for a whole chicken carcass along with the pork bones. Again, hard to tell what difference it made.

Finally, I want to note that the meat pulled off of these bones after cooking was absolutely delicious in tacos after cooking with some sautéed onions & peppers and some sazón.

Sigh… first bread, then peanut butter, then hummus, and now noodles. At this rate I’m not going to have time to do anything else: this past weeked I bought a shiny new pasta maker. It’s steel, heavy, has some gears, a few knobs, a big crank, and a C-clamp for attaching to the table. Certainly nothing to complain about there… but I wonder if those smiling Italian factory workers in their cute little European cars would still be smiling if they knew that I haven’t made a single Italian noodle with their noodly contraption.

Instead, I’ve begun an ill-adivsed quest to make a perfect bowl of tonkotsu ramen. Failing that, I’d at least like to come up with something that people would pay five or six bucks for. Some people might say that because the soup is the most important part of tonkotsu ramen (I don’t think I’m going to bother italicizing that every time), I should just use cheap noodles until I get the soup right. However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about setting up Virtual Private Networks, it’s that you should put the simple stuff in place first, and slowly add complexity until you break something. And of course this applies to ramen as well. I think.

As it turns out, the noodles themselves are dead simple.

These turned out pretty damned good on my first try. A couple of notes:

• The noodles often wanted to stick together as they came out of the noodler. I think that drying the dough out by adding a bit more flour would help this; it might be easiest to stick to the inital two cups and add a bit more while putting the dough through the rollers.

• This recipe makes 4 – 6 servings, depending on how fat you want to get. To avoid problems with really long strips of dough, it’s best to cut the dough into pieces before starting to roll it: 1 piece per serving if you have a helper and want longer noodles, 2 pieces per serving otherwise.

• Toss the noodles in more flour as they come out of the noodler — this will prevent them from sticking together during wrapping and in storage. The extra flour will come off when they’re boiled.

• I used bread flour; I’d be curious to find out if I can tell the difference between that and all-purpose flour.