Zaru Soba (cold buckwheat noodles) recipe
One of my earliest memories is to sip chilled Japanese Zaru Soba pasta made by my mother. I was small and shirtless, a kitchen towel that was draped around my neck and swung the legs off the chair, the steady sum of our window panel in the background. On a hot summer day, these cold buckwheat noodles were pure relief – certificate that could extinguish as much as it could.
These days, when the air humidity is received, I still reach for this cold pasta shell to cool myself from the inside out. To remove every trace of strength, my mother rinse the cooked SOBA under cold flowing water and scrubbing it like laundry. This step shocked the hot noodles, sets their hopping texture and prevents clumps.
Next comes the mentuyu – a hearty noodle soup that serves as a dip sauce, which is usually made from dashi, mirin, soy sauce and sake. To just keep it on weekdays, I skip the sake (nobody in my family seems to notice). In the meantime, immediate dashi Powder delivers a deep Umami taste and bypasses the need to produce a homemade version with Kombu and Bonito flakes.
To serve, stack the cold Soba noodles in a bowl and put the mentaluu in a separate, small bowl. Let a few ice cubes fall into the sauce to carefully dilute the sauce – like a martini on the rock, but salet. I end the pasta with cut green onions, crushed Nori, a swab of Wasabi and a hill made of grated Daikon radishes. Do not skip this last – this bitter sweet set is like fluffy snow that melts into the sauce.
You could arrange the Zaru Soba in imaginary compositions, as my mother always did. But more often I eat them directly from the sieve with chopsticks -without flying, mental spraying -until the bowl is empty and I’m cool again.
