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Halved marinated soft-boiled eggs with jammy orange yolks, stained brown by soy marinade
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Side Japanese Asian Vegetarian Dairy-free

Ramen Eggs

Ajitsuke tamago, the marinated soft-boiled eggs that make a homemade ramen bowl look and taste like a shop bowl, jammy-yolked from an exact seven-minute boil and stained savoury-sweet by an overnight bath in soy, mirin and sake. The marinade never gets cooked and never touches the pan, which is the whole appeal, the only technique in the recipe is timing the boil and having the patience to wait a day.

Prep5 min
Cook7 min
Rest720 min
Servings4
Cook mode

Adapted from Just One Cookbook's ramen egg, the standard ajitsuke tamago ratio of equal parts soy, mirin and sake.

Ingredients

Written for a 2 L pot

Units
Temperature
Servings
4

Eggs

  • 4 eggs, refrigerated; slightly older eggs peel more easily

Marinade

  • 60 ml soy sauce
  • 60 ml mirin
  • 60 ml sake, or water
  • 4 g sugar

Dietary labels are a guide, not a guarantee. If you have an allergy, read the ingredients yourself.

Method

  1. Mix the marinade. Stir the soy sauce, mirin, sake and sugar in a container just big enough to hold the eggs snugly, until the sugar dissolves.
  2. Boil the eggs for exactly 7 minutes. Bring a pot of water to a full boil. Lower the cold eggs in gently with a spoon and start the timer immediately. Keep the water at a steady, gentle boil.
  3. Shock them. Move the eggs straight into a bowl of iced water and leave them for 5 minutes. This stops the cooking at jammy and makes peeling possible.
  4. Peel carefully. Crack the shells all over against the counter and peel under a thin stream of cold water, starting from the fat end where the air pocket is.
  5. Marinate overnight. Submerge the eggs in the marinade, refrigerated, for at least 4 hours and ideally overnight. If they float, hold them under with a folded piece of paper towel laid on top, which wicks marinade over the exposed patch.
  6. Serve halved. Slice lengthwise with a thin sharp knife wiped between cuts. One egg per bowl of ramen, or eat them straight from the container as a snack.

Notes

  • The 7 minutes are from a boil and from the fridge. Room-temperature eggs or water that is merely simmering both shift the yolk past jammy. Change one variable at a time if your stove runs different.
  • Do not marinate past about 2 days. The white keeps absorbing salt and eventually turns rubbery and aggressively seasoned. The sweet spot is 12 to 24 hours; the eggs keep 3 to 4 days total in the fridge.
  • The used marinade is not dead. Strained, it can marinate one more batch within a few days, or be simmered into a glaze for rice.
  • Made for miso ramen and spicy shoyu ramen, but they disappear as snacks at exactly the rate you let them.

Ingredient substitutions

  • Mirin is the sweet rice wine that gives the marinade its rounded edge; German and Canadian Asian grocers stock it routinely. The substitute is the sake-plus-sugar route, an extra 60 ml sake with 12 g more sugar. Non-alcoholic households can use 60 ml water with 15 g sugar for the mirin and water for the sake; the eggs are a little flatter but entirely worth making.

Sources consulted

Good with

Sources consulted

From Christoph Mayer

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