Nagasaki Champon (Seafood and Pork Noodle Soup)

Ingredients

• 2 portions champon noodles
• 80 g thinly sliced pork belly
• 80 g peeled shrimp
• 80 g squid (body)
• 100 g clams (in shell, purged of sand)
• 150 g cabbage
• 100 g bean sprouts
• 30 g carrot
• 2 fresh shiitake mushrooms
• 30 g kamaboko fish cake (red and white)
• 1 tbsp lard (or vegetable oil)
• [Soup] 500 ml water
• [Soup] 100 ml milk
• [Soup] 1 1/2 tbsp chicken stock powder
• [Soup] 2 tsp oyster sauce
• [Soup] 1 tbsp sake
• [Soup] 1 tsp sugar
• [Soup] 1/3 tsp salt
• A pinch of pepper

Steps

1. Cut the pork into 3 cm pieces. Slice the squid into 5 mm rings (or score it in a crosshatch and cut into bite-size pieces), and devein the shrimp.
2. Cut the cabbage into rough chunks, the carrot into thin rectangles, slice the shiitake, and cut the kamaboko 5 mm thick.
3. Heat the lard in a wok (or deep frying pan) over high heat and stir-fry the pork. Once the fat renders, add the shrimp, squid and clams and stir-fry together.
4. Add the carrot, cabbage and shiitake and stir-fry for about 1 minute. When everything is coated in oil, add the bean sprouts and kamaboko, toss briefly and season with pepper.
5. Add the water, sake, chicken stock powder, oyster sauce and sugar and bring to a boil. When the clams open, skim off the foam.
6. Add the milk. When it comes back to a boil, loosen the noodles and drop them in. Simmer the noodles in the soup for 2 to 3 minutes so they soak it up. Adjust the seasoning with salt.
7. Transfer everything to bowls with the toppings and pour over plenty of soup. Add a little pepper or vinegar to taste if you like.

Origin and history

Champon is Nagasaki's signature noodle dish: pork, seafood and plenty of vegetables are stir-fried, simmered in broth, and finished with its own special noodles. The noodles are not boiled separately, so the whole thing is made in a single wok.

It dates back to 1899 (Meiji 32). The story goes that the owner of a Chinese restaurant in Nagasaki wanted to give Chinese students living in Japan a cheap, nourishing meal, so he stir-fried scraps of meat and vegetables and simmered them with Chinese noodles in a rich broth. He took tanrosu-men, a light Fujian pork-shred noodle soup, as a model, added more toppings, made the broth richer and paired it with a firm noodle of his own, adapting it to Japanese tastes.

There are several theories about the name: one says it is a corruption of a Chinese phrase meaning "to eat a meal", another that it comes from a word meaning "to mix". The red-and-white Nagasaki kamaboko is a local touch of colour.