Tonight, Nana and I went out for soba, one of our favorite Japanese foods, at a noodle shop down the street from our place.
Soba is a thin buckwheat noodle that can be served either hot or cold. It packs a lot of flavor, even when unseasoned, and has the most fiber of any Japanese noodle style.
The simplest cold soba (mori soba) is basically a pile of noodles on a plate, which you dip in an icy broth (tsuyu) of sweetened soy sauce, seaweed stock, and rice wine--flavored with wasabi (Japanese horseradish) and scallions to taste.
Eating cold soba noodles is a real test of one's chopstick chops. Here's Nana's technique, demonstrated on a plate of zaru soba (cold soba with seaweed):
(Note: E-mail subscribers may have to click through to the blog to view the video.)
There are also a variety of hot soba dishes, which usually take the form of a big bowl of soup. I picked one at random and ended up with the standard soba-noodles-in-soy-broth with a topping of some kind of pickled vegetable (Nana guessed rapeseed) and flavoured with a bit of lemon peel.
The result was delicious, and totally unexpected! That dash of lemon, plus the bitterness of the pickle, gave the ol' soy broth a whole new flavor. Yum!
Did Nana actually eat that entire plate of noodles?!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteHeck yeah I did!
ReplyDeleteAwesome video demonstration, you guys. This post makes me want to jump on the next boat across the Pacific. One question: what do you drink with soba??
ReplyDeleteUsually you drink cold (herbal) tea made with roasted barley. Good stuff--kind of a woody flavor.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you do find that you're overcome with the urge to visit, let us know!