Easy Chicken Broth Recipe (Dogs Love This Too)

A good broth makes a huge difference in your ramen soup! It's easy, as I show you in the video (below). Basically, it's simply boiling chicken until the fat has emulsified into the water, making it rich and creamy. You can use any part of the chicken for this. Here, I used chicken hearts because my dog Charlie loves them.

By letting the fat emulsify in boiling water, you get a broth that will push your next bowl of ramen to restaurant quality. Season it however you want. I personally like adding garlic (fresh or powder) and a little salt. That's it, and I'll add other seasonings when I actually make the ramen: Turmeric, ginger, cayenne pepper, and sesame oil. So simple, and so much better than just using the flavor pack that comes with your brick of ramen noodles. My goal is to emulate a tonkotsu ramen broth.

"The characteristic creamy colour of the Tonkotsu broth," says The Japanese Food Lab, "comes from an emulsion of rendered fat, collagen and gelatin, whereby the gelatin acts as a surfactant that emulsifies the fat." This is usually done by boiling pork bones, but it works with chicken or beef just as well. Or, as in my video, chicken hearts.

But what, you may ask, does "emulsify" mean? The Spruce Eats defines it this way: "To emulsify means to combine two ingredients together which do not ordinarily mix easily. The ingredients are usually a fat or an oil, like olive oil, and a water-based liquid like broth, vinegar, or water itself."

Charlie loves hearts!

I'm killing two birds with one stone, so to speak, with the hearts. They're a healthy treat for Charlie.

"As the heart is not a secreting organ, such as the liver, it can be considered muscle meat and is not a high risk for causing loose stools! Recommended feeding up to 10-15% of the diet, or up to 4 per day for cats and small dogs," according to truecarnivores.com.

And I confess that I like them, too.

Related: Amazing Tonkotsu Ramen In Houston

Amazing Tonkotsu Ramen in Houston

Watch onYouTube

Almost everybody, it seems, has eaten ramen noodles. But if the only ramen you know is the kind you get as a dried brick that you get for less than 30 cents per pack at the grocery store, you really don't know ramen.

Don't get me wrong. I love the cheap "instant" ramen and would continue to eat them even if I had Elon Musk's money. But the real deal is what a good restaurant (or home cook!) makes. And it's anything but instant. It's a lot of work to make it. 

Fortunately, great ramen is becoming more accessible to us in the U.S. More and more Americans are becoming aware that good ramen is more than a brick of dried noodles boiled for three minutes!

Teriyaki Kitchen is a ramen lover's dream. (See my video below.) I had the tonkotsu ramen soup, and the velvety pork broth was incredible. Tonkotsu broth feels creamy, but there is no dairy in it. The "creaminess" comes from the emulsion of fat and water as the bones are cooked on a high boil for hours.