Brown Butter Miso Ramen: The Bowl I Made to Get Through a COVID Winter

This one goes back to COVID.

We weren't allowed to seat guests indoors, and it was the middle of winter. We had heaters out front for everyone eating outside, which helped them. It didn't do much for me. I was standing out there for hours every day, freezing, genuinely worried I was going to get sick.

What I wanted was a bowl of miso ramen to warm me up.

What We Had at the Time

We already had a miso ramen on the menu, but it was Tokyo style, a lighter miso, cleaner and less heavy.

It's a good bowl. It just wasn't the thing that was going to get me through standing in the cold for another four hours.

The Hokkaido Part

So I thought about how they do it in Hokkaido, where it actually gets cold, and where butter in ramen is normal.

That was the obvious move. Add butter.

Then I started thinking about it more. Miso has a nuttiness to it. Browned butter also has a nuttiness to it. Those two things should belong together, not just butter melting into the broth, but butter that's been taken a little further and given some color.

So I charred it.

What Went In

I grilled chicken with a heap of garlic, ginger, and butter, let the butter take on some color, and put the whole thing into my miso ramen.

It worked immediately. Better than I expected. The browned butter didn't sit on top of the miso, it went into it, the nutty side of the miso came forward, and the whole bowl got rounder and deeper.

I made it for myself. Then I made it for staff. Then we put it on the menu.

What's in the Bowl Now

The grilled chicken is how it started, not where it ended up.

All our ramen runs on a tonkotsu base, and this one is no exception, the browned butter and miso are built into that. Toppings are chashu, menma, spinach, egg, corn, and scallion.

The corn isn't decoration. Corn and butter together is a Hokkaido thing, which is where this whole idea came from in the first place.

Our Most Popular Ramen

It's now the ramen we sell more of than any other, and the first thing listed when you pull up our online ordering page.

Which still amuses me a little, because it exists entirely because I was cold and worried about getting sick in a winter when we couldn't let anyone sit inside.

Try It at Juraku

Brown Butter Miso Ramen is on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. If it's your first time here and you want one thing that explains the place, order this.

See the rest of the menu.