The Secret Of Ramen

Ren gave a big nod and began to speak.

“What my ramen—and Brad’s—was missing… was ‘kachō’!”

As he spoke, Ren thumped a container filled with pure white powder onto the counter.
Brad leaned forward eagerly.

“K-Kachō…? What is this!? What’s it made from, and how do you make it?”

Ren folded his arms and raised his chin as he answered.

“Kachō is short for chemical seasoning. It’s mainly made by fermenting sugarcane… This stuff is an unbelievable magic powder that’ll make practically any dish ‘taste better’ just by adding it!”

“A-A magic powder that makes… any dish taste better!?”

Both Ouri and I cried out in astonishment.

Ren nodded with a serious expression.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

A low groan escaped from the back of my throat.

“Hmmm, I find that very hard to believe! To think such a godlike substance could actually exist… May I taste a little?”

Ren thrust up his thumb.

“Sure. Brad, Ouri-san, Maria—you guys too… Go ahead and try some!”

Our hearts pounding, we each pinched up some of the powder and put it into our mouths, expecting some heavenly flavor that would make our tongues melt. But…

“…???”

There was hardly any flavor to speak of.

No, there was a slight saltiness, and beyond that I could detect something resembling a savory note… but we looked at one another and tilted our heads in confusion.

Seeing our reactions, Ren laughed.

“Well? Barely tastes like anything, right?”

“Y-Yes. It certainly isn’t unpleasant… but neither is it particularly delicious. It hardly seems like the magic powder you described!”

Brad, however, adopted a serious expression.

“No… Rinsir-san. I don’t think we can dismiss it quite so easily.”

Brad stared intently at the pure white powder as he continued.

“It has no noticeable color, and it isn’t especially salty or sweet. It barely has any smell either. And yet the savory taste lingers on the tongue. With so few distracting flavors of its own, you could add this to almost any dish without ruining it.”

Ren slapped his knee.

“That’s it! Exactly! I knew a ramen chef would get it!”

Everyone’s eyes immediately turned toward Ren.

With a stern expression, Ren continued.

“The more of this you add, the tastier food gets. And on top of that, it’s cheap. In other words, even carelessly made ramen can turn into ‘decently edible ramen’ just by dumping a load of this stuff into it! Of course, there’s a world of difference between adding kachō as the finishing touch to ramen you poured your soul into and thoughtlessly throwing heaps of it in from the start. Only the former is gonna move a customer.”

Brad’s expression soured.

“So even lazily made ramen can still satisfy customers…? That makes all the effort seem ridiculous!”

Ren gave a wry smile.

“Yeah. Especially for cooks like us, we’ve got this strong belief that the more time and effort you put into food, the better it ought to taste… That’s why there was a time in my world when rumors went around saying things like, ‘Chemical seasoning makes your body go numb,’ ‘It ruins your sense of taste,’ or ‘It’s unhealthy.’”

Maria frowned.

“…Is that true?”

Ren shook his head.

“Anything’s bad for you if you overdo it. And if you use too much kachō, the flavor gets flat and heavy. But kachō is glutamic acid—or rather, a seasoning made by turning something naturally present in living bodies into a salt.”

Ren scratched vigorously at the back of his head, looking as though he had mixed feelings about the whole matter.

“Of course, there are plenty of ramen shops that advertise themselves as ‘MSG-free,’ and I’ve trained at places like that myself. Those shops put tremendous effort into getting a ‘deep, concentrated umami’ without kachō, experimenting with their stocks and spending more on ingredients. I’m not denying what they do, and I respect them for it… but when it comes to making ramen that’s both cheap and delicious, my own philosophy is that you’ve gotta ‘learn how to work with kachō properly.’”

He spoke while affectionately running his hand over the Yatai.

“My old man knew how to use kachō skillfully too. Back then, it wasn’t like today, when you could open a proper shop and charge a thousand yen for a meticulously crafted bowl of ramen… My old man was incredible. To give his customers delicious ramen at a low price, he used his exceptional instincts to adjust the amount right up to the limit—just before it would make the flavor monotonous, and just before it would overwhelm the ingredients.”

Ouri swallowed audibly.

“S-So… what we’d been searching for was…?”

Ren gave a large nod.

“Yeah. You all kept eating my old man’s ramen for years, and after he disappeared, you spent all that time chasing after his ramen and nothing else, right? Your memories and longing for it got burned deep into your minds… And my old man’s broth, despite tasting clean and straightforward, was packed with an incredibly powerful concentration of ‘umami’ from the kachō—the kind you couldn’t get from ordinary cooking alone. In other words, that ‘something’ you all felt was missing… was the taste of kachō!”

W-What!?

The “something” we had been craving was “kachō” all along!

I understood now. No wonder we had never been able to reach the answer no matter how deeply we pursued “ramen” in our own world. After all, the secret behind its flavor had been a powder that existed only in Ren’s world.