When I agreed to work at a well-known ramen restaurant for free, one of my goals was to learn the chef’s ramen recipe. He taught me so much: how to make his signature broth, how to perfect the egg, and even how to make noodles with local flour. But whenever I tried to make his ramen recipe at home, it never tasted right. And that’s because he never shared his tare recipe.

Tare recipes are notoriously difficult to find. First off, most ramen recipes online aren’t too authentic, so they’re not even attempting to include a tare. More importantly, however, ramen chefs are tight-lipped with their tare recipes because tare is a ramen shop’s main differentiator. There’s really not much difference between one shop’s broth and another’s: the tare is nearly everything.

In this post, I’ll help you understand what tare is and what it’s for. Then we’ll cover my tare framework that will enable you to make your own tare recipes. Just looking for a recipe instead? Try here.

WHAT’s ramen TARE?

Japanese for “sauce,” tare is the seasoning element in a bowl of ramen; it’s responsible for the salt and much of the umami, acidity, and (usually) seafood flavors that you associate with ramen.

Tare is a liquid, and it is typically added to the bowl via a small ladle before the steaming soup is added. Packing a punch, only 1/10 of the volume of the the broth is the tare. The rest is essentially boring meat-flavored water. In short, ramen without tare is bland, unseasoned, and almost always not ramen!

WHAT TYPES OF TARE ARE THERE?

There are many varieties of tare, and usually the ramen variety is named after the tare used. For example:

• Shoyu ramen uses shoyu tare (i.e. there is soy sauce in the tare)

• Miso ramen uses miso tare (i.e. there is miso in the tare)

• Shio ramen uses shio tare (i.e. there is salt in the tare). Most tares contain salt in one form or another, so the name “shio” (which means salt in Japanese) is a little misleading. Nowadays “shio tare” essentially means a tare absent of soy sauce or miso.

A tonkotsu ramen, for example, is typically made with a shoyu tare. The shoyu tare likely contains many ingredients (such as kombu, mirin, or bonito flakes) but definitely contains soy sauce. That soy sauce mixture is added to the pork broth to season the tonkotsu ramen.

But whAT’s THE POINT of tare?

I get it. You’re probably thinking: why make a tare? Why not season the broth directly like literally every other soup? Primarily two reasons.

• Efficiency: Tare enables a ramen shop to produce multiple flavors with the same soup base. Rather than keep three separate pots of broth simmering, ramen chefs can keep one pot of broth simmering and add one of three tares to each bowl. In other words, tare modularizes ramen.

• Flavor: By separating the tare ingredients from the rest of the broth ingredients, tare allows for flavor development. Tares are often aged at least a week before they are used, enabling the ingredients to mature and meld together. This is possible because of the high salt content. You’d never want to age a chicken broth for a week!

If you don’t care about either of these, or if you’re just making a single bowl of ramen for yourself, then you probably don’t need to make a tare; you can season the broth itself to taste. But if you are serving ramen in bulk, hoping to flavor some but not all of your chicken stock to be like ramen, or simply want to delve into the world of authentic ramen recipes, a tare is your best bet.

What makes the ideal tare?

There is no ideal tare. The tare’s goal is to enhance the other ingredients and impart flavors of its own. If the other ingredients lack something, then the tare can make up for it. If the other ingredients have enough of something, then the tare can help to emphasize other flavors.

So, when choosing to make your ideal tare a particular broth, you need to ask yourself: what does this broth need to take this ramen to the next level? A flavor, a mouthfeel, a color? Then, you need to identify the ingredient(s) that can provide that missing aspect to your bowl. Let’s walk through the six questions that I ask whenever making my tare.

1. Does the broth need salinity?

The answer to this is always yes, because salinity enhances flavors in food — giving them the strength they need to shine. But seafood-based broths might need less added salinity than pork or chicken.

• Traditional ways to add salinity: Soy sauce, salt, miso

• Non-traditional ways to add salinity: Gochujang, soy-less sauce

Another non-traditional way to add salinity to shoyu ramen is to utilize alternative soy sauces. I love the smoked taste from this whiskey barrel aged soy sauce. I’ve always dreamed of using it for a ramen served with brisket or pork ribs :-)

2. Does the broth need acidity?

Acidity can freshen a broth to make it taste more delicate or refined. It can also mask certain funky flavors.

• Traditional ways to add acidity: Soy sauce, reduced sake, miso

• Non-traditional ways to add acidity: Reduced white wine, vinegar, sherry, shio koji, soy-less sauce, lacto-fermented ingredients

3. Does the broth need sweetness?

Sweetness can counteract bitterness and acidic flavors and enhance other elements of the broth.

• Traditional ways to add sweetness: Reduced mirin, soy sauce, tamari, sugar

• Non-traditional ways to add sweetness: Reduced white wine, honey, koji

There are countless mirin brands out there, but for some reason I always go back to the classic: Kikkoman. The others I’ve tried are either too sweet or remind me too much of rubbing alcohol.

4. Does the broth need umami?

It’s ramen, of course it needs umami! I’m always trying to make my ramen broth taste more savory.

• Traditional ways to add umami: Kombu, bonito flakes, soy sauce, miso, dried shrimp, dried scallop, shiitake mushroom, MSG

• Non-traditional ways to add umami: Koji, roasted koji, shio koji, fish sauce, garum, countless other mushrooms, roasted tomato

5. Does the broth need seafood flavors?

To me, the taste of the sea is what separates ramen from other soups. I need the pungency and/or bitterness of fish (no matter how subtle it might be), and I prefer to have the lingering flavor of shellfish, too.

• Traditional ways to add seafood flavors: Kombu, bonito flakes, niboshi, dried shrimp, dried scallop, clams, mussels

• Non-traditional ways to add seafood flavors: Oyster leaf, dulse, fish sauce, garum

Dried scallops really pack a punch, and they make for a great lighter shio ramen. These ones are from Hokkaido, the seafood mecca of Japan. It amazes me how much Amazon has improved since I first started making ramen.

6. Does the broth need other flavor accents?

Other flavor accents can round out a bowl, creating a bridge between two different ingredients already in the bowl. These flavor accents can also be a key differentiator for your recipe.

• Traditional ways to add other flavor accents: Garlic, ginger, scallions, togarashi spice

• Non-traditional ways to add other flavor accents: Thyme, scallions, cauliflower, bacon, tahini

TESTING TARE RECIPES

Given all the elements at play, it can be hard to find the right tare recipe for a given broth. Here’s what I do to dial my recipes in:

• Taste! It’s so easy to forget how important our senses are when working with an esoteric thing like tare. First, you’ve gotta taste your broth. Just add salt to taste then ask what it’s missing. Next, you gotta taste your tare (and preferably each ingredient in the tare so you know how it is contributing to the bowl). Is it achieving what you want it to achieve? What does it need? To test the tare alone, you can also water it down (e.g. add 9 parts water) to simulate the saltiness of a final bowl. Once you’re confident, you can start testing the broth with the tare together.

• Make extra broth: Always make extra broth so that you can test different tare combinations. If I’m making ramen for 6 people, I usually make enough ramen for 10. Then I use the 4 bowls worth of soup to test a dozen or so tare combinations.

• Prep the ingredients in advance: You’ll feel less inhibited while testing your tare if you already have completed separated ingredients ready to go. I always have reduced white wine, reduced dashi, and a few other ingredients ready to go for when I start taste-testing.

My TARE RECIPE

By now, you hopefully realize that there is no perfect tare, so a single tare recipe here is not going to help. But I recognize how unsatisfying that is for a post like this, so I’ll share my tare recipe anyways — but only because it illustrates that tare is only good in context