Nineteen hours, and why not twenty

Every ramen bar has a number on the wall and most of them are round. Twelve hours, eighteen, twenty-four. Round numbers are marketing. They are what you land on when you started the pot at nine in the morning and served at nine at night.

We had eighteen on the wall for four years because that is when the shift ended.

The month we actually checked

Last spring we ran three pots in parallel, on the same bones from the same butcher, for a month. Same water, same skim schedule, same single scorched onion. The only variable was time off the heat: sixteen hours, nineteen, twenty-two. Every Tuesday somebody who had not cooked that week tasted all three blind out of identical cups.

Sixteen was the surprise. It is a good broth and it would sell. But it is thin behind the fat — the richness is on the surface and there is nothing underneath it, so the second half of the bowl tastes like the first half diluted.

Twenty-two was the other surprise, because we expected it to be the best and it was the worst. Past about twenty hours the collagen that makes a broth cling stops being silky and starts being chalky. It coats the roof of your mouth and stays there. Two people described it, independently, as “dusty”.

Nineteen

Nineteen won eleven of twelve blind tastings. Not because nineteen is magic, but because it is the last hour before the pot turns. Whatever is happening chemically, the useful part is finished somewhere around eighteen and a half and the damage starts somewhere around twenty.

The part nobody wants to hear

A month of three pots is about four hundred dollars of bones and a lot of gas, to move a bowl maybe five per cent. Most of running a counter is that arithmetic. You do it anyway, because five per cent on the thing you sell four hundred of a week is the whole business.