Inside Jun Furukawa's Method for Teaching His Signature Broths

Jun Furukawa has spent more than two decades refining a single obsession: a gyokai-tonkotsu broth that marries the milky weight of pork bones with the briny, mineral lift of seafood. From his two Sapporo counters, MEN-EIJI Hiragishi BASE and Duck Ramen EIJI, he now oversees a kitchen culture that treats each bowl as a fingerprint, never a copy. For an Australian reader who has watched Melbourne's ramen rivalry turn the CBD into a broth battleground, the question is not whether the ramen is good, but how a single chef's instinct survives the handover to a new generation of cooks.

Training inside MEN-EIJI is less like a culinary school and more like a watchmaker's bench. There is no glossy syllabus, no weekend workshop, and no shortcut. What exists is a layered programme that runs from sensory awakening to full autonomy, with each stage requiring the trainee to unlearn what they think they know about heat, time, and taste. Furukawa's method borrows from his international pop-up years, his Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition, and his quiet refusal to compromise on the broth that built his reputation.

This piece steps inside that method. It follows the apprentice from the first morning at the prep sink to the day they are trusted to teach another set of hands, tracing how a recipe becomes a discipline, and how a broth becomes a brand.

Training Stage Focus Area Typical Duration End Goal
Sensory Foundation Aroma recognition, fire reading, water quality 3 months Calibrated palate and ear
Component Cookery Tare, aroma oil, noodles, tare ageing 6 months Mastery of each element
Live Service Assembly, timing, customer interaction 6 months Bowl consistency under pressure
Apprenticeship of Apprentices Teaching new cooks, recipe replication Ongoing Brand stewardship

A Sensory Education Before the Knife

Furukawa does not allow a new cook to touch a pork bone in the first weeks. The reasoning is practical: a hand that has not learned to read a rolling boil cannot be trusted with the eighteen-hour simmer that defines gyokai-tonkotsu. New arrivals begin at the prep sink, sorting aromatics and listening to the stockpot as if it were a kettle at a Brunswick roastery, where the barista's whole world is the crackle of beans and the hiss of steam.

The training rests on three sensory pillars Furukawa absorbed during his years in Sapporo kitchens and abroad. The first is aroma: trainees blind-identify dried sardine, scallop shell, and pork femur as the broth descends into its final hour. The second is sound: a properly managed pot murmurs rather than rages, and a cook learns to lower the flame before the surface breaks. The third is viscosity, judged by dipping a chilled spoon and watching how the liquid clings. Each pillar is reviewed weekly, with notes kept in a small notebook that becomes the cook's personal field guide.

For Australian trainees, this early stage often produces a small culture shock. Many arrive with the speed and banter of a Brisbane pub kitchen on a Saturday arvo, where service is loud and feedback is fast. Furukawa's counter is the opposite, calm, observant, and built on repetition. The shift from reactive to reflective cooking is, he says, the hardest handover of the entire programme.

The Daily Rhythm of an EIJI Apprentice

A working day at Hiragishi BASE starts before sunrise. Apprentices arrive in time to inspect the overnight broth, lift the lid, and record the colour, the clarity at the edge, and the faint marine note that sits above the pork fat. This is not ceremony. It is the daily audit that keeps every bowl consistent, whether the customer is a salaryman grabbing lunch or a tourist who has queued for ninety minutes after seeing the Bib Gourmand sticker.

The rhythm repeats across the week. Mondays and Tuesdays are tare work, blending soy, mirin, and a house-aged fish sauce that Furukawa refuses to outsource. Wednesdays are noodle days, where the apprentice learns the hydration curve of each flour blend and how Sapporo's cold, dry air changes the dough's behaviour from what a Sydney-trained chef might expect. Thursdays and Fridays are live service days, when the trainee moves from prep to the pass, plating bowls in the sequence Furukawa has drilled into his senior team.

What looks like a simple weekly schedule is, in practice, a layered curriculum. Senior cooks rotate through stations so that no single apprentice becomes over-specialised, a deliberate move that mirrors how Furukawa himself travelled through different kitchens before settling on his own style. The result is a team that can step into any role on any day, which is essential for a brand that runs two distinct venues and the occasional international pop-up.

Broth as a Living System

The broth is the heart of MEN-EIJI, and Furukawa treats it as a living organism rather than a recipe. Pig bones are blanched, rinsed, and roasted at controlled temperatures; seafood elements, including niboshi and scallop, are added at staggered intervals so that their flavour compounds release without clouding the stock. The exact timing lives in the muscle memory of cooks who have done it hundreds of times, rather than on a clipboard in the dining room.

Teaching this kind of intuition is where Furukawa's method diverges sharply from conventional kitchen training. Instead of handing over a printed formula, he asks the apprentice to cook the same batch three times in a row, varying only one variable each round. The first round uses the standard flame pattern. The second raises the heat by five degrees during the final hour. The third pulls the pot off the burner ten minutes earlier than usual. The trainee tastes all three side by side and writes down what changed, not in technical jargon, but in plain words: brighter, flatter, sweeter, heavier.

This comparative tasting is the closest thing the kitchen has to a textbook. Over months, the apprentice builds a private map of cause and effect, learning which decisions deepen the gyokai note and which flatten it. The exercise mirrors how Australian specialty coffee houses train new roasters, where cuppings are repeated until the palate stops searching and starts recognising. Furukawa respects that parallel, and his Australian collaborators have noted how naturally the two crafts speak to one another.

What London Taught the Training Kitchen

Furukawa's international pop-ups, including the recent London residency documented through London pop-up lessons, exposed a quiet problem in his old training method. In Sapporo, the broth behaves one way; in London's harder water, higher ambient humidity, and different pork supply, it behaves another. A cook trained only at Hiragishi BASE could not simply be dropped into a foreign kitchen and expected to replicate the bowl.

The lesson reshaped how new chefs are taught. Today, apprentices spend at least one extended block working with alternative water profiles and substitute proteins, learning to adjust the simmer rather than chase an identical number on a hydrometer. Furukawa calls it "translating" the broth, a term he picked up from chefs who had worked through similar adjustments in Australian venues, where imported Japanese pork is rare and local supply chains dominate.

The London experience also reinforced a second principle: the broth is half a bowl. The tare, the oil, the noodle texture, and the plating temperature each carry their own variables, and a chef who has mastered only the stock is, in Furukawa's words, "half a cook." Returning to Sapporo, he restructured the senior stages so that no apprentice advances without proving they can rescue a failing tare in the middle of a Friday night rush, the way a chef at a busy Sydney CBD counter might recalibrate a sauce when the delivery is late.

From Memory to Written Method

For years, Furukawa resisted writing down his recipes in detail. He worried that a written formula would freeze a broth he considered alive, and that a cook holding a printed sheet would stop listening to the pot. International expansion forced a compromise: a working manual exists, but it reads more like a field journal than a recipe book. Entries are short, often a single sentence, and leave room for the apprentice to fill in the missing data through repetition.

Each new cook receives a blank version of the manual on day one. Pages are added as the apprentice completes a stage, and senior cooks review the entries weekly, marking them with corrections, questions, or a single kanji character that means "listen." Furukawa calls the manual a "second teacher," one that points the apprentice back to the pot rather than away from it.

The approach has caught the attention of hospitality educators in Australia, where TAFE programmes and private culinary schools have struggled with the gap between textbook precision and kitchen reality. Furukawa has hosted a small number of Australian chefs during Sapporo winters, and the manual, photocopied and worn at the edges, has become an unofficial teaching tool across a handful of Melbourne and Brisbane kitchens. It works, he says, because it is honest about what it does not know.

Scaling the Method Across Two Counters

Running two distinct venues, MEN-EIJI Hiragishi BASE and Duck Ramen EIJI, requires duplicating a culture rather than a recipe. Furukawa treats the two kitchens as sister labs: broth techniques, tare ratios, and noodle handling are tested first at Hiragishi BASE, then refined and rolled out to the Duck counter, where the menu leans further into duck-based innovation. Chefs rotate between the two venues during their final training stage so that the replication skill they develop is transferable, not site-specific.

The rotation is also where leadership training begins. Senior apprentices are paired with new arrivals and asked to teach the very exercises they once struggled through, from blind aroma tests to comparative tasting rounds. Watching a former trainee correct a junior's flame reading is, Furukawa says, the moment he knows the method has taken root. The brand no longer depends on him alone.

This distributed approach has practical appeal for an Australian market considering its own ramen expansion. Sydney and Melbourne operators who import Japanese chefs often face the same vulnerability Furukawa once faced: one talented head cook leaves, and the broth collapses. A kitchen built on shared muscle memory, with a manual that travels and a rotation that multiplies expertise, is far harder to break.

A Practical Guide for Kitchens Training Their Own Broth Cooks

Visit MEN-EIJI Hiragishi BASE or Duck Ramen EIJI in Sapporo to taste what the method produces, or follow the brand's international calendar for the next Australian-adjacent residency. Operators interested in bringing the training approach into their own kitchens can begin with the sensory drills and the comparative tasting rounds, two practices that cost little but reshape how a cook listens to a pot. The broth will follow.