You’ll be hard-pressed to find another vegan ramen with these levels of umami and richness. Owing it's deliciousness to modern cooking techniques and fermentation, this ramen broth was an absolute hit when I served it at a pop-up in San Francisco — even outshining its carnivorous competitors!

In this post, I’ll detail the recipe and the theory behind what makes it so special.

The inspiration

While touring Copenhagen to try the food and teach a couple ramen classes, I visited three Michelin star Restaurant Geranium. The meal greatly exceeded all expectations, but it was a humble course of porcini broth that really stuck with me.

The broth — a luxurious mix of porcini mushroom stock, cream, creme fraîche, lemon thyme, and hops — instantly reminded me of a mushroom-forward tori paitan or tonkotsu ramen despite being vegetarian.

Days later, my mind started racing. Could I produce a vegan ramen recipe with the same rich porcini focus? With the same creamy mouthfeel? Could I even make it vegan? When I returned to the US a few weeks later, I immediately started recipe testing.

The recipe

What follows is the recipe I arrived at after months of trial and error. A harmony of fermented ingredients, porcini, hazelnuts, and lemon thyme, this vegan ramen recipe packs all the punch of a tonkotsu ramen while still tasting like no ramen I’ve ever had.

I like to share this recipe with ramen enthusiasts because the recipe could not be realistically executed at a ramen shop. Over a half pound of mushrooms are used per bowl, and that doesn’t count the mushrooms used as aromatics or toppings! And yet, through the use of fermentation, it’s in some ways more authentic than real ramen, which typically relies on purchased fermented ingredients (e.g. soy sauce, mirin, miso) rather the custom ferments we do for bowl. We’re fermenting on our own out here! So making it at home is your best shot.

Before you start

I’ll be real — this is an ambitious recipe. Like other authentic ramen recipes, this recipe has multiple components:

Broth
Tare (which is the seasoning component of authentic ramen. See my post on tare here.)
Aroma oil

I ferment my own ingredients for this, and I highly recommend you do the same. The fermented ingredients are the primary reason why this vegan broth can taste this savory. But if you want to buy pre-fermented ingredients on Amazon, you can do that too, and I will share some links.

If you do ferment your own ingredients for this, the recipe could take 10 days. But it’s worth it! And you can use the fermented ingredients for other recipes too. Alternatively, if you’re using store-bought ingredients, this recipe still requires an overnight step (and otherwise requires 1:30 of active time).

Ingredients

This serves ~6 people.

Tare

Rice-based shio koji (made with rice koji): 20g per serving
Salt to taste

Roasted mushroom juice

3 pounds of cremini mushrooms (i.e. small brown mushrooms/baby bellas)

Mushroom broth

Mushroom juice from above
Hazelnuts (unsalted, not roasted): 2 cups
Soy milk: 20% of the weight of the cooked mushroom juice
Kombu: 15-20g
Aromatics:
- Dried porcini mushrooms: A handful
- Lemon thyme or lemon verbena: A handful
- Carrot (peeled then chopped): 1
- Ginger: a knob
- Garlic (cut in half): 1
- Potato (chopped): 1
- Yellow onion (cut in half): 1
- Pearl barley koji: 2 cups (I also ferment this myself, but you can buy some here or use rice koji)
Xanthan gum: About 0.1% weight of the finished broth

Aroma oil

Neutral oil: 200g
Kombu: 50g

Recommended toppings

Maitake mushrooms marinated in shio koji
Arugula
White onion
Lemon thyme or lemon verbena

Step 1: MAKE THE TARE

Tare is the seasoning and umami element of authentic ramen. This particular tare is made entirely of shio koji, a sauce made from lacto-fermented koji (which is the molded rice used to make miso and soy sauce). You can use shio koji to marinate meats and really take them to the next level. But here, I use it add umami, acidity, and body to the ramen. You can make this weeks in advance.

I highly recommend fermenting this yourself. It’s very easy, though it takes 7 days. But if you must buy some instead, try this. It won’t be the same, but it’ll work in a pinch.

I’ll walk through the steps to make shio koji, but at a high level, you just combine 4 parts rice koji, 1 part salt, and 5 parts water. Then you let these ingredients sit at room temperature in an air-tight space for 7 days. Over those 7 days, the salt protects the other ingredients from bad bacteria, but good bacteria (which is resistant to the salt) breaks down the starches into their component parts. These component parts have more umami and acidity than the ingredients themselves. The end result is a powerful, salty brew of beautiful umami.

If you’ve never fermented like this before, it’s surprisingly easy. And it’s actually how pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi are made. You just need a few pieces of equipment to make sure it is safe. Here’s what I use.

1. Wide-mouth mason jar: This is where we will store the rice, salt, and water as it ferments into shio koji.

2. Fermentation lid: When the fermentation is doing its thing, air escapes. We want air to exit the mason jar so that it doesn’t explode from built-up pressure. But we also don’t want to let air in (because that can let the wrong bacteria take hold). This lid has a one-way valve to allow for this.

3. Kitchen scale: You need a scale that measures to the gram, because we’re going to add a very specific amount of salt that enables the good bacteria to do its thing while the bad bacteria can’t.

4. Rice koji: This is the molded rice used to make soy sauce, miso, mirin, and sake. A staple in Japanese cooking, think of it like natural MSG. It’s the secret behind this recipe’s ability to taste as savory as a dish with meat.

I personally grow my own koji using the Noma Guide’s recipe, but this works just as well.

Once you have all the ingredients, here are the steps for making shio koji. This makes more than you need for this recipe.

Combine 500g of water with 100g of salt. Mix in the mason jar until fully incorporated.
Add 400g of rice koji and mix well.
Tighten the fermentation lid and leave it in a dark place at room temperature.
The next day, confirm that the rice has not soaked up all the liquid. If it has and the rice is exposed to the air, add a bit more liquid until the rice is submerged. Don’t add too much because then you will mess up the salt to water/koji ratio.
After 7 days, taste to ensure that it has developed a sourness similar to sauerkraut. If it has, you are done fermenting! If it hasn’t, you can wait a couple more days.
Add to a blender to turn it into a fine puree. You can now store this in the fridge for months and use it to marinate things.

Step 2: MAKE THE MuSHROOM JUICE

The actual ramen broth will be a mixture of multiple ingredients. The most important of these ingredients is this roasted mushroom juice. This mushroom juice uses a technique that is common in gourmet restaurants.

Wash the mushrooms over a strainer in the sink. Dry.
Add the mushrooms to a pot with a tight fitting lid and put the pot in the oven.
Cook the mushrooms at 170f (or a little higher if your oven doesn’t go that low) overnight or for 8 hours. Over the course of the 8 hours, the mushrooms will release their own juice. That juice will steam the mushrooms, deepening the flavor of the mushrooms and the juice alike until what you are left with is the most intense mushroom stock you’ve ever tasted.
After 8 hours, remove the pot and strain the juice.
Then, to collect the remaining juice left in the mushrooms, put the mushrooms in a blender for 30 seconds (in batches) to turn them into a puree. Squeeze the puree through a nut milk bag to collect the rest of this incredible juice.

Step 3: MAKE THE MuSHROOM broth

Next, we’re going to infuse the mushroom juice with flavor and umami, then create a nut milk from it to add body.

Soak the hazelnuts in water. I recommend doing this the night before.
Briefly soak the dried porcini to remove the dust. This dust adds bitterness we don’t want! Avoiding bitterness is also why we peeled the carrots.
Weigh the mushroom juice. Combine the juice with the same weight of water and 20% of its weight in soy milk (so the juice’s weight multiplied by 0.2).
Combine these liquid ingredients with the kombu and the aromatics.
Bring to around 176f.
Remove kombu after 30 min.
Simmer remaining ingredients for 30 min
Strain, then let the broth cool a bit so you can blend it without it steaming.
Blend the hazelnuts with the broth together. This will take a few batches. Combine the batches at the end.
Squeeze the hazelnut broth through a nut milk bag.

At my pop-ups, I keep this broth at a simmer for a few hours. Doing so can make the hazelnuts split from the broth and look weird, so I blend the broth with 0.1% of the broth’s weight in xanthan gum (a stabilizer) to prevent it. If you’re serving this right away, you can skip the xanthan gum step.

Oil

Authentic ramen has flavored oil atop the broth. For this ramen, I usually make the below recipe for my flavored oil. When I’m feeling lazy, I just add garlic oil or store-bought hazelnut oil. You can make this a week in advance.

Roast kombu in the oven at 300ºF until it is fragrant.
Cook for an hour sous vide at 176f with the oil.
Blend then strain through a nut milk bag.

If you’re new to sous vide, apologies! I use a Breville Joule for many of the recipes on this site because it allows for perfect temperature control. There’s no better way to ruin this dish than to destroy the oil.

Toppings

Go wild with this! But I recommend using a maitake mushroom as the star of the show. Here’s what I do:

Marinate mushrooms in barley shio koji (same recipe as above but with koji made from barley instead of rice). Just an hour before cooking will do.
Sear and cook mushrooms as if they are a steak. Press down during the cooking process to make that centerpiece shape.

I also highly recommend adding additional lemon thyme leaves at this stage.

Assembly

Here’s how we put it all together!

Add dash of the oil to the bowl.
Add ~20g of the shio koji tare.
1. Note you might need to adjust the salt levels on the tare. Consider the first bowl a wash because you should really experiment until the salt level is perfect.
2. To experiment with salt levels, make a complete bowl and add a bit more salt. Taste it. If it’s not salty enough, you’ll probably taste the nut milk more than you do the mushroom. Add salt and taste again. And repeat. The mushroom REALLY shines right before there is too much salt. Keep going until it is too salty. Now you know what too little salt tastes like and what too much tastes like, so just do neither of those things :)
Add 300ml of the broth. I typically serve this broth with less volume than a regular ramen (which is closer to 350 or 400ml) because frankly it is a beast calorie-wise and also because it is so inefficient to cook.
Add those toppings, and don’t forget the extra lemon thyme!

If you’ve made it this far, please make the recipe and report back! Or hit me up when you are in San Francisco and I’ll serve you some.

Thiccc Vegan Ramen Recipe