Lecker Book Club is a monthly feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? Are you cooking from it? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Happy New Year! A heads up that Lecker Book Club is taking a break for a few months while I regroup and work quietly on a few other things. Paid subscriber posts will continue! I’ll be back in April-ish with new podcast episodes and posts.
This month the book is Ramen Forever by Tim Anderson.
Photo by Laura Edwards
Ramen has ended up as a cornerstone of Tim Anderson’s life. As he writes in the book, it was originally his love of ramen - as well as Japanese food more broadly - that took him to live in Japan, which steered the course of his future in many ways, including meeting his wife. Avid food TV watchers in the UK may also remember that ramen was at the heart of his Masterchef story; when he won the series in 2011, ramen was his winning main course in the final. He previously ran a ramen restaurant in Brixton, Nanban, which opened in 2015 and closed in 2021. But although he’s got five cookbooks already to his name, he’s never written a book entirely about ramen….until now.
Tim and I spoke via Google Meet towards the end of last year – against all the odds and our best laid plans! We had arranged to meet in person and when that wasn’t possible we switched to remote recording and unfortunately the internet where I was staying was not playing ball. After several failed attempts on different video call platforms we finally managed to connect. Grateful to Tim for bearing with me!
I opened with a big question, one with which he grapples with from the start in Ramen Forever. What is and isn’t ramen?
“I mean, on the one hand, the answer is very simple. Because ramen is, when you boil it down, no pun intended, a very simple thing, and that is... alkaline wheat noodles in broth. The wheat noodles have Kansui: potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate in them. That really makes ramen ramen and distinct from other kinds of noodles.
Ramen, the word as it's used in Britain and, I think English speaking countries generally, people take it to mean sort of any sort of noodle soup which isn't true, obviously. So you see kind of absurd things in shops and on the high street chains like ‘ramen udon’ or ‘laksa ramen’. ‘Ramen udon’ is like saying ‘spaghetti gnocchi’. It just makes absolutely no sense if you know what these words mean.
If I have one thing that I want people to sort of take away from the book, it is actually just that. It's that ramen is ramen and ramen has to have alkaline salts in it, kansui, or it isn't ramen.
Now, having said that, there are other types of noodles in Chinese traditions that do use kansui and are basically the same dish. But I think you also have to respect those dishes and not call them ramen, even though they sort of technically fit the definition, like wonton noodle soup. You could say, oh, it's ramen, but really I think when you do that, you're also sort of showing your hand to somebody who's not that familiar with that particular dish, and you would never sort of conflate the two if you did know the difference.
But, you know, also, this definition is a little bit sort of unsatisfying because ramen has other elements beyond the noodles and the broth, and that's the toppings, the oils, and the tare, the seasoning. It's not just wheat noodles in broth or alkaline wheat noodles in broth. It is all of the variations that you get from that starting point as well. So it's simple, but it's also complicated, basically.”
As I mentioned above (and you can hear Tim go into more detail about this in the podcast episode) ramen has been central to Tim’s progression as a chef and food writer. And this is, in fact, his sixth cookbook. Why did it take him so long to do a ramen book?!
“The publishers are running out of ideas. Not really!
The funny thing is…that's a great question! So, my very first book, Nanban, is about the food of Kyushu and a little bit of Okinawa with some of my own sort of takes on that type of food and what I had been serving at pop ups in London at the time. And there's a big chapter on ramen, but it's really quite basic. Like, at the time I thought, oh, I'm publishing these recipes that are, you know, they're going to be great because it's going to showcase a little bit about...the diversity of at least within Kyushu and the different styles there, Champon and Kumamoto Ramen and things like these, um, which is still some of my favorites.
But really, the recipes are too basic in that book. They, they weren't that well researched. There's not a lot of information on the variation in terms of tare and noodles in them. It's a bit too simplistic. It's a bit too much of an overview, I guess.
So it's not like I was sort of itching to do another ramen book for a long time, but this was a good opportunity to really dive deeper. There's less of the regional variations, but more in terms of a sort of nuts and bolts understanding of how those variations are made basically, in each element within them.
But getting into the sort of, why now? side of it, to answer that question is…doing these books has always been a collaboration, I guess you could say, between me and the publisher. They have mostly, to be honest, been ideas that have come from my publisher and they said: we want to do this, can you do it and I've said, ‘okay’, or ‘no’.
But with ramen it felt like something I could do, but it was daunting still. There's a Mickey Mantle quote I read recently where I think he said something like: “It's amazing to realise how little you know about the game you've been playing your whole life.” Something like that. And, I really felt that writing the ramen book. On the one hand, as I was testing recipes, I was like, oh good, these recipes are working. And it's like, well, yeah, of course they are. I've been making ramen for a long time.
But on the other hand, I was like, man, but there's still so much I don't know. And there's so much that I can't fit in the book. And it's like, I don't know, I've done my best to say what I think is important about ramen, but try to encourage people to do their own extended research, I guess. Which people do anyway, they don't need me to tell them that.”
Tim’s right about people doing their own extended ramen research. This was something else I wanted to ask him about: what it is about ramen in particular that inspires a kind of cult-like devotion around the world.
“I think about this all the time, to be honest.
And so I think for one thing, there is an undeniable sort of impact of this dish, even at its sort of most soothing and subtle, it's still a large portion of salty food with a filling amount of noodles in it and broth. And it's got, you know, bags of umami and all this contrast, like you'd get from so many different kinds of foods that also inspire a similar kind of nerdy devotion, like burgers or pizza, you know, these are similar foods that you can really fiddle with and tinker with.
But I also think that there is something, you know…I don't want to get too ethnographic or something, but there is a certain kind of person who is attracted to ramen, into making – and I put myself in this category! – that I think is a kind of a control freak kind of personality. People who really like to sort of dial in specificities of a recipe and a process, because ramen isn't something that's technically hard to make. You don't need good knife skills. You know, I look at people who make sushi and I watch their hands and I'm just like…it's like a magic trick to me. It's so amazing. Ramen is boiling stuff. If you have a head for sort of math and processes, good ramen is achievable. It is much less about, I think, technique than it is about numbers, in a way.
And I think that attracts a certain kind of person. And I am sort of in that camp. I am a kind of numbers guy, but I am also a pinch of this, a pinch of that guy. And there's room for that in ramen as well. Like, from bowl to bowl, you're always tasting, always tweaking. So, it's not all about the numbers, but...I think if you are somebody who likes to, I don't know, get into percentages in terms of hydration or temperatures and timings and stuff like that, it can be a satisfying project.”
In some ways, Ramen Forever is an unconventional recipe book. It has relatively few recipes for finished dishes; the majority of the recipes are for the different elements of ramen, the broth, tare, oils, toppings, and the actual full meal recipes appear towards the end of the book. I was curious whether Tim had always planned to structure the book this way.
“I did, and now I have I have a little bit of regret in terms of not putting more recipes in there that you I can say, okay, here's a ramen that you can do start to finish in X amount of time, you know, boom boom boom. You can do it in an hour. You can do it in a day. That's a purely commercial thought because I know that from experience and just from seeing what's out there, people want recipes that they can cook regularly.
It's not that you can't cook ramen regularly, but it is a bit of a project. You need a sort of solid two days to put together a bowl from scratch. And, you know, I did a talk at a bookshop in Bath where somebody was like, well, what recipe do you recommend from the book where, you know, that I can make, like, every day?
And I was like, uh, Ha ha ha. I was like, you can't. Well, what I've been telling people now is all of the elements have different uses outside of a bowl of ramen, like the chashu recipes in particular. You could have those on a bowl of rice with some greens and it'd be a great meal. The oils are great for roasting vegetables, or dressing salads, or all kinds of different things, making mayonnaises and dressings.
And then there are ones that are sort of more stand alone, like there's a whole chicken ramen recipe where you sort of, you poach the chicken and that becomes your broth and your toppings and you just add noodles basically. Or one of my favourites, which is the Leftover Nando's Ramen, which sounds stupid, and it is, but it was surprisingly good, otherwise I wouldn't have put it in the book.
And then that kind of thing is there to show people, once you know the basics, once you have good noodles, and understand seasoning in particular, anything can become ramen, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a big project. In fact, the book's being translated into German, and they don't have Nando's in Germany, so they were like, what do we do? And what we settled on was just like, well, basically we can just tell people, order any chicken from your favourite chicken shop, follow this process, season it up how you like it, and you'll have a pretty good bowl of ramen.
I want people to cook from it. And I always want it to not be too, too nerdy. But unfortunately, that's sort of the nature of the dish. And I've been describing the book as a one for serious beginners, like it's not incredibly nerdy or detailed, not as much as it could be anyway, but having said that, like, you have to be the kind of person who really wants to set the time aside to make a proper bowl.”
Following on from this, I told Tim I appreciated that the book had space for the humour of a recipe for Leftover Nando’s Ramen, and the Full English Ramen, and the Wisconsin beer and cheese ramen, while still taking the dish seriously.
“Thanks. I mean, this is sort of a sticking point as well. There is this urge with any kind of food, which is to sort of be protective of some kind of idea of authenticity.
But, all throughout ramen history, and especially now, in Japan, there are variations that are based on just one individual chef's sort of idiosyncrasies and creativity. I mean, there's a pizza ramen in the book. And I know people would probably look at that and they think, ah, you're just being silly. That's not legit. And, you know, we had this at the restaurant too. We did a curry goat ramen and there's a French onion ramen in one of my other books.
And I was just curious because when I make these things, they're done sort of in the spirit of this sort of creativity that you get in the ramen world in Japan. So I just googled it, and it turns out there is a French onion ramen being served in Japan, and it's even got a pastry lid. Yeah, this kind of like silliness, I think it's important, like it's a serious business, ramen, but it also allows for a lot of fun and creativity.
I think part of the reason behind that is because it's always had this, this status of being not quite Japanese. For decades and decades after it was introduced to Japan, it was referred to as Chinese food, or Chinese soba. And it still sort of holds on to that in some, some cases, especially among like older generations.
And I think that that has allowed people in Japan to sort of blow it up a bit and say, well, you know, this is not our food, we're not following strict traditions here, so we can have a bit of fun with it. As long as the rules are followed, anyway.”
Something that I was really keen to talk to about Tim is the idea of being an expert. He is seen, in this country, as an expert on Japanese food. Which is understandable, because he has put the time in, done the research, and does truly know what he’s talking about. But he’s also not Japanese. And Japanese food, in the UK, does not have a wealth and breadth of voices talking about it. So how does he feel about being seen as this expert voice, in that context?
“Yeah, I don't know. For one thing, it's all relative. And if you're the guy in the room who knows the most about something, or more than anybody else, rather, They're going to call you the expert, whether or not you feel that yourself. And they're going to be looking to you for answers. And I accept that.
Like, if I, if people come to me and they say, we would like to know about Japanese food to some degree, whether it's in the form of a book or doing the radio or whatever, I'll say, okay, here's what I know. Here's my opinions on it. Here's what I've learned. But, you're absolutely right that I can't be the only one and I can't be the first stop, basically.
I think you've got to find the right person for the right job. So, I'll give you an example where I didn't do that. Or I did not follow that rule. That's my vegan book. That's the book I probably shouldn't have written. I did my best. They asked me, can you do a vegan book? And I said, okay, I know some things about that.
But really, that's a whole other tradition in Japan. And I mentioned it in the book, there's shojin yori, which is this Buddhist vegetarian tradition. And I said, I basically say in the book, like, I don't know enough about this to write about it, so here's a bunch of other dishes I can write about.
Whereas, in retrospect, I probably should have passed on that one and said, I'm not your expert here. I can do ramen. I can do easy Japanese home cooking. I can do izakaya food. But there's somebody else out there who is going to be able to explain this better. So I guess that's sort of the thing is you've got to find the right expert for the right topic.
And one thing I would like to see more of – and this is again a situation where it's sort of a two way street – I'd like to see more interest in regional Japanese food, and then finding the right person to talk about that. I did a book on Tokyo as well, Tokyo local foods. And then the topic came up at the publisher, it's like, okay, well, what about Kyoto? What about Osaka? What about Okinawa? All these other kind of regions. Like, yeah, absolutely, somebody should do these books. But not me.
And also, the demand has to be there. That's a commercial consideration. But like, you know, would a book on Kyoto food sell? I don't know. But if it does, then absolutely it should be done. And it should be somebody who really knows that cuisine well to do it.”
It was really refreshing to have this kind of conversation with an author and I really appreciated Tim’s honesty in his reflection on whether he would make the same decision about agreeing to projects today. And his creative ambition carries on along the same lines.
“What I would love to do is what Ottolenghi has started doing with these co-authored books. And I don't know exactly what sort of form that would take, if it would ever take form. But because I love writing the books, and I love the learning and research that goes into them it'd be great to sort of collaborate with people on specialist subjects who know more than I do, basically, and get their perspective in, their voices.
Sometimes I think, to be completely honest, it's like, well, I've done the writing, and I've enjoyed it, and I still enjoy it. But at this point, it's almost like, well, I want to be the commissioning editor now. I want to start finding other people who I think are interesting and could write interesting things about Japanese food.
And putting them out there, because I want to see their books.”
Ramen Forever by Tim Anderson is out now, published by Hardie Grant.
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a longer, more in depth version of my conversation with Tim, click here for the podcast.
You can follow Tim Anderson on Instagram and you can follow Lecker there too