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Interior and Designer: Jennifer Hsu Art Producer: Sara Feinstein Editor: Georgia Freedman Production Editor: Jenna Dutton Production Manager: Holly Haydash
Photography 2021 Elysa Weitala. Food styling by Victoria Woollard. Illustration used under license from Shutterstock.com. Author photo courtesy of Tom Healy.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-63807-121-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63807-171-6
R0
DEDICATED TO OUR
RESPECTIVE GRANDMOTHERS,
MOKARAM AND NARUMI.
CONTENTS
We are Zoe and Armon, the owners of Safframen, a food cart in Portland, Oregon, serving exclusively plant-based ramen. It is one of only a handful of fully plant-based ramen restaurants in the world.
Zoe (pronounced Z) is part Japanese, and Armon is part Persian, and the menu at Safframen incorporates aspects of both of our cultural heritages (skewing heavily toward the Japanese side). Like most cuisines, Japanese and Iranian foods both have histories that are inextricably linked to the use of animal products. Beef and lamb are staples of Iranian cuisine, and seafood is ubiquitous in Japan.
When we made the decision to open Safframen in 2019, we were faced with a daunting task: to serve high-quality ramen without using animal proteins. In spite of the rising popularity of high-quality meat alternatives, the negative stigma surrounding vegan food still lingers. We felt an obligation to create recipes that avoided animal products but could still impress our immigrant grandparents. We were not going to compromise. We dove deep, honed our skills, tweaked our recipes, and strived to live up to our own standards.
Our food cart became a modest success, thanks in no small part to the fact that Portland, where we live, has a large vegan population, and these adventurous eaters tend to go out on a limb for a new plant-based business. During this time, we also began to notice an overwhelming interest in vegan ramenand a serious lack of available resources for cooks to prepare it. Popular recipes for plant-based ramens tended to feel compromised and didnt fully live up to their conventional counterparts. As we developed our own recipes, we realized that this problem was actually a blessing in disguise, as it forced us to invent our own solutions to the problems we encountered.
This book is a direct expansion of the ideas we developed for our food cart. As weve grown and evolved, we have been able to tackle many of the questions that have challenged us from the beginning: How do you make tonkotsu ramen that is as rich and delicious as the version with pork in it? How do you achieve the sublime simplicity of a bowl of shio ramen without bonito flakes? With much time and work, we developed recipes that answer these questions.
We have no qualms about sharing the knowledge weve accumulated. No clinging to closely guarded secrets for uswe prefer a world abundant with great vegan ramen! In this book, well share what weve learned over years of study and experimentation: First, well take a brief look at the history of ramen culture. Once we are steeped in context, we examine what it means to make ramen plant-based .
The recipes start with the components that comprise ramen as a dish: oil, tare, broth, noodles, and toppings. Master these building blocks, and making a bowl of ramen becomes a far more approachable task.
Then we have our ramen recipes: 24 dishes, each of which usually utilizes one of each of the five previously outlined components. (Once youve prepped the components in advance, cooking ramen is mostly a matter of assembly.) Some of the dishes in this book are vegan versions of Japanese classics, while others are more inventive and draw on our own personal histories and cultural touchstones as well as the wisdom weve gained from the day-to-day work of running a ramen food cart.
Lastly, well round out our recipes with some delicious sides to serve alongside your bowls.
When we began our own vegan ramen journey, we often wished we had a guide like this one. We want vegan ramen to be a dish that stands on its own meritsnot a subpar duplication but a unique category on par with any other style of ramen. With this book as your guide, we hope to bring you into our world and give you the tools to flourish into a great vegan ramen chef.
The first step to understanding how to make vegan ramen is to look at ramens history, its cultural importance, and its evolution. After that, well dissect the elements of ramen, assessing each component, identifying its purpose, and working through how to build up to a full bowl.
