In the hilarious Japanese noodle Western "Tampopo," a truck driver is on a mission to find the recipe for the best ramen.

For a Honolulu woman, whose e-mail handle is "phoqueen," the mission was to find a recipe for an ingredient that's common in ramen. "I'm at my last resort here," she wrote. "Do you have any recipe for the pork that goes in ramen? I've searched high and low for the correct recipe and prep, but I do not know the traditional name for this dish."

It's not surprising that this reader had so much trouble: The pork dish to which she is referring is called by several names, and some of them are inaccurate. And although I did find several references to it online, the recipes were few, and sometimes conflicting.

There's no conflict about one thing, however: These little slices of pork are meltingly delicious, slightly salty and sweet.

With some clues provided by readers, and the help of a couple of experts, I was able to come up with recipes, and to learn how to make delicious ramen at home.

E-mailer "Amy in Ala Moana" provided the first clue when she defined it as Japanese-style char siu and reminded me that noodle soup, of course, originated in China. The Chinese dish, and its accompaniments, was altered to suit Japanese tastes and cooking practices.

Amy said the primary difference between Chinese char siu and Japanese char siu is that the Japanese char siu is simmered, not roasted or spitted. Japanese also do not use red food coloring or a honeyed glaze on the outside of the pork cut. And Japanese char siu is not as sweet as Chinese. (Unless you're in Hawai'i — but more on that later.)

With these clues, and a recipe for "chashaomein" provided by reader Nate Lum, I was on my way.

MANY NAMES, ROOTS

An Internet search revealed that the Japanese not only borrowed the idea for tender roast pork as a soup topping, they borrowed its name, if not its proper pronunciation and spelling. The term they often use is "chashu." But I also found similar dishes labeled nibuta and even butayaki. Some time with a Japanese dictionary revealed that nibuta means boiled pork and butayaki means roast or grilled pork. And another reference said that chashu means roast pork.

I shot off an e-mail to Japanese cooking expert Elizabeth Andoh of A Taste of Culture cooking school in Tokyo, who, as I knew she would, cleared up the confusion.

"Ni refers to stovetop braising, boiling or simmering submerged in liquid. Yaki refers to skillet-searing, broiling, grilling or searing with heat. Buta is pig, hence pork. Chashu derives from Chinese and refers to roast pork sold in Chinatowns around the world," she wrote.

She further explained that most pork dishes originated with Chinese-style cooking and that, since there was no baking (cooking in dry, enclosed heat) in the traditional Japanese kitchen, to replicate the roast pork, Japanese developed a slow simmering method using shoyu and sugar in which the pork almost caramelizes. (I saw one reference online to using Coca-Cola to caramelize the pork!)

"The fact that names (chashu and nibuta) are used interchangeably (and not always accurately) is a sign (to me, at least) that the food has been 'adopted' by many different groups of people coming from many different food heritages and each uses its own experience and terminology as a reference base," Andoh concluded.

So call it chashu or call it nibuta, it's still a dish with a storied past.

LOCAL EVOLUTION

And that past isn't confined to Japan. Although home economist Muriel Miura, author of "Japanese Cooking, Hawai'i-Style" (Mutual, 2006), said that chashu wasn't something most local Japanese made at home, and local saimin stands tended to use ka-maboko, teri sticks or Chinese char siu for garnish, I did find some Hawai'i-based recipes for slow-simmered pork. Islanders, in addition to renaming ramen as saimin, have steadily moved the recipe away from its Japanese roots by sweetening it up to satisfy our sugar-loving palates, and even recombining it with Chinese ingredients, such as star anise.

Although Lum rightly points out that there are "hundreds, maybe thousands" of recipes for nibuta out there, there appear to be two main avenues. You start with pork belly, pork butt or pork loin, which is cut, rolled or tied into a cylinder, so as to create the little rounds when sliced crosswise. These lengths are browned in oil, then combined with water, vegetables and flavorings and slowly simmered. Some recipes use a two-stage process, first simmering the pork with water, vegetables and flavorings, then draining off this broth for later use, and simmering the pork some more in a sweetened shoyu mixture. Other recipes add the shoyu and sweetener at the beginning.

I was delighted when it dawned on me that, although nibuta at first appeared to be something you made to serve as a condiment with ramen, in fact, it can be the heart of ramen. In "Harumi's Japanese Cooking" (Home/Berkley, hardback, $27.95), Japanese celebrity teacher Harumi Kurihara offers a recipe for "Chinese Style Soup Noodles/Ramen" with Simmered Pork given as a sub-recipe. The pork not only graces the top of the noodle soup, but the broth in which it cooked becomes part of the broth in which the noodles float.

The pork broth from my cooking experiments, combined with some dashi and chicken stock, made amazingly good saimin, and no need to use those salty little dashi packets!

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.