Four Restaurants around Tokyo for Light and Healthy Ramen!
Ramen is great, but we don’t usually associate it with health or beauty. However, there are more and more ramen stores that use healthy ingredients or put a large amount of vegetables into their soups. Today, let's look at some healthy ramen stores around Tokyo!
Soranoiro and its vegetable ramen
Soranoiro is located in a business area in Hirakawacho. It is famous for making ramen with many different sorts of vegetables.
The most famous dish on the menu is "Veggie Soba," served in a soup made from onion, cabbage and carrots. Paprika is used when making the noodles, giving them an orange color.
The ramen is topped with coleslaw, mizuna (Japanese greens) or mashed potato, all made from seasonal ingredients.Each vegetable adds its own unique flavor to the ramen. The noodles are flat shaped, which is unusual, and they give an innovative texture to the ramen. The "Special Veggie Soba" comes with a flavored egg and an extra helping of vegetables! The vegetable content amounts to 100 g per bowl!
You can also order their vegetable juice (charged separately), which is hand-made in limited amounts.
Menyashono Gotsubo - Vegetable tsukemen!
This tiny ramen store is located near Shinjuku Gyoen National Park. Its name, Gotsubo, literally means five tsubo (unit of measure), which is about 16.5 m2. The famous dish here is their "Veggie Tsukemen." Tsukemen, unlike usual ramen, comes with noodles and soup in separate bowls, and the eater gets to dip the noodles (and the toppings) into the soup. The Veggie Tsukemen, beautifully assorted with a wide variety of vegetables, looks like a modern spaghetti dish prepared by an Italian chef.
The assortment includes grilled char siew, zucchini, okra, yam, radish and cherry tomatoes. There are two dipping sauces you can choose from: niboshi (dried fish) or shrimp, and these come with a slice of lemon. You can feel the medium-sized noodles, dipped in the sauce, unleash complex and powerful flavors each time you gulp them down. And don't worry, if you still have some soup left at the end, order some rice and make yourself a delicious risotto.
Rinsuzu Shokudo - Lemon ramen!
This restaurant is situated along Shinobashi Street.
What is so unique about the ramen here is that there is a whole lemon, sliced, on top of the noodles. The chef originally trained in a soba store specializing in sudachi-soba (soba in a soup containing slices of lime), and this is where he got the idea of using lemon in ramen. The soup is make from pork, kombu and shiitake. A mixture usually used for soba, consisting of soy sauce and mirin is then added to bring complexity and depth to the ramen soup. The gentle and comforting taste of this ramen is ideal after a hard day's work.
It is up to you to eat or not the lemon slices, but the longer they stay in the soup, the more bitter it gets, so it may be better to eat them at the beginning.
Koshinbo - Ramen with flavored egg
"We must challenge general conceptions about ramen: let's make low-calorie ramen!"
This is what the owner of Koshibo thought when creating the recipe of this ramen.
The soup is made a day in advance, then is left to cool down so that the fat separates and can be removed later on. A brilliant idea to make a low-calorie soup!
Made from marinating pork bones with ten different kinds of vegetables and mixing in fish broth (dashi), the resulting soup is full of flavors but gentle to the palate. No oily after-taste like in tonkotsu ramen.
The popular ajitama ramen (ramen with flavored egg) comes with a delicious egg, but also char siew, menma, spring onion, and surprise: lettuce. No need to worry about calories! This is a truly healthy ramen.
Writer: Katsunori Sekino - http://www.studio-woofoo.net/
