Interlude: On Tipping; or, WTF America?

I'm starting a restaurant.  So I have a lot of decisions to make about how I run my business.  Here's one decision I've already made: we won't have table service, and we won't have tipping.  Customers will pay at the register in advance, and the price on the menu is what they'll pay.  I want our restaurant to be convenient, and our prices transparent.  Paying my employees is my problem; it shouldn't be yours.       

Ever stop to think about why we tip in the first place?  Why certain types of employees receive a significant portion of their wages directly from the customer, the amount left to the customer's exclusive discretion?  Employees in most jobs, after all, receive all wages from their employers at a pre-agreed amount.  You don't tip your auto mechanic or your insurance broker--my legal clients certainly don't tip me--but you do tip restaurant servers, hairdressers, and cab drivers.  Tipping conventions are all over the place, and oftentimes we find ourselves guessing what the "rule" is.  This absurd phenomenon, where the price listed on the bill isn't really the price, has run amok in America.  

The Restaurant Payment Transaction. An Ordeal of Inefficiency, Math, and Emotions.

The absolute most frustrating part of dining in America is the combined phenomenon of table service and tipping.  Not table service in the abstract, mind you.  At many restaurants, servers are pretty essential--though not, in my opinion, at a ramen shop.  But what gets me is the inefficiency of table service, particularly at the end of the meal.  Haven’t you ever thought about it?  There you are, you’ve finished eating and are ready to leave, credit card at the ready.  But your server is nowhere to be found, so you can’t go anywhere.  

Can we please have the check?  

As a matter of fact, dear reader, you’re not even close to going anywhere.  First you need to get your server’s attention--something that appears to me inexplicably harder at the end of a meal than at the beginning--and ask for the check.  Second, your server needs to go get the check and bring it to you.  Third, the server must return to your table to collect the check (pray there are no inaccuracies that would necessitate the recalculation of the check).  Fourth, the server must return yet again to deliver your receipt and credit card.  In this everyday scenario, your server will have visited your table four times, simply to execute the payment transaction!! 

But wait!  Your ordeal is not over, for now you must do math!  And not only must you do math, but otherwise mechanical and objective calculations will be inextricably suffused with emotions. Emotions like guilt!  Why?  Because the restaurant has transferred to you, the customer, the job of determining how much money its employees should make, instead of just building the cost of service into the cost of the food and being done with it.   

You feel social pressure to pay more, even when the service was poor, even when you thought your server was a total jerk.  Meanwhile, social tipping conventions continue to become more onerous.  When I was a kid, 15% was acceptable.  My guess is that, today, most people do 20%, and restaurants will even suggest 25% tips on your receipt.  Note re outrage: it gets my blood boiling when this suggested tip is based on a percentage of the combined food and sales tax—nobody should pay for service as a percentage of a wholly separate government surcharge.  

Tipping.  Remind me why we do it this way?

So there you are.  You’ve split the bill four ways with your friends, and you’re all waffling about what to do.  You’ve had a couple of drinks and you’re full; it’s late.  Math isn’t coming easily.  You’re simultaneously trying to be accurate and fair, while desperately hoping you don’t seem like a cheapskate--an even greater risk when four people separately calculate tips on the same base amount.  Again, why is this your responsibility?  This Slate article from 2013 makes the same point, explaining that federal tax law encourages restaurant industry employers to rely on tip-based compensation, turning the "customer into a co-employer."  Another great piece on American tipping culture from Kitchenette is here, if you're interested.  

Let Us Gaze Upon the Rising Sun and Rejoice!

In other countries, it isn’t your responsibility.  American-style tipping isn't the norm in Europe, although in some countries a small gratuity can show appreciation for good service.  As an American, I’ve always been terrified of paying in Europe--should I leave a tip, how much should I leave, if it’s too little will they be offended, if it’s too much will they be offended, if I leave anything at all will they be offended?  

In Japan, there’s no tipping.  Ever.  At any time.  Japanese service is world-class, so it can’t be that tips somehow incentivize better service.  It’s just that a phenomenon that is supposed to incentivize better service has been coopted by the restaurant industry and distorted into a default measure of compensating its workers, using smoke and mirrors to make prices seem lower than they really are. 

Awaiting the Idaho Burger.  Left: A Japanese restaurant where tips are not required.  Right:  A Japanese restaurant where tips are not required.  

And you know what else is great about Japan?  They’ve got table service figured out.  You’ll recall my concerns with end-of-dining efficiency in the U.S.  No problem for the Japanese.  Oftentimes, when a server brings food to your table, an updated check (or an order tally) comes with the food.  So when you decide to order another beer, an updated bill will come with your new round.  And you’ll just take it to a register to pay on your way out.  So instead of four separate trips to your table by your server, it’s just one trip by you to the register.  And off you go!

The way food is served and paid for in this country is a real concern to me, and I think there’s a lot of room for improvement.  I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way. 

Next time at Ramen Chemistry, we’ll be back to umami science.

Umami Science Part II - Taste Phenomena and the Discovery of Umami

OK, so now we know that umami has a huge role in worldwide cuisine.  It's got a Japanese name, but it's hardly an exclusive Japanese thing.  Nevertheless, given the prevalence of umami in Japanese food, it's not terribly surprising that a Japanese scientist first "discovered" umami as a distinct taste phenomenon with a distinct molecular basis.   And this was only about 100 years ago, meaning that the "umami" concept is a pretty recent one, even in Japan.  

Umami was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, a chemist at Tokyo Imperial University (today's University of Tokyo, Japan's most elite school).  After a contemporary hypothesized that "good taste stimulates digestion" Ikeda was apparently inspired to research the connection between flavor and nutrition.  Having grown up eating large amounts of kombu dashi (high-umami broth made from a kind of kelp called kombu in Japan), Ikeda had noticed something unique about dashi.  It was mild, yet highly distinctive.  It wasn't sweet, salty, sour, or bitter.  So Ikeda set out to identify the chemical basis of kombu's flavor.

Original MSG. The first Ajinomoto product (left) and Professor Ikeda's lab notebook (right).  Photo Ajinomoto.  

The Basic Tastes

In order to understand the significance of Ikeda's discovery, we need to understand the concept of "basic tastes."  According to Ikeda, "physiologists and psychologists recognize only the four tastes sour, sweet, salty and bitter."  He distinguished other apparent "tastes" as being something else:  "A hot sensation is just a skin mechanical sensation" and "such qualities as metallic, alkaline and astringent are not considered to be tastes (at least not pure tastes), because they cannot be separated from the sensation accompanied by tissue damage."  

Now let's pause for a second and consider that last statement.  How does one draw a line around what constitutes a "taste" and what doesn't?  Ikeda was writing before we knew a whole lot about cell biology, so we'd like to know how these phenomena are classified by modern scientists.  It seems that the five "basic tastes" all are due to interactions of particular chemical compounds with associated chemical receptors in the taste buds.  

Tongue.  Up close with a scanning electron microscope.

As a recent article entitled "The Cell Biology of Taste" explains, taste "is the sensory modality generated when chemicals activate oral taste buds and transmit signals to a different region of the brainstem."  But the article goes on to state that "[t]aste is commonly confused with flavor, the combined sensory experience of olfaction [smell] and gustation [taste]."  It "is also commonly confused with somatosensory sensations such as the cool of menthol or the heat of chili peppers."  This latter phenomenon, through which other non-taste nerves in the mouth "are capable of responding to irritative chemical stimulation" is referred to as "chemesthesis."  Generally speaking, chemesthetic sensations include (1) chemical irritation and pungency (examples include capsaicin in chili peppers, piperine in black pepper, gingerol in ginger); (2) astringency (examples are tannins and ethanol in wine); and (3) cooling (menthol in mints).  

All that said, research on taste is still evolving.  For example, "The Cell Biology of Taste" explains that "evidence is mounting that fat may also be detected by taste buds via dedicated receptors," meaning that "fat" may turn out to be a sixth basic taste (fatty flavor has historically been viewed, like chemesthesis, as  "somatosensory" in that it derives from a food's texture rather than arising through a gustatory signaling pathway).  

The linked articles above, as well as this BBC piece, are really illuminating if you're interested in further reading on taste science and chemesthesis.  

Signaling Pathways.  The basic tastes and their associated cellular protein receptors (left).  The mechanisms by which the five basic tastes operate in taste cells (right).  Excellent and detailed explanations of both figures here: http://jcb.rupress.org/content/190/3/285.full.  

A Bit About Evolutionary Biology

So why do we experience these basic tastes in the first place?  Why did we develop these complex signaling pathways so that we could experience the tastes of sugars, organic acids (sourness), glutamate, and salt?  Professor Ikeda was inspired by the notion that "good taste stimulates digestion." And that notion--that taste sensations send a message to the stomach to prepare for digestion of the kinds of foods being eaten--is tied to the evolutionary history of taste.  

Taste evolved not only as a means of stimulating digestion.  It also evolved as a way to lead us toward nutritious foods--and away from poisonous ones.  One scientist explains it this way:  "Among the five tastes, salty, sweet and umami (meaty or savory) are appetitive, driving us toward essential nutrients, whereas bitter and sour are aversive, alerting us to potentially harmful substances."  And another pair of authors tells us that each of the various basic tastes "is believed to represent different nutritional or physiological requirements or pose potential dietary hazards."  

An Acquired Taste.  Bitter melon.

Sweetness signals the presence of carbohydrates, saltiness signals critical dietary salts, and umami signals protein. Bitterness is described as "innately aversive" and signals the presence of toxic compounds (it's no coincidence that a lot of poisons actually taste bitter).  It's probably not a coincidence that our sensitivity to bitter compounds is significantly stronger than our sensitivity to sweet compounds.   Sourness is considered "generally aversive," because our bodies want to control the amount of organic acids taken in.  That's also why spoiled foods, which contain lots of acids, often have a sour taste.  

Adding Umami to the Basic Taste Roster

Let's go back to Ikeda's seminal 1909 paper, entitled "New Seasonings," in which he postulated that "there is one other additional taste which is quite distinct from the four tastes.  It is the peculiar taste which we feel as 'umai' [loosely translated as "savory" or "delicious"] arising from fish, meat, and so forth. . . . I propose to call this taste 'umami' for convenience."   

Ikeda employed a painstaking series of extractions, chemical separations, and crystallizations to ultimately identify ionic glutamic acid as the source of umami.  And when I say "painstaking," I mean it.  Ikeda worked in an age before the technological revolution gave us the wide array of powerful analytical instruments we now have at our disposal.  The techniques he used are practically a lost art today.  An article in the Journal Chemical Senses distills Ikeda's work as follows:  it "was done with the procedures of classical chemistry, aqueous extraction, removal of large-scale contaminants [] by crystallization, lead precipitation and numerous other steps of preparative chemistry.  Finally, low-pressure evaporation resulted in the slow crystallization of a single substance with the mass formula C5H9NO4: glutamic acid."  

How Times Have Changed.  Ikeda probably worked in a lab like this one at MIT (top).  His task would be a lot easier today with techniques like LC-MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) (bottom).

Reading "New Seasonings," one is struck by the number and variety of steps Ikeda had to undertake in order to take a piece of kelp and reduce it down to pure crystals of the single molecule responsible for umami (actually he took 38,000 grams--about 84 pounds--of dried kelp, and reduced it to 30 grams of glutamate).  Getting there must have required a tremendous amount of trial, error, and, above all, patience.  

For this achievement, Ikeda has been named one of Japan's "Ten Great Inventors" by the Japanese Patent Office.  But Ikeda took it a step further and commercialized his invention.  As he explained in his paper, "[a] rational method of production satisfying this natural preference [for umami] must be developed."  And so it was.  Ikeda obtained a patent on his process and partnered with "Mr. Saburosuke Suzuki, a well-known iodine vendor," and created Ajinomoto, the company that pioneered the commercialization of MSG.  If you see MSG in a grocery store today, there's a good chance it's sold by Ajinomoto.  

Ikeda and Ajimoto.  http://www.ajinomoto.com/en/aboutus/principles/

You can read more about Professor Ikeda and his discovery here, here, and here, if you want to know more.  

Next time, we'll find out about umami synergy: the way certain ribonucleotides act in concert with glutamate to significantly amplify the umami response.   

Umami Science Part I - How to Think About Umami

So far, we’ve been navigating the basics of ramen here at Ramen Chemistry.  Ramen is our product after all, so that's how I kicked off this blog.  But Ramen Chemistry is not a food blog, per se.  It’s about every aspect of the ramen business.  Once Shiba Ramen secures a physical space (hopefully soon), our lives are going to revolve around getting the business open, and Ramen Chemistry is going to reflect the the diverse things we'll be doing to make it happen.

But here in the last days of (relative) calm before our fire drill starts, I want to take a short detour into the world of science.  Chemical biology and food science, that is.  I want to tell you about the molecular basis for the human umami response.  This is real, current science and it relates to ramen.  Let’s get started!

MSG. Monosodium glutamate. This unnecessarily controversial compound is naturally abundant in many foods we eat every day (see below). 

What Is Umami?

Umami (literally "delicious taste" in Japanese) is, along with sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness, one of the five basic tastes.  It is often described as having savory or mouth-watering quality.  The umami response is triggered by free L-glutamate (one of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids, the building blocks of proteins), usually in the form of its sodium or potassium salt.  The sodium salt is, of course,  monosodium glutamate, MSG.  And, as we'll discuss, the glutamate-induced umami response is strengthened when either of two ribonucleic acids (the building blocks of RNA), guanylate or inosinate, is present.  Foods that contain these chemicals deliver umami.  That's it.

Umami Foods.  Left image shows amounts of glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate in everyday foods.  Right image shows umami-rich foods worldwide.  These images were taken from this very informative article. 

I remember the first time I read about umami. It was in some magazine (I think on an airplane) about a decade ago.  The article described umami as the “elusive Japanese fifth flavor.”  That phrase “elusive” persisted in my thinking for years, in part perhaps because the article’s phrasing—Japanese fifth flavor—left me with the impression that umami was somehow a uniquely Japanese phenomenon.  If that was true, umami may well be elusive to anyone not steeped in Japanese food and culture.  

Umami is elusive, but not because it’s foreign.  Although it’s perhaps more prevalent in Japanese cuisine, with its heavy use of high-umami ingredients like kombu and dried fish, umami has a long history in Western cooking.  The ancient Romans were wild about garum, a fermented fish paste that was full of umami.  A recent article explains that "like Asian fish sauces, the Roman version was made by layering fish and salt until it ferments.  There are versions made with whole fish, and some just with the blood and guts."  The process "creates a fermentation environment that releases more of the protein, making garum a good source of nutrients" and giving "it a rich, savory umami taste."  A food historian is quoted as saying that garum is "very, very flavorful.  It explodes in the mouth and you have a long, drawn-out flavor experience, which is really quite remarkable."

Garum Amphora.  Floor mosaic from garum shop in Pompeii.  The favored condiment in ancient Rome was an umami-heavy paste made of fermented fish guts.

Today, we're wild about pizza, burgers, bacon, roasted tomatoes, oysters, parmesan cheese.  Have you ever eaten at Umami Burger?  Their concept is to make burgers that are umami-maximized.  They do it by invoking non-traditional burger ingredients (and combinations thereof).  They have umami-maximized ketchup on the table, and a very nice appetizer plate of high-umami pickles.  I've eaten there a couple times, and there's a definite difference in how these burgers taste.  Eating one and thinking about its flavor compared to a normal burger is actually a pretty good way of isolating the umami flavor and getting a better sense of what it is.

Umami Burger.  Parmesan frisco, shiitake mushrooms, roasted tomato, caramelized onions, umami house ketchup.

Umami is elusive because of its relative subtlety.  It doesn’t jump out in the obvious way the other four flavors—sweet, salty, sour, bitter—do.  Think about all of the times you’ve thought something was too sweet or too salty.  You probably never thought that something has too much umami.  Umami is also elusive, I think, because we take umami flavors for granted.  We don’t have the “umami” concept in western culture, and we’re just not used to talking about our food in these terms.  

I like to think of umami this way:  imagine the last time you ate a really good slice of pizza.  You were pretty into it, right?  It was hot, the crust was crispy, and it had so much flavor. You had a hard time stopping after a few pieces.  What flavors did you taste?  There was some sweetness and sourness in the tomato sauce, and maybe something was a little bit salty, but of the flavor in that slice of pizza, how much of it can you really assign to sweetness or saltiness, let alone to sourness or bitterness?  All the pizza’s indefinable savoriness, all that flavor that’s not sweet or salty, sour or bitter—that’s umami.  I'm oversimplifying it a bit, I'm sure, but you get the idea behind this thought experiment.  Next time you have pizza or a bacon cheeseburger, think about this formula and maybe umami will start seeming less elusive:

Umami = Total Flavor – (Sweet + Salty + Sour + Bitter)

Maybe you still can’t totally put your finger on it, but by eliminating sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, you see that something else is hard at work making your pizza taste so good.  That’s umami.  

Next time, I'll explain how umami was discovered and how umami happens down at the molecular level.

Ramen 101.4: Everything Else! Noodles, Oils, and Toppings.

Now we’ve worked our way through arguably the two most important components of ramen, soup and tare. The combination of soup and tare goes a long way toward defining the flavor and quality of a bowl of ramen. But the overall experience of a given bowl can—and will—vary wildly depending on everything else that’s in it. Everything else means noodles, oils, and toppings.  

Noodle Basics

Ramen noodles are alkaline wheat noodles, made from flour, water, salt, and carbonate salts like potassium carbonate (K2CO3). The word “alkaline” refers to the basic pH of added carbonates. As this recent column explains, taking the pH to about 9.0 (remember neutral pH is 7.0), natural yellow pigments are released, “giving the noodles a characteristic golden hue. Alkalinity also encourages greater absorption of water in the flour, more starch degradation, and an increase in strength and extensibility. . . . The starch gel within the protein matrix is also strengthened, resulting in a firm, chewy bite.” In other words, it’s the alkalinity that makes a ramen noodle a ramen noodle.

Good old potassium carbonate.  You and I spent a lot of time together during the last Bush Administration.  

The composition of ramen noodles is variable.  Flour can range from 50-70%, water from 25-50%, and carbonates (kansui in Japanese) from 1-3%.  Unsurprisingly, noodles with higher water content are softer.  Noodles with less water are more powdery and have a rougher texture.  They also have a more floury taste.  And they are less springy and absorb water (and become soggy) more readily.  

The type of flour used impacts the properties of the noodle.  This is because different types of flour have different levels of protein content.  The more protein in a flour, the more gluten will be present in the noodle, and the more chewy and elastic the noodle texture will be.  Gluten (in addition to being the leading dietary bogeyman of the past decade) is a composite of two naturally-occurring wheat proteins, gliadin and glutenin, that forms during the kneading process.

Creating Noodle Elasticity.  As the Royal Society of Chemistry explains, "as mechanical work stretches the dough, more hydrogen bonds (black) can form between chains of gluten subunits (orange)."  Great article on the chemistry here:  http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2009/October/Ontherise.asp.  

The shape of the noodle is also important.  The thickness of the noodle influences the sensory experience, the rate of absorption of broth, and the amount of soup that is eaten in a given bite along with the noodles.  Noodles are numbered according to their thicknesses, which are set based on the number and size of the teeth in the noodle machine.

By adjusting these variables--the ratio of water, flour and carbonates, and the thickness and shape of the noodle--you can technically achieve infinite variety in ramen noodles.

Noodle Varieties.  Sun Noodle's product line.  http://sunnoodle.com/our-noodles/

Noodles in Practice

Shiba Ramen is going to buy its noodles, just like most other ramen shops do.  It's easy to buy a wide range of quality and fresh noodles from various wholesalers.  Doing so makes sense from an operational perspective, because you don't have to allocate scarce resources to the non-trivial and constant demands of making noodles.  This is especially case early in the life of the business.  

Of course, some ramen shops do make their own noodles. They use noodle machines: big pieces of equipment that cost between $10K and $30K in Japan.  These things can make 100-300 servings/hour.

Cooking the noodles the right length of time is critical. Noodles that are overcooked or waterlogged are hard to eat, and can ruin an otherwise good ramen. It’s just as important to serve (and eat) them quickly after cooking them. The longer the noodles sit in the bowl, the more soup they’ll absorb and the soggier they’ll get. Quality control is achieved by using a restaurant-grade noodle or pasta cooking machine with a timer.  And, of course, by paying attention to what you're doing!

Noodle Machine Catalogue.  http://www.yamatomfg.com/item/richmen/

Oils

Oils are often used to enhance the sensory experience of a bowl of ramen. It makes sense—fats are full of flavor, after all. Because the oil sits on top , it's the first thing to hit your spoon when you scoop up some broth, and the noodles pass through it as you eat them, too, picking up flavor along the way.

You can pretty much make an oil out of any ingredient, so oils are a great way to add some flavor punch to a bowl of ramen. You may have seen blackened garlic oils or spicy chili oils (like la-yu) at ramen restaurants. You can even use the clear, golden chicken oil that rises to the top when making a chintan soup. Pork back fat can also be used. And have you ever had shio butter ramen? It's served with a chunk of butter dropped into the hot soup. Yes, it's good.

Toppings

If you've eaten very much ramen, you already know there are no real rules for topping ramen. Slices of pork chashu, soft-boiled egg, menma, negi (green onion), and nori paper are pretty conventional, and it might be expected that one or more of these ingredients will come with a bowl of ramen. Some of Shiba Ramen's menu items will feature these standards.

There's a ton of flexibility, though, and chefs are hardly limited to this traditional set of toppings. As Ramen Chemistry develops, I'll make sure to show a lot of ramen, both ours and others, so readers can get a sense of the range that's out there.

Chashu.  This article has a great recipe and discussion: http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/03/the-food-lab-ramen-edition-how-to-make-chashu-pork-belly.html.

Ramen 101.3 - Tare

Now that we know all about soup, let’s take a quick march through the rest of ramen’s core elements. Today, we’ll talk about tare.  

When you go to a ramen ya (that’s the Japanese term for ramen restaurant), you’ll often see ramen categorized by the type of tare used in a particular bowl. We’ve all seen shio (salt), shoyu (soy), and miso ramens. This is not to say that ramen is always named according to its tare. When you see tonkotsu ramen, for example, the reference is to the soup, not the tare. And when you hear tonkotsu shoyu, the reference is to both.  But the point remains that if you’ve eaten much ramen, you’re already familiar with tare, even if you didn’t appreciate the details until now.

The most basic function of tare is to bring saltiness to the ramen. But tare can do a lot more than just deliver salt.  It can be a vehicle for additional umami, sweetness,  sourness, or spiciness.  For example, shoyu and miso are both salty, but both are also sources of umami, and each brings its own unique flavor profile to the ramen. 

Shoyu is a fermented soy bean product.  There are tons of different kinds, with different flavor profiles.  Here in the U.S., we can only get a snapshot of the shoyu variation found in Japan.  Photo credit: http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/do-you-know-your-soy-sauces-japanese-chinese-indonesian-differences.html.  

Importantly, just calling a ramen “shoyu” or “miso” doesn’t tell you anything about what else is in its tare. In those examples, soy sauce or miso paste might be the main ingredient, but it’s not at all uncommon to have 5-10 other ingredients, as well. A good ramen shop isn’t just dumping a load of soy sauce or miso into the ramen simply to have done with it. Other common ingredients include mirin (explained below), dashi, vinegar, sake, spices, garlic, ginger and oils.  The reality is that you can add a lot of different things, and everything can be adjusted to taste.  There aren't hard and fast rules here.

Hipsters rejoice!  In Japan, artisinal shoyu-making is a nationwide industry.  Photo credit: http://www.yuasashoyu.com/eshop/item.html

The key thing with tare is to use the right amount. Typically, tare is combined with soup in an approximate 1:10 ratio. Miso, however, is something of an exception.  It's common to use more than 10% miso, because miso is contains less salt per unit weight than soy sauce.  To achieve the same level of saltiness in a miso ramen, the amount of miso must be relatively larger.  The point is that no number is absolute, and in practice everything is optimized to taste.  

Miso is yet another fermented soybean product (how about that soybean, eh?).  Like shoyu, there are many kinds of miso, and many distinct flavors.  Photo credit:  http://www.crunchyroll.com/forumtopic-674040/how-to-make-miso-soup.

When it comes to ramen, the soup is the most important and fundamental ingredient.  The tare should be viewed as an additive that is there to support and enhance the soup.  It's not something that should become too overwhelming in its own right.   

Tare book.  In Japan, you can buy whole books on tare. We got this tare textbook in Japan (you can get it on Japanese Amazon here). 

A note about mirin.  According to Wikipedia, mirin is an "essential condiment used in Japanese cuisine."  It is a type of rice wine that is low in alcohol content and high in sugars, and is commonly used to add sweetness to ramen.  After seeing a lot of Japanese foods being cooked at our house, I've come to realize how important mirin is as a basic culinary ingredient.