Saturday, August 24, 2013

Beef Nikumashi Ramen from Buta God

Buta God, Beef Nikumashi Ramen

Ramen Champion (201 Victoria Street, Bugis+ #04-10, tel : +65 6238 1011) has concluded the results of their second year and it seemed that Ikkousha has won for the second consecutive round. Three stalls were rotated out for newer competitors. Buta God, with their young chef Mamoru Kanaya is one of the new entrants.

What Buta God brought to the table in their bowl of noodles was notably different from the rest. 

The pork component featured thinly sliced marinated pork belly rather than charshu and their eggs were poached rather than hard boiled. On top of that Buta God simmers a tonkotsu based soup with some sort of sukiyaki blend; I'm detecting the trinity of shoyu, mirin and sugar. The result was a broth that was rather sweet, reminding me more than a little of Yoshinoya.

I picked the beef option because they seem to do limited runs of 20 bowls a day. As expected, it was like a ramen version of a gyudon. That was pretty much the only difference between this and their regular pork based bowl. As much as I generally dislike Yoshinoya, those guys actually struck a better savoury balance with the flavour and their sliced beef were also thinner than this one. I guess a buta god was simply not so good with gyu. I managed to finish my broth so I guess it wasn't terrible. But something about the sweetness makes me think that they're going to have a difficult time against the current reigning champion.

1 comment:

DerrickTan said...

This is quite interesting. Ramen for a different using sliced pork belly/beef and poached egg.