Salt, and the year we got it wrong
For most of 2023 our bowls were slightly under-seasoned and we blamed the broth. The problem was a tare jar, a new fridge and a number nobody was writing down.
Tare is the salt of a bowl of ramen. Not the broth — the broth is the body. Tare is a dark concentrate that goes in the bottom of the bowl before anything else, and it decides whether the whole thing tastes finished or merely warm.
Ours is roughly 30ml a bowl. Thirty millilitres, out of about four hundred. It is the smallest ingredient and it is the one that goes wrong.
The symptom
Through most of 2023 people were reaching for the white pepper. Not many. Enough that we noticed, because at this counter you can watch every hand on every shaker.
The obvious suspect was the broth, so we chased the broth for four months. Different butcher. More bones. Longer. Shorter. Skim schedule rewritten twice. None of it made any difference, because none of it was the problem.
The cause
A new walk-in, installed in February 2023, running about three degrees colder than the old one.
Our shoyu tare is a topped-up jar — you never finish it, you add to it. It is also saturated with salt and sugar, and a saturated solution at 2°C holds less in suspension than the same solution at 5°C. Salt was quietly crystallising out onto the bottom of the jar. Every ladle came off the top. Every ladle was fractionally weaker than the one before, for ten months, in a curve too slow for anybody to taste on any given night.
What changed
Three things, and the third is the only one that matters.
- The tare jar comes out of the walk-in and lives in a warmer under-counter fridge at 5°C.
- It gets stirred from the bottom, with a spatula not a spoon, at the start of every shift.
- We measure the salinity with a cheap refractometer once a week and write the number on a card taped inside the fridge door.
Number three is the actual lesson. We had eleven things we tasted every day and zero things we measured every week. Tasting is how you catch a bad batch. It is useless against a slope that shallow, because your palate recalibrates faster than the jar drifts.
Where it sits now
Between 26 and 28 on the refractometer, checked Tuesdays. If it reads 25 the jar gets a correction, and if it reads 29 somebody has been heavy-handed with the tamari. It has gone out of range twice in two years, both times in the week after a holiday, both times caught on a Tuesday instead of over ten months.
Lantern Broth · 6 Kettle Lane, Northbridge