Chintan and paitan: clear or creamy ramen broth

The same kind of bones can make two very different soups.

Ninja City

Two broth styles

Chintan is a clear broth. Paitan is an opaque, often creamy-looking broth. Chicken can make either: tori chintan is clear chicken broth, and tori paitan is its cloudy counterpart.

The meat alone doesn’t decide the style. How the stock cooks matters too.

What happens in the pot

For a clear stock, cooks keep the heat gentle and skim material from the surface. A vigorous boil moves fat through the liquid and can break it into tiny droplets, making the broth cloudy. That dispersion is an emulsion.

Adam Liaw’s clear ramen stock uses both chicken and pork, with a low simmer. Sarah Gavigan’s chicken-stock lesson explains how harder boiling produces an emulsified paitan. Neither example needs cream to explain the cloudy appearance.

Clarity and strength are different qualities. Reducing a clear stock concentrates it; a transparent broth can still have plenty of flavor and body.

Broth, seasoning and topping tell you different things

Chintan and paitan describe broth styles. Shoyu and shio describe seasoning: soy sauce and salt. Tonkotsu identifies pork-bone broth. A menu can use more than one of these names for the same soup.

Our Japanese Chicken Ramen in November 2025 paired a clear chicken broth with shio tare. Today’s Spicy Korean Fried Chicken Ramen is a different bowl: pork tonkotsu broth with a spicy tare and crispy chicken on top. The old bowl is useful for understanding chintan; the current one is a reminder to read the broth description as well as the topping.

Keep reading

What is tare?

What is tonkotsu?