Greetings and Salutations, Blog Readers!

Today we are talking about my recent attempt at making ramen fully from scratch, and if that wasn’t hard enough, I also made it as low sodium as possible, omitting the higher sodium things that make ramen so high in sodium, and dangerous for blood pressure, like soy sauce and meat.

For the week leading up to the ramen, I gathered vegetable food scraps, things like carrot peels, onion and garlic skins, and leftover celery. I added to this some beans I had used for a soup mix, having set them aside before making the soup. I used the beans to add more nutrients to the broth, but also to add a nice velvety feel to the broth.

I stored these in a Tupperware container and Ziplock bag in the freezer until I was ready to make the broth, and also added some leftover herbs from Thanksgiving. On the day of, I used a secret ingredient for browning and thickening gravies and soups, which helped give us the color one would want for broth. This secret ingredient is not needed, but only had 5 mg of sodium per serving, giving the entire pot of the stock a negligible amount of sodium.

The way I made it was simple, veggie remnants, a full onion and a clove of garlic for fun, and leftover herbs in a pot with some filtered water, add heat and let it sit for time until the veggies are all depleted of their goodness.

Simple, easy. Couple hours of very little effort. I am sure it didn’t need that much time but that’s what I did to make sure it all broke down and leeched all the nutrients out.

A very damn good stock was created from mostly kitchen scraps. That’s damn near free stock, and, nearly no sodium.

For the noodles, I used the stand mixer Travis got me as an early Christmas present, and the pasta maker my sister got me for my birthday.

The udon noodles were more fettuccine shaped, but, they cooked evenly and tasted amazing. Also, pasta making is super chill and calming, and the recipe I ended up going with is something anyone can do, even if you don’t have the mixer and pasta maker.

5 cups ish of flour, and some water, I used like 1-1/4 cup of warm water, not quite 1-1/2 cup, but nearly once I started mixing. 5 cups of flour, the 1-1/4 cups of warm water, mixing in the mixer, adding some water as needed to form a firm dough. Wrap dough into plastic wrap and let sit for 1-5 hours. I had it sit for 3ish, and when next I make it, it will be 5, because the flavor, I think it would be better. I also added onion and garlic powder, in lieu of salt, and I may add a little more next time.

Once the dough sat, I rolled it flat in the pasta maker, and then ran it through the fettuccine cutter. I let the noodles dry a bit and stored in the fridge overnight before making the ramen.

The noodles can stay in the fridge for like two days, if you won’t make them faster, freeze em.

So then the day of ramen came, and we got a ton of veggies. I sautéed some zucchini, Bok choy, mushrooms and corn. I also steamed snap peas and shelled peas, and hard boiled some eggs.

The noodles are cooked for around ten minutes, and then dropped into ice water, so the starch is removed and the noodles stop cooking. Once the noodles are cooked, iced, and placed in the ramen bowl, add some broth, top with the veggies. (You can use whatever veggie you want, I wanted a big ole bowl full of veggies and noodles).

The bowls weren’t big enough for the ramen, so some things got put on a plate to the side, but the ramen was pretty goddamn delicious, despite being my first attempt and having aa negligible amount of sodium. Plenty of supplies leftover for more bowls, so it is much cheaper than in a restaurant, and way healthier than it would be as well, with less sodium.

I didn’t marinate the egg, again, trying to not add extra sodium, and yes, a splash of soy sauce would have been amazing, BUT, for negligible amounts of sodium, and tons of veggies, for so much less than it would cost in a ramen house, this ramen was a major hit.

If you want details on how to make it, comment and let me know, and I will post something more detailed, but this blog post is under 1k words, which is less length than some food bloggers make their intro, so just read the instructions and rock out. If you want a recipe card, hit up the comments or DM’s and I will of course give in and give you that information, and if you wanna know what my secret ingredient was for the broth, definitely comment and DM me- it’s an amazing secret.

Thanks for reading, enjoy your ramen!

Abbi