Spicy Ramen Recipe: 3 Common Spicy Ramen Variations

Spicy ramen is a variety of Japanese noodle soup featuring ramen noodles tossed in a sauce seasoned with assorted dried red pepper powders like togarashi, pastes like yuzu kosho and gochujang, or sauces like sriracha, Chinese-style chili garlic sauce, and sambal oelek (Indonesian chili sauce). Punch up the heat by garnishing the soup with sliced jalapeños or Thai chilies, or make the dish gluten-free by swapping the traditional ramen noodles with a gluten-free option.

You can make the spicy noodle dish in the style of instant ramen, without a chicken or vegetable broth. You can also apply it to any traditional ramen style, stirring the peppers into the broth of tsukemen dipping ramen, pork-forward tonkotsu ramen, or buttery-sweet Sapporo-style ramen.

To personalize your spicy ramen bowls, add seasonal veggies like diced zucchini or mushrooms, a handful of bean sprouts, wilted Asian greens like komatsuna or bok choy, or a ramen egg—a soft-boiled egg marinated in soy sauce and mirin. Seek out fresh ramen noodles if you can; texturally, they are worlds apart from instant ramen noodles, but either will work.

Homemade ramen soup comes in several variations—the spicy ramen genre has two main formats: with or without broth. Here is a breakdown of the most common types:

1. 1. Brothless instant ramen: Spicy ramen is best known as a genre of instant ramen—spicy chicken ramen is particularly popular—which relies on flavor packets filled with dried chili pepper seasoning to slick the noodles with heat. There are dozens of instant spicy ramen packages on the market.
2. 2. Homemade spicy ramen: You can find instant spicy ramen noodles in most Asian markets and grocery stores, but you can achieve a similar effect at home by mixing any chili sauce with a bit of sesame oil, soy sauce, and additional seasonings, then tossing it with cooked ramen noodles.
3. 3. Paitan-style spicy ramen: Paitan broths are often the best vehicles for added heat since the fat in the ingredients rounds out the spice. You can make the two main types of ramen broth—paitan and chintan—from chicken bones and meat from different animals cooked together with aromatics, like leeks, to form flavor variations for ramen broth. Paitan broth is opaque, full of fat, and silky in texture due to gelatin, which forms when the collagen-rich connective tissue cooks at a high temperature.