The few warm days left before the coldness sets in gets us craving a bowl of buck-wheat soba noodles. Like me, they might not be super attractive but with their wabi-sabi colour, al-dente bite & earthy flavour they’ve secured a place in our stomachs forever. This is a soba noodle salad dish we make all the time. It’s super easy & super delicious.
Contents
Soba Noodle Salad
Ingredients
Soba noodles
- 1 pack soba noodles buckwheat
Sauce
- 2 tbsp konbu dashi
- 2 tbsp mirin
- 2 tbsp soy sauce
- 60 gram Takana (pickled mustard greens) roughly chopped
- 4 tbsp takana pickle sauce
- ¼ ice berg lettuce
Topping
- Japanese mayonnaise watch video for the cool method
- shichimi shake & sprinkle
Instructions
Noodles
- Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil
- Add the noodles & cook for 4 minutes-ish & drain
- rinse under cold water, kind of important to wash & cool the noodles
Sauce
- chop the lettuce into something more civilised
- throw everything into a mixing-type bowl & make mixing-like actions
Video
Notes
Easy to make, easy to mess up. If you over-cook any noodle they'll turn to mush. Just don't do it. Stop it. Stop it now. 4 minutes is usually plenty of time for most noodles AND once you take them out they're still hot so they're still cooking anyway. Oh & Japanese Mustard Greens are called Takana pickles in Japanese & you can buy them from us sometimes. Shichimi is also called Togarashi & is a 7 spice mix.
Summer noodles yep, good with sake yep, brown, earthy, hearty & comforting, yep yep & yep. For your reference, no one in Japan parties on New Years Eve, they spend the day cleaning their house or business (o'souji) or whatever and then they all go home & eat soba noodles because they're long & lucky, so to eat them on New Years Eve signifies a prosperous & long new year. And then around midnight, everyone heads to the Local Shrine & rings the huge bell, prays & drinks awful tasting nigori-type sake, goes home, sleeps & wakes up to a super clean life ready for the new year.
