Shoyu, shio, miso, tonkotsu: a field guide to ramen's four big flavours

Stand in front of almost any ramen shop's ticket machine and you'll meet the same four words again and again: shoyu, shio, miso, tonkotsu. They look like a tidy menu of four soups. They aren't, quite, and once you see why, the whole map of ramen snaps into focus.

Here is the trick that took me far too long to notice. Three of those words describe one part of the bowl. The fourth describes a completely different part.

Five things in every bowl

Before the flavours, a quick look at the construction. A bowl of ramen is assembled, not ladled out of a single pot, and it usually contains five separate decisions:

1. Stock: the body of the soup, simmered from pork bones, chicken, seafood, vegetables or some mix of them.
2. Tare (タレ): a small amount of concentrated seasoning spooned into the empty bowl first. This is where most of the salt lives, and much of the character.
3. Aroma oil: kōmiyu (香味油), a slick of flavoured fat such as chicken fat, lard or scallion oil that floats on top and carries scent up to your nose.
4. Noodles: thin or thick, straight or curly, made springy by alkaline kansui.
5. Toppings: chashu pork, bamboo shoots, green onion, nori, an egg and so on.

The cook puts the tare in the bowl, pours hot stock over it, adds the oil, slides in the drained noodles and arranges the toppings. If you'd like the long version, I've taken a bowl apart piece by piece in the anatomy of a bowl.

Keep that list in mind. It's the key to everything that follows.

Three tares and a stock

Shoyu (醤油) means soy sauce, and a shoyu ramen is one whose tare is built on soy sauce. The soup is usually clear and brown, salty with a gently fermented depth. Underneath, the stock is often chicken, or chicken and pork, sometimes with dried fish. It's the old classic of Tokyo and probably the bowl most people picture when they hear the word "ramen".

Shio (塩) means salt. A shio tare is salt-based, often rounded out with ingredients like kombu or seafood, and it makes the palest bowl in the family: golden, clear and honest to a fault. With nowhere to hide, the stock has to be good. Hakodate, in Hokkaido, is the city most associated with it.

Miso (味噌) is fermented soybean paste, and a miso tare turns the soup opaque, nutty and rich. As a recognised style it's the youngest of the four, made famous in Sapporo from the 1950s onwards. I've written about it in Sapporo miso ramen.

Tonkotsu (豚骨) is the odd one out. It means "pork bone", and it names the stock, not the seasoning. Pork bones are boiled hard for hours, until collagen and fat break down and emulsify into a cloudy, creamy, almost milky soup. It belongs above all to Kyushu, and especially to Fukuoka. More on that in Hakata tonkotsu.

So a tonkotsu bowl still has a tare at the bottom, often salt-based, sometimes soy. The word on the menu simply tells you what's in the pot rather than what's in the bowl.

Why the categories blur

Once you know that tare and stock are separate choices, the hybrids make perfect sense. Nothing stops a shop pouring pork-bone stock over a soy tare, and plenty do: tonkotsu-shoyu is the backbone of Yokohama's iekei style and of Wakayama's local ramen. Miso tare can go over a pork-bone stock. A shio bowl might sit on chicken stock, seafood stock or both.

Many shops ignore the four boxes altogether. You'll find niboshi bowls built on dried sardines, chicken paitan (白湯, a cloudy chicken stock made the tonkotsu way, by boiling hard), and thick blends of pork and seafood. The big four aren't a law. They're a vocabulary.

That's also why two shoyu ramen can taste nothing alike. One might be a clear chicken soup with a whisper of soy; another a near-black bowl where the soy lands like a drumbeat. Both are telling the truth on the menu.

How to choose at the counter

If you're new to ramen, or just new to a shop, here's how I'd think about it:

• Want to taste the cook's stock? Order shio. It's the most transparent bowl and, in my opinion, the bravest one a shop can sell.
• Want the classic? Order shoyu. It's balanced, savoury and easy to love.
• Cold, hungry or both? Miso is a warm coat of a soup, especially with butter and corn on top.
• Want richness above all? Go for tonkotsu, and expect thin noodles if the shop follows the Fukuoka style.
• Can't decide? Pick whatever is listed first or marked as the house special. Shops tend to put their pride at the top.

A useful tell: most shops specialise. If one flavour gets a whole row of buttons and the others are squeezed into a corner, the big row is what they're known for. Our map is a good place to watch how styles cluster from one region to the next.

A grammar, not a menu

I've come to think of the four flavours less as dishes and more as grammar. Stock is the noun, tare is the verb, and oil and toppings are the adjectives. Once you can see how those parts fit together, you can read almost any bowl in Japan, including ones nobody has invented yet.