The Bay Area is saturated with bowls of ramen, and since few restaurants make their own noodles, the supposed appeal is the broths.
Yelp lists 302 SFBA restaurants serving “tonkotsu ramen”, famous for its long cooking time, and many of those restaurants have a long list of ramen bases to choose from. How in the heck do so many restaurants have the skill and time to make that happen? It turns out that that ramen bases, like curry pastes or endless other products, can be purchased rather than cooked in-house. And their ingredients look mighty similar to supermarket ramen.
An SFBA restaurant was kind enough to post their base’s ingredients next to the cash register to inform people with food allergies/preferences. They get soup bases from a SoCal company called Wakou USA, and just add water. Wakou makes everything from Tonkotsu to Tantanmen base and also makes toppings like black garlic oil. The bases are full of good stuff like corn syrup, disodium inosinate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and by my calculations 3000-3500 mg sodium per 12 oz. of liquid. And that’s not considering the sodium in whatever pork, etc. they add to the bowl.
That is very interesting information. I suppose it seems obvious, given the huge number of ramen restaurants, but how very disappointing. I wonder how many restaurants use these products.
I’m sharing this on FTC, they may have some input.
Interesting. I would hope that restaurants proclaiming to make their own broths are honest, although i can also see how a small restaurant would be tempted to resuce costs this way.
And if you click through you can see nutritional info- it’s closer to 7,000 mg sodium per serving for the tonkatsu. (!!)
Only question to that being, couldn’t you just add like knox unflavored gelatin to increase mouthfeel and it’ll just gel if you refrigerate it? I’m also not sure, but how often do they refrigerate the soup if they supposedly make it from scratch?
Hahaha, yeah right???
I’m in nyc and they passed a law about nutritional info on menus for restaurants with more than X number of locations (10? Or 15? I forget) and gotta say no one is ever posting that info for the public… or at least not until there’s a lot of fine print that says one serving has 1,000 grams and by the way each order serves seven
I get take out pho from local restaurants. Often, I have leftovers, when the broth does not gel in the fridge, I think it is due to using a mix. I do not think the restaurants I get my take out are using gelatin.
Ah totally makes sense. I never get pho as I like eating right then and there. Its been too long since I last read up about it, but for beef pho, its typically with beef bones, some other meaty part of the cattle and aromatics right?
Man, I wonder there are chain suppliers for Taiwanese beef noodle soups now… same for Won Ton noodle soup (though I’ve yet to find one that matches to HK)
Add to that list hot pot. I know at least one restaurant that uses Little Sheep brand products for their hot pot and grilled items. Not surprising given the price.
That’s what the server told me, but he didn’t show me the packages so it could be a larger restaurant supplier sized thing. Granted, this was a small place.
