Ramen Eggs
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Eggs
- 4 eggs, refrigerated; slightly older eggs peel more easily rounded
Marinade
- 60 ml soy sauce rounded
- 60 ml mirin rounded
- 60 ml sake, or water rounded
- 4 g sugar rounded
Method
Method
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.