PAITAN (白湯) “WHITE SOUP”

The first time I had a tori paitan was at Totto Ramen in NYC. I sat in amazement and just kept asking myself, This is just chicken broth? What I didn’t understand was how it could be creamy like that . . . without cream. I was so mesmerized by it that I set out to learn how to make it. I had never had a creamy chicken broth until I had ramen, even though I grew up eating a lot of chicken soup in the South. My mom excels at it, and sometimes she’d make a creamy chicken soup, but it was usually canned, or she used dairy to thicken it. The fact that you could extract the marrow from chicken bones to make it a creamy broth was mind-blowing to me.

Tonkotsu, the milky-white pork broth and arguably the world’s most popular ramen broth and style, is also technically a paitan, as it is a cloudy stock and the name of the game is extracting the marrow to give it the milky-white look and texture.

Another valuable piece of the paitan puzzle to note here is emulsification. You want to basically blend your strained stock either in a blender like a Vitamix or with an immersion hand blender, which I prefer because it creates less mess. Emulsifying, or blending, makes the larger fat globules into smaller globules and is the key to a great tori paitan or tonkotsu. When I started making ramen, I knew enough to know that all those pretty little balls of oil floating in the bowl when I took a sip made the whole bowl better, but admittedly it took me a while to figure out that you had to emulsify to get the creamy texture. So if you are going to get serious about making these broths, buy a handheld immersion blender. (Not expensive.)