Hop into the SoraKitchen with us for a super-easy way to supercharge your rice cooker cooking.

Because of how delicious ramen is, it’s pretty much impossible to make a bowl of the stuff and not eat each and every noodle. It’s a different story, though, when it come to the broth.

On one hand, the broth is really where ramen’s flavor comes from, but you’ll almost always run out of noodles before you drink all of the liquid. Usually, this means you’ve got some broth to dump down the sink at the end of your meal…unless you follow the brilliantly lazy recipe we recently developed at SoraNew24 headquarters.

Aside from some leftover ramen broth, you’ll need:

1. Rice
2. A rice cooker

…and that’s it.

Simply put the uncooked rice in the rice cooker, and pour in the ramen broth as a substitute for the water you’d usually use for the cooking process. A standard Japanese one-person serving size for rice is 180 milliliters (6.1 ounces by volume), which requires 200 milliliters (6.8 ounces) of liquid to cook, so those were the portions we used for this article.

Though you can use any sort of ramen broth, the kind we happened to have on hand was Nissin’s Chicken Ramen. Sure enough, about 10 minutes after he hit the start button, the steam coming out of the rice cooker took on a delicious chicken broth aroma, which filled the room and made us feel like we were relaxing in a ramen sauna.

After 30 minutes, the cooking process was done, so we popped open the lid to see…

…a ready-to-eat pot of rice that had taken on an inviting golden color.

Given how noticeable the ramen scent was, we braced ourselves for a mercilessly salty taste, but were surprised to find chicken ramen rice has a softer touch on the tongue than it does on the nose. There is, however, an enticing and rewarding meaty sweetness to the flavor profile, and we happily went in for mouthful after mouthful.

Luckily, we did manage to restrain ourselves long enough for another round of inspiration to strike. One of the most popular, and delicious, ways to spruce up a bowl of ramen is to crack an egg into it, letting the heat of the broth cook it in the bowl. There’s a similar Japanese dish called tamagokake gohan, where you add a raw egg to rice, and so we quickly came to the conclusion that doing the same to our chicken ramen rice would make it even tastier…

and we were right!

Honestly, the only downside here is that since you’re using leftover broth to make the rice, you might not have enough materials to make enough ramen rice for all of your coworkers/housemates who will pester you for a bite.

Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]