Soba noodles

Nouilles soba

What it is

Buckwheat has no gluten, so soba dough holds together only by hand technique or by wheat: juwari is a hundred percent buckwheat and breaks easily, nihachi is the usual eighty-twenty. The cloudy cooking water is not thrown out — it goes into what is left of the dipping sauce and is drunk at the end as soba-yu.

In the kitchen

Boil in a large volume of unsalted water with no lid, then rinse the noodles under cold running water while rubbing them — the surface starch is what turns soba gummy. Fresh wants ninety seconds, dried about four minutes, and a minute over is enough to make it fall apart.

Goes with

Katsuobushi (dried bonito) Kombu Negi Wasabi Nori Duck Hon-mirin

Same species

Buckwheat groats Buckwheat flour Buckwheat honey Buckwheat tea

Also used with

Abura-kasu Beni shoga Dongchimi Saba-bushi Sōda-bushi Tororo kombu

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