Ramen love: Rediscovering the flavors of my childhood

When I was little, I didn’t understand why my mom loved ramen so much. She would buy packs of ramen – the ones with dry noodles and just-add-water broth granules in a silver packet – at the Japanese grocery store and ask Obaachan, my grandmother, to make it for her with additional toppings like a runny egg, pork or steak, and some vegetables.

I liked ramen, but my mom could sometimes eat it two or three days in a row; I joked that ramen broth ran through her veins. I preferred other Japanese foods over ramen, mainly sushi, but I also enjoyed foods like shrimp tempura; guratan, a type of Japanese macaroni gratin; and goma, or sesame pudding made with heavy cream.

After I moved out of my childhood home, and Obaachan returned to Japan after 23 years of living in the United States, I stopped eating most of the Japanese foods I grew up with. I had decided to adopt a plant-based diet to reduce my carbon footprint. I was cooking for myself and my then-boyfriend (now-husband), and most vegan recipes I found online were dupes for typical American dishes: pastas, salads, wraps, chilis, and burger patties.

Thanks to my newfound interest in a plant-based diet, I had unintentionally placed most of the cultural foods I had grown up with on the hardest-to-reach shelves in my pantry, effectively leaving my kitchen devoid of warmth. No matter how good the food was, I felt disconnected from the recipes I found online. They lacked the familiar flavors and memories of cooking and feasting alongside loved ones who created a little Japan for us in the confines of my childhood kitchen.

On my highest shelves sat unused bottles of rice vinegar and packs of soba, collecting dust. They were little pieces of what I associated with my cultural identity: the handed-down flavors and nostalgic tastes of favorite meals, cooked by a loved one who speaks the ancestral language better than I do.

After about three years of eating a plant-based diet, I learned about shojin ryori, a type of Buddhist cuisine that focuses on seasonal vegetables and omits the use of animal products. As I leafed through the colorful pages of a shojin ryori cookbook that I requested for Christmas one year, I knew that I had found culinary paradise. It straddled the limbo between my childhood and cultural roots, and my adulthood decision to adopt a plant-based diet. I didn’t have to pick one – shojin ryori embraced all of me.

Taking inspiration from the cookbook, I began to revisit the Japanese foods from my childhood through this lens. I searched for specific recipes like vegan ramen, vegan sushi, even vegan takoyaki, grilled dumplings stuffed with octopus.

Although I did not cook everything I searched for, I would examine the ingredients and learn new ways to substitute certain foods. I used yuba, or dried tofu skin, to mimic the chicken cutlets I had growing up; I substituted shiitake mushrooms for octopus in takoyaki; and I even found a Japanese company that makes a vegetable broth that gave my dishes a more Japanese flavor than the vegetable bouillon from the grocery store down the street.

I started incorporating and consuming more vegetables found in Japanese cuisine, like lotus root; kabocha squash; kabu, or Japanese turnips; and various types of mushrooms, from enoki to kikurage, or wood ear mushroom. Ironically, some of these were staples in my childhood kitchen.

In the midst of all my experimentation, I had a full-circle realization. I finally understood why my mom loved ramen so much. There is something comforting about drinking a flavorful, hot liquid that fills the stomach while warming the body, reaching the heart and unlocking memories. Like my mother, I’ve found my comfort food is now a bowl of noodles in hot soup, especially ramen.

The process itself is restorative. As I prepare the broth in one pot and boil the noodles in another, the rigid noodles slowly relax to fit the perimeter of my stainless steel pot. Steam rises from the water, even after I take out the noodles, and I can see the swirling ghosts dancing above the water, white from the starches released into it, like the bathtub in which Obaachan used to bathe my sister and me, the water foamy with soap bubbles.

It reminds me of when Obaachan, my aunt, my mom, my sister, and I went to an onsen, or Japanese hot spring, in Hakone, a mountainous town west of Tokyo. I was between 7 and 10 years old, and had never been to an onsen before. Stripping down and bathing nude in public bathhouses and onsen is a normal thing in Japan. Despite being raised by a Japanese grandma, I felt embarrassed as I tried to cover my body after we placed our clothes in cubbies on the women’s side of the onsen.

Still, I tried my best to not be embarrassed, to relax into the onsen culture. After a while, as we bobbed in the water, the embarrassment melted away. Like the noodles I cook in my kitchen, I went from rigid to relaxed in the mineral bath, steam emanating from the water, my body soaking up all the goodness.

I finally felt at home.