Vegan ramen
I managed to catch some time again this week, so I am sharing my recent breakfast with you. It might be weird to have vegan ramen for breakfast, I know. But since my schedule is kind of wild right now, I use every free moment to have normal, warm, home-made meals. And for a few days I could only do that in the morning. So I decided to skip the usual cereal bowl and have the ramen instead.
There is already a ramen recipe on my blog, but as you already might know, it can be made in a million different ways. This one is just as delicious as the previous one I made. These measures that I wrote down make about 2 to 3 servings of vegan ramen. At least that is what it looked like to me. If there is any remaining tare sauce and broth, you can store them in a fridge for few days.
Some health benefits
Normally you wouldn’t expect a bowl of ramen to be very healthy. However, there are a few ingredients in this dish that are kind of healthy. I just thought that this is worth mentioning, so I picked out some of them and wrote down a few fun facts.
Tofu is one of the ingredients of this dish. It is low in calories but high in protein and fat. It also contains many important vitamins and minerals.
It contains antinutrients like trypsin inhibitors and phytates. Soaking or fermenting soybeans before making tofu reduces these antinutrients, increasing its nutritional value. All soy-based products contain isoflavones, which are believed to have various health benefits.
Whole soy foods like tofu can improve several markers of heart health. This may lead to a reduced risk of heart disease. Research indicates that soy has a protective effect against breast, digestive, and prostate cancers. Tofu may have positive effects on blood sugar control, but more studies are needed to confirm this.
Like many vegetables and fruits, scallions are mostly water. A cup of it has just 32 calories, trace amounts of fat, and no cholesterol. It also has less sugar and fewer carbs than vegetables like carrots, potatoes, and corn.
A cup of cut scallions has about 10% of the fiber you need for the whole day. Getting lots of fiber helps you feel full, keeps your cholesterol levels down, and may lower your chances for diabetes, heart disease, and other conditions.
Scallions and other similar vegetables may block cancer growth, especially in the stomach. Scientists are still not sure how. They believe that a compound called allicin, which is what gives you garlic breath, may prevent cells from turning cancerous or slow tumors from spreading.
Extracts of onions, garlic, and their relatives have long been used as medicine. They can kill bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Lab tests on certain varieties of onions showed that at high enough concentrations, some can kill or slow the growth of salmonella or E. coli.
Vegan ramen
Course: Salty, SaltyIngredients
- For the broth:
8 to 10 dried Shiitake mushrooms (washed)
4 slices of fresh ginger
100 g of raw cashews (washed)
1 leek (chopped)
2 garlic cloves (peeled, halved)
Salt (as desired)
800 ml of water
oil
- For the tare sauce:
70 ml of light soy sauce
65 ml of dark soy sauce
43 ml of mirin
2 stalks of scallion (white part)
2 garlic cloves (mashed)
3 slices of fresh ginger
- The rest:
2 servings of ramen noodles
Bamboo shoots (as desired)
100 g of tofu
Chopped scallions (the green part)
Oil
Directions
- Start of by preparing all of the ingredients. Chopp and weigh everything and divide into groups. This will make things easier. Then prepare the broth.
- Drizzle a bit of oil in a large cooking pot. Heat it to medium heat and sautee the mushrooms and the ginger slices for a few minutes (until fragrant). Then add the leek and cashews and sautee for a few more minutes. Add the water, salt and garlic to the pot, cover it with a lid and and bring everything to boil. Reduce the heat to medium and let it simmer for 45 minutes.
- Once that is done you can pour the broth into a different pot, through a strainer. Get rid of all the solid ingredients and keep the broth.
- Then prepare the tare sauce. Mix all the tare ingredients in a small sauce pan. Bring them to boil and cook the sauce for 10 minutes. Stir frequently. Remove it from the stove. Slice the tofu into several square pieces. Pour some tare sauce over the tofu and let it marinade for 15 minutes.
- Heat some oil on a non-stick pan (medium heat). Fry the tofu for about 2 minutes on both sides. Remove from the pan and set aside. Cook your ramen noodles for about one minute less than indicated on the packaging. If you need to, reheat the vegan ramen broth.
- Pour a little bit of tare sauce into a serving bowl. Pour some ramen broth over it and add the noodles, scallions, tofu and bamboo shoots. Serve the vegan ramen while hot.
If you liked this recipe, make sure you check out my other recipes like:
– vegan Korean savory pancakes
Feel free to tell me what you think about this in the comments below, or send me the pictures of your own vegan ramen. If you did something differently, I would also like to hear that, I’d love to see the things you come up with.
P.S. for more recipes like this and a bunch of other stuff, follow me on Instagram, @margo_drobi.
Also, I recently started a Patreon page, where you can subscribe and help me create more/better content. In return, you will get an exclusive piece of content (recipe) each month. My plan is to increase the amount of that content if I gain a few subscribers. If you are interested and you want to find out more, I will leave the link to my Patreon right – here.