Looking for ramen cookbooks? Here are five ramen cookbooks that share how to make this savory noodle dish.
Ramen reminds me of my college days. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was obsessed with making ramen. And when I say obsessed, I mean obsessed.
His dorm kitchen smelled like soy sauce, shiitake mushrooms, and salty seaweed. He fiddled with recipes for ajitsuke tamago (those marinated, boiled eggs you find topping warm bowls of ramen) for hours, trying to get the egg yolk to its jammiest consistency. He showed me that ramen was the sum of five distinct parts: how rich broth, flavorful tare (a thick, glazy sauce), springy noodles, textured toppings, and aromatic oil added up to an umami-forward bowl.
I started experimenting with my own ramen dishes years later. And these (mostly) chef-penned ramen cookbooks are personal favorites, filled with straightforward recipes and simple, flavor-rich broth bases.
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Ivan Ramen
Ivan Ramen is one of the best ramen cookbooks in English. Sure, the first one-third of the cookbook is a memoir (the tale of Ivan Orkin, a New Yorker who broke into Tokyo’s ramen landscape as a gaijin, a foreigner in Japan), but the rest is a masterclass in making ramen—picture thirty(ish) pages dedicated to just one shio ramen recipe. If you follow every step, you’ll be in the kitchen for a good chunk of a week, prepping a dish that might make you weep.
If you don’t want to spend that much time cooking a single bowl of ramen, you could do what I did: try a few steps on a stress-free weeknight and cobble together the rest with blasphemously prepackaged ingredients. You’ll still learn a lot.
Side Note: Ivan Ramen’s slow-roasted tomato recipe is unexpectedly delightful. I first shrugged off this side dish as cookbook filler, but that was a mistake on my part. Every recipe in Ivan Ramen is thoughtful, intentional, and so good.
Ramen
Ramen by Makiko Sano is the cookbook I turn to whenever I want to use fridge and pantry staples. Sano weaves everyday ingredients into zingy, punchy noodle bowls unafraid of fusiony elements like tahini, coconut milk, or mozzarella. Tomato and chicken ramen? Sure, why not (Japan started importing ketchup in the 1960s. So you could find slightly ketchupy ramen, similar to the dish in this cookbook, served in some ramenyas in Japan).
Ramen, the cookbook, features eighty hearty ramen recipes, all created by a Japanese chef who teaches cooking classes at The Suzu House in London.
Let’s Make Ramen
A few winters ago, I came across Let’s Make Ramen, a ramen for beginner’s cookbook I wish I had read in college. A thick culinary comic, Let’s Make Ramen is fun, light-hearted, and easy to follow. Every step is illustrated. And broth portions are so huge that the stock is meant to be batched and stored in the fridge for a week or in freezer-friendly souper cubes (like these) for six months.
Ramen Otaku
If your friends who spend their evenings watching anime, reading manga, and obsessing over One Piece deep dives wrote a cookbook, I suspect it might sound a little like Ramen Otaku. Passionate. Enthusiastic. Nerdy.
Sarah Gavigan is a self-proclaimed otaku ramen (a ramen geek) who credits herself for helping the big city of Nashville fall in love with little bowls of ramen. I’ve popped into Otaku Ramen a few times since moving to Nashville and slurped down helpings of Tennessee Tonkotsu, Otaku’s signature dish. The recipe is one of a dozen mentioned in this ramen cookbook. The rest of the book contains my favorite explanation of umami (the word gets thrown around a lot, and I spent a little too long wondering what it meant), supplies for making a restaurant-style bowl of ramen (the shortlist: an instant pot or a stockpot like this one, a chinois, and an immersion blender), chef interviews (with New York restaurateurs like Yuji Haraguchi, Shigetoshi Nakamura, and Ivan Orkin), and chatty chatter meant to get you in a ramen mindset.
Vegan Ramen
When essential ramen toppings include marinated eggs and pork belly chashu, and stock relies on ingredients like chicken (with giblets left in for extra flavor), fixing up a bowl of vegan ramen can seem out of reach. But Vegan Ramen makes ramen accessible for vegans, with twenty-four unique ramen recipes (the book contains fifty recipes overall). The recipes range from a two-hour-long “beef” stew ramen to a quick instant ramen upgrade. And y’all, the caramelized cabbage stock in this book is genius.
Favorite Vegan Ramen Recipes: Vegan Ramen is a good cookbook. I can’t deny that, but I don’t use it often. I still rely primarily on food blogs, instead of cookbooks, for plant-based ramen recipes. This is my favorite weeknight vegan ramen recipe. I also really like Wil Yeung’s restaurant-style vegan ramen recipes. I primarily watch his YouTube videos for recipe inspiration, but Yeung published his own vegan ramen cookbook if you’re looking for straight-to-the-point instructions to follow.
More Ramen Cookbooks
🍜 Ramen Obsession: I want more cookbooks to format their recipes like Ramen Obsession. You’ll find easy-to-follow instructions, relevant and quick tips and techniques, and red font (right under each recipe title) that reveals whether a dish is gluten-free, nut-free, vegan, or dairy-free (helpful for anyone with allergies). I wish Ramen Obsession had more photos, but that’s my only gripe with this cookbook.
🍜 Ramen For Beginners: Ramen For Beginners shares seventy-five ramen recipes you can try to make with store-bought ingredients. You’ll find a vegan and vegetarian ramen section and a simple, five-ingredient miso tare recipe.
🍜 101 Things To Do With Ramen: Think creative, cheap, Americanized spins on instant ramen, like beer noodles, chicken alfredo, and tuna noodle casserole.
🍜 Japanese Soul Cooking: Japanese Soul Cooking is one of my favorite Japanese cookbooks. The ramen recipes only span pages five to twenty-five, but that small space packs a punch. You’ll find recipes for ramenya classics like shoyu ramen, shio ramen, and tan tan men.
Ramen Pantry Essentials
Most of the ingredients needed for the recipes in these ramen cookbooks can be found at your local Asian grocery store.
Here’s what you’ll need in your pantry:
- Instant Ramen
- Bread flour (if you’re making your noodles from scratch)
- Dried shiitake mushrooms
- White and yellow onions (or shallots)
- Cooking Sake
- Sesame Oil
- Soy Sauce
- Mirin
- Chili Flakes
- Sesame Seeds
- Bouillon Cubes
Did you find this post on the best ramen cookbooks helpful? What are your favorite ramen cookbooks? Let me know in the comments below!
