Immigration in any society is a complex and controversial subject. It’s something that is likely to get tempers flaring and people marching on the streets. I don’t normally have much to say on the topic, it’s normally a dead end. Like pineapple on pizza, people tend to do a lot of talking about immigration and very little listening. If you enjoy being lectured at, just mention immigration. It is a subject that will ruin a social occasion faster than a whole battalion of drunk uncles.

As someone interested in food, though, I have always been a little struck by the hypocrisy at the heart of our attitude to immigrants and their food. People like new food, they flock to restaurants showcasing some new cuisine. Society, it seems, can embrace foreign cuisines, make them “cool” even, while voraciously debating the evils of having those who produce that food in the country in the first place. Like the late-night hook-up with an ex, people want immigrant’s food more than they want the actual immigrants. I’m willing to bet hard cash that many an anti-immigration march, in Australia at least, has been planned in a Chinese restaurant.

There is a very clear example of this in Australia’s recent history. Between 1901 and 1973 Australia had a set of immigration laws specifically designed to keep Australia not just white but British-white. There was no attempt to hide this intent under a euphemism, it was called the White Australian Policy. Yet even this draconian set of laws had a provision that allowed for the immigration of Chinese chefs to Australia. Like an adulterous preacher, Australian law makers at the time weren’t quite ready to accept all the consequences of their moral framework. The nations supply of sweet and sour needed to be protected.

It was the after effects of the White Australian Policy that ensured a certain lack of culinary diversity when I was growing up in 1980s suburban Brisbane. Fine if you enjoyed fish and chips or rotisserie chicken, not so good for anything else. We didn’t know that other types of food existed. Back then Brisbane suburbs were whiter than the sunscreen we used to protect our pale skin from the harsh Australian sun, we just didn’t have a lot of immigrants exposing us to their food. Even in parts of Australia with greater immigrant populations we were slow on the uptake. Greek immigrants, for example, were famous for running American-style diners. Serving hamburgers and milkshakes not souvlaki or spanakopita.

In this environment it seemed impossible that I would be exposed to a Japanese noodle soup, with seaweed in it no less. Amazingly, though, ramen found a way. It’s a well-known story how instant ramen, invented by Momofuku Ando and sold by Nissan Foods, paved the way, in the West, for the proper ramens that we all enjoy today. In 1980s Brisbane though, even Japanese instant ramen was rarely sighted. What we did have was a product called Maggi 2-Minute Noodles that were in everything but name, and flavouring, instant ramen.

Not that you would know it from the packaging. There was absolutely no indication that Maggi noodles were a version of a Japanese noodle soup. The word “noodle”, for Australians at least, may have hinted at some foreign, potentially Asian, connection lurking in the background, but that was about it. They were mass-produced food, all their cultural origins replaced with generic marketing. But we youngsters loved them.

It was only a matter of time, though, before we would discover that Maggi noodles, and, over time, other more obviously Asian instant ramens, were merely gateways to proper ramen. Asian immigration to Australia increased after the end of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s and with the immigrants came their food. It’s a bit hard to say, but the first real ramen shop probably opened around 1997, in Sydney, but others soon followed, all around the country, even in Brisbane¹.

We children of the 80s were all grown up by this stage and eager to try the real version of a childhood staple. It was something of a revelation. Unfortunately, the major revelation was that when eating Maggi 2-minute noodles we’d been eating the Kraft singles of the noodle soup world. We discovered that Maggi noodles were really a serving of broken promises in a salty lie.

Finally trying the real thing, we discovered that real ramen was a complex savoury broth, the result of hours of simmering, served with firm, chewy noodles with a unique alkaline flavour. We discovered that it took real expertise and skill to make ramen. We discovered that proper ramen came with interesting toppings like chashu pork, naruto, soy-marinated boiled eggs and pickled ginger, to name a few. We discovered that thinking you could reproduce the complexity and flavour of a real ramen using a flavour sachet was a type of madness caused by excessive exposure to the output of a marketing department. Ramen, along with sushi, which was on a similar trajectory, became a shining symbol of Japan cuisine.

This is a great story, one that has been repeated all over the world. But it is not the whole story. If you look a little deeper you discover that this is not the first time that ramen has had to overcome cultural barriers. In fact, and it may be something of a surprise, ramen is not even originally a Japanese dish. The Japanese have made it their own but before they could do this ramen had to make the journey to Japan and then establish itself in a sometimes hostile environment, just like it did in 1990s Brisbane.

So if ramen didn’t start in Japan, where did it start? Well, a clue to ramen’s origins can be found in it’s nature. The star of a ramen is the broth. The broth gives the ramen its character. The broth is the exciting part of a ramen. Without a good broth a ramen is nothing. But the noodles are also vitally important. If the broth is the soul of the ramen, then the noodles are its bones. Without the noodles the ramen would just be soup, a tasty soup no doubt, but who wants to eat soup for lunch every day? I, for one, want something filling, something to chew, some contrast to the broth and softer toppings, and this is what the noodles provide.

To play this role the ramen noodle needs some real character. It needs to be strong enough to not go soggy in a broth and elastic enough to provide springiness and chew. Other noodles can’t do this. Udon noodles are too big, too demanding, they consider themselves the star and like to be paired with a more delicate broth that wont compete with them. Egg and rice noodles have their place, but it is not in a bowl of ramen, they go soggy too quickly. No, a real ramen needs noodles that are happy to play a supporting role to the broth but have enough character to stay firm and provide a meaty chew. What’s needed is the Steve Buscemi of the noodle world and the only noodles that can play this role are ramen noodles.

The reason that ramen noodles can do this is because they are made of wheat flour. If you have read my post on pasta you’ll know that wheat flour contains proteins that can be developed, by kneading, to form a strong, elastic protein network that we call gluten. It is the amount of protein, and how much that gluten is developed, that gives a wheat-based dough it’s strength. If an appropriate hydration (a fancy way of saying how much water you add to the dough) is used gluten lets you make a nice strong, elastic noodle.

By this logic, though, we could just use spaghetti in our ramen², but when it comes to ramen noodles gluten is not the whole story. Ramen noodles have an ingredient called kansui, an alkaline mixture of sodium and potassium carbonate, that is added when the dough is made. Kansui is a base or, more precisely, carbonate is a base and when you add a base to something you increase its pH. Proteins, as we know, are sensitive to pH because the acidity, or it’s converse alkalinity, can alter the charge of various acids and bases that are found on the surface of proteins.

In ramen noodles, kansui strips protons from carboxylic, sulfhydryl and other acidic groups, making them negative, while also removing them from positively charged ammonium groups, making them neutral. Overall, this makes the proteins that make up gluten negative. Because like charges repel, this makes the proteins start to separate and unwind.

If this was all that happened then kansui would be weakening the gluten network but the unwinding of these proteins also exposes reactive chemical groups; sulfhydryl groups probably being the most important. These chemical groups, that had been buried within the folded proteins, are now free to react with similar molecules on other proteins, forming covalent bonds that securely fix the protein network together. These bonds not only strengthen the dough but they also provide the elasticity that gives us the springiness and chew that we love in our ramen noodles.

Using kansui to make wheat noodles ramen noodles is a pretty clever innovation. As is often the case, though, the discovery had more to do with serendipity than strategy. It’s thought that about 1700 years ago noodle makers who lived around the shores of Lake Kan noticed that wheat flour dough made with waters from the lake had an unusual alkaline flavour and that they were unusually strong. Lake Kan, now called the Jilantai Salt Lake, is unusually rich in natural deposits of sodium carbonate which meant that waters of the Kan (hence the name kansui) made some good strong dough when used with wheat flour³.

Given ramen’s association with Japan you might be forgiven for thinking that Lake Kan is in Japan, but it isn’t. It’s in Inner Mongolia and for centuries Chinese cooks used the waters to make a strong dough that they used for noodles and dumplings. In particular Chinese cooks developed a style of noodle that they called lamian. They made lamian by repeatedly stretching, twisting and folding the dough by hand. This method is reflected in the name, lamian translates to “pulled noodles”. These hardy noodles were used in a variety of stir fries and salads, but also in soups. Soups that look quite a bit like ramen, the most famous being Lanzhou Beef Noodle Soup.

So how did a noodle soup dish that was created in Inner Mongolia become one of the national dishes of Japan? The answer is it happened in much the same way that ramen got to suburban Brisbane in the 1990s. That is, with immigrants. Though 1980s Brisbane and late 19th century Japan were very different places, in one way they were remarkably similar, both places were pretty much monocultures that were beginning to experience immigration after a long period of government enforced isolation.

In Brisbane, the lingering effects of the White Australian Policy made it a little bit of Britain sitting in Asia. In Japan, from the 1630s onwards, the Tokugawa Shogunate had enforced a strict isolationist policy called sakoku, or locked country. This policy prevented almost any foreigner from entering Japan and any Japanese person from leaving. There was no ramen in Japan during this time which meant that a Japanese person in the 1740s had as much chance of getting a ramen as I had in 1980s Brisbane.

Sakoku came to end in 1853 when Matthew Perry sailed his heavily armed steamships into Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay). Whatever we may now think about the “gunboat” diplomacy used by Perry it did start to open Japan to outsiders. Chinese immigrants, who started arriving in newly opened port cities like Yokohama, brought their lamian with them. From there it was the usual boy meets noodle soup story and lamian noodle soup started becoming popular in Japan as shina soba, literally Chinese noodles.

After WWII, when rice was scarce but American wheat more plentiful, carts selling ramen provided a nutritious alternative to more expensive rice dishes. With the post-war boom the noodle soup became even more popular as a reasonably cheap and fast way for office workers to feed themselves. It also had a couple of name changes, shina soba had some ugly Imperial connotations, but eventually the Japanese mispronunciation of lamian, ramen, won the day.

By the 1960s, we’ve almost come full circle. Momofuku Ando, himself having Taiwenese and Japanese ancestry, created instant ramen and started selling it to the world. Maggi’s knockoff turned up in suburban Brisbane in the 1980s and next thing you know, in modern Australia, free of the White Australia policy, I can get a tonkotsu ramen for lunch everyday. And it’s not just ramen. In modern day Australia I have a dazzling array of dining options: Thai, Chinese, Ethiopian, Korean, Japanese, Persian, the list is endless. What I also get is the result of people mixing these different cuisines, learning from each other and creating even more interesting things. If the death of the White Australian Policy was the price we had to pay for the Thai Beef Eggs Benedict with Tom Yum flavoured hollandiase that I had last week then that is a very small price to pay indeed.

Footnotes

1. For a much more rigorous and academic look at the evolution of ramen in Australia see here. ↩︎
2. If you are in a pinch you can actually use spaghetti as a ramen noodle. For reasons explained above, the trick is to cook it with some baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) which gives it some springiness, some flavour and some of the colour of a real ramen noodle. If you want to try this there is a recipe here. ↩︎
3. This may have been particularly obvious in China because Asian wheat varieties are generally lower in protein than those used in somewhere like Italy. Discovering that using the waters of the Kan made stronger pasta would have been a welcome development for chefs trying to make noodles for broths and dumplings where you want some extra strength in your dough. ↩︎