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2010-02-14

Hinode Ramen/Yokohama
日の出らーめん/横浜

    

Hinode Ramen is a very casual shop in a slightly sketchy area of Yokohama, on Hirato-Sakuragi Dori, right next to an off-track betting office and right after several other ramen shops on the other side (going south-west on the dori). Lots of crusty old men in track suits and slightly creepy looking younger guys milling around with racing newspapers folded up under their arms. Hinode Ramen makes great press of their different tonkotsu gyoukai tsukemen types and their thick noodles. Their most popular dish "gou-tsukemen" or "剛つけ麺" (剛 = "gou" = strong, masculine) will run you a mere 750 yen, before adding any of the toppings. However I decided to go for their special dish, the "剛満つけ麺" or "gou-man-tsukemen", for 900 yen. This is a special tsukemen that they claim scores 30 on the Brix scale (they transliterate it as ブリックス). I found it to be so thick, with little clumps of stuff, that it was like pudding. Offically the Brix Scale is a standard way of measuring and describing the sugar content of a given liquid, such as measuring the amount of sugar in grape juice so you know what kind of wine it will produce. But this shop seems to have co-opted the term to mean something more like specific gravity, which is a sort of related concept but not exactly the same. This guy must have gotten a Brix measuring device or a refractometer and started measuring the density of his tsukemen broth. Isn't that clever. The fattening/thickening agent is presumably some combination of lard and rice/wheat flour, or something similar to cornstarch. The place also claims to have super-thick noodles (kiwami) but they weren't thicker or significantly thicker than any other super-thick noodle tsukemen place I have been to, in fact I have been to a couple that have been thicker.

Note though that the Brix 30 (ブリックス30) gou-man-tsukemen is only available from 5 PM onwards, and there are only a limited number each day.

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Video showing how ridiculously thick it is
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