What do you do with your turkey carcass after Thanksgiving? My mom suggested making stock, so that’s what we did! And then I realized that we could turn that stock into ramen broth with just a few more ingredients and with the crock pot, we could do it with a lot less effort than it took to make Momofuku ramen broth (which my son and I took 12 hours to do one day – it was delicious, but a lot of work).
So, here’s my turkey ramen recipe, which turned out way better than I expected and was slurped up in minutes by my family.
- We took the turkey carcass, with some leftover meat on it, legs and wings (which no one in my family likes), tore it up and stuffed it disrespectfully into my 6 quart crock pot, then covered it with water. We’d smoked the turkey, so you may get different results if your turkey was roasted, but it’ll still be good.
- Crock pot it on low for 18 hours (really).
- Strain out the broth. I used a metal colander because I don’t have one of those fancy soup colander things. I just wanted to make sure I caught any bones and big chunks. The great thing about ramen broth is that you don’t have to be as diligent about skimming off fat as you would with a classical stock.
- After straining it out, I put the broth back in the crock pot with two packages of mushrooms (one shiitake, one baby bella), a chunk of jowl bacon and two ham hocks and let it go for another 18 hours. You could use bacon ends, a ham bone, just something porky to give it some extra punch. I also added some more water to get it back up to almost the top (I left about an inch between the broth and the top).
- With about four hours to go, I added 2-3 tablespoons of soy sauce. It probably doesn’t matter too much when you add this.
- I didn’t have any ramen noodles, so I made pad thai noodles, which worked fine.
- Plating is pretty easy. In each bowl, I put:
- 1 poached egg (I poached them in a sauce pan full of water and put the eggs in biscuit cutters to keep them together)
- Chopped green onions
- Grated carrots
- Some chopped up leftover turkey
- Finely chopped roasted unsalted peanuts.
That’s pretty much it! The broth came out full of strong flavors, which matched well with the light flavors in the bowl.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the 12 hour process. This worked really well and should be super flexible.
The only thing I might do differently is to actually make the tare instead of just dumping in soy sauce, since it’s easy to make and super versatile. If I were starting from scratch and had it handy, I might also start with the konbu broth and then pour that over whatever poultry I started with in the crock pot.
If you come up with interesting twists on it, let me know what you do!
