Soba noodles are thin Japanese noodles made with buckwheat flour. These noodles are approximately the same thickness as Italian spaghetti. They are served in a different cold and hot dishes.
There are different varieties of Soba, based on location and ingredients. The finest soba is Juwari, made of 100% buckwheat. I made the Sockeye Salmon Poached in Blueberry Earl Grey Tea Broth with purchased Hakubaku Soba noodles, which contain 69% organic wheat flour and 29% organic buckwheat flour.
You can also find flavored soba noodles such as Jinenjo soba (with yam flour), Cha soba (with green tea powder), Mugi soba (with mugwort), and Hegi soba (with seaweed). The most traditional Soba is Ni-nachi soba, containing 20% wheat and 80% buckwheat. This is the kind of soba I have decided to make at home.
I used this article describing a Soba Noodles Class in Tokyo as my initial guideline. I did this project with my daughter who was a terrific helper.
Ingredients:
2 cups organic buckwheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose wheat flour
5 oz cold water
What we did:
First, we sifted buckwheat flour and wheat flour into a mixing bowl. Then, we mixed the flour with my hands and added the water gradually, while mixing the flour and water together until a ball was formed. We flattened the ball into a smooth disk.
Then we tried to roll out the dough by hand.
But the dough was just too hard for us. Realizing that we won't have the right equipment to properly cut the noodles anyway, we pulled out our pasta maker.
We rolled out the pasta sheets on the thinnest setting and cut them through a spaghetti setting. This method worked perfectly and the noodles turned out to be just the right thickness.
Because I take most of my photos up close, it may be hard to tell how thin our homemade soba noodles really were. So, here's a shot of a homemade soba noodle and a purchased one (green tea flavored soba noodle) side by side. They are exactly the same size!
We cooked the noodles quickly (a minute or two) in a boiling water, rinsed them in the cold water, and drained them.
We served hot soba noodles tossed with sesame oil, soy sauce, and black sesame seeds, to accompany a sablefish poached in Earl Grey tea broth.
We also served the soba noodles chilled with the traditional dipping sauce and garnishes. Our sauce was made with a combination of mirin, dashi, soy sauce, and brown sugar. The garnishes included chopped green onions, grated ginger, black sesame seeds, and finely shredded nori seaweed.
We loved the delicious buckwheat flavor of the homemade soba noodles and they were terrific served in both hot and cold preparations. This was definitely a fun project!
Please check the other dishes with noodles by other participants of the International Noodles Incident Party!
