Recipe Roundup

Asian Noodle Soup Recipes Worth Making From Scratch

A great bowl of noodle soup lives or dies on the broth, and every recipe on this list builds one worth the effort — whether that effort is twenty minutes or half a day. Start with the two quickest: kitsune udon leans on a light dashi broth and sweet fried tofu pouches, with a vegan kombu-dashi option built into the recipe if you also skip the optional fish cake garnish, while udon noodle soup (kake udon) keeps things just as simple with a dashi-soy broth and a few slices of fish cake on top. From there, four bowls land around 45 to 50 minutes: Japanese miso ramen builds a savory broth around ground pork and a soft-boiled egg; vegan ramen with tofu, mushroom, and pak choi proves a plant-based broth can be just as deeply savory; laksa brings a completely different profile with a spiced coconut-milk base loaded with shrimp and fried tofu puffs; and vegetable tempura udon takes a bit longer, about 50 minutes, to fry a fresh batch of vegetable tempura for that same light dashi broth. The last three are weekend projects: Taiwan beef noodle soup simmers beef shank in a star-anise-scented broth for two hours (about two and a half hours start to finish), traditional Vietnamese pho takes roughly three hours to properly draw flavor from charred aromatics and beef bones, and tonkotsu ramen goes furthest of all, simmering pork bones for the better part of a day until the broth turns rich and cloudy.