This recipe provides you with all of the building blocks of a chintan shoyu ramen, or a soy sauce–flavored ramen with a clear broth. You don't need any special tools other than a pressure cooker, and only a few specialty ingredients. While some of the components do take at least around 12 hours to make, and the process can be stretched to 36 hours, a vast majority of that time is hands-off and/or overnight. The rest of the components—the broth, the tare (or seasoning), and the aroma oil—can be made in about two hours. You can omit the pork entirely, if you prefer.

This recipe will produce more tare and aroma oil than are necessary to flavor the amount of broth it produces, but the aroma oil and tare are also integral components of our miso tori paitan recipe and can be used there, too. A portion of the tare can also be used to marinate the cooked pork belly overnight, which will improve the pork belly's flavor. The tare used to marinate the pork belly can subsequently be used as seasoning for a bowl of ramen.

Any leftover tare you have can be used as an all-purpose seasoning, whether to add some umami depth and complexity to other soups or as part of a glaze or marinade for meat, such as broiled chicken thighs.