You will need:
- Soba (Buckwheat Noodles)
- Dashi (powdered or make your own – but powdered is actually fine)
- Super-amazing love sauce – AKA seasoned soy sauce (Recipe Below)
- Shichimi (ask for it at the AsiaMart)
- Pile of thin sliced scallions + Tempura if you care, I personally don’t.
Start two pots of water. One with a lot of water, heavily salted, for boiling the noodles. Another, with just a bit more than you will need to fill up however many bowls of soup you’re making.
When the water for your soup comes to a boil, start adding dashi powder a teaspoon at a time until it tastes just a bit under-salted. Note: you will need to taste it over and over until you like it. Now add seasoned soy, until it reaches a clear, light black tea sort of color…think Darjeeling; yeah, Darjeeling.
Now, taste it. Wait, taste it again. Adjust the soup with seasoned soy until it’s just a bit over salted, a bit too strong to drink out of a mug.
Put al dente cooked buckwheat noodles (again taste your noodles every minute after 4-5 minutes) into a nice big bowl, cover with soup, shake on a lot of shichimi, and tons of scallions. Did you know that this is a high protein, super-healthy, one of the great reasons why the Japanese are so skinny food? Well, it is.
As long as you don’t go down to any Tokyo department store basements and buy dessert. Three desserts is just never enough…
Seasoned Soy Sauce:
- 2/3 cup soy sauce
- 1/3 cup sake
- 10 sq. inches of kombu
- 1 dried shiitake
- 1/2 cup tightly packed katsuo boshi
- iriko – dried anchiove (optional)
- 3 tbsp sugar
- 3 tbsp mirin
- 2 tbsp water
Put the Soy sauce, sake, kombu, shiitake, and iriko (if using) into a small diameter sauce pan. You want to cover the kombu and shiitake to soak for at least 2 hours. Up to 12. After soaking, add the sugar, mirin, and water, and turn your stove to medium. Let it come up to a simmer slowly. Reduce until a loose syrup (can coat a spoon really easily), turn off the heat, and then sprinkle the katsuo boshi over the entire surface of the sauce. You want it to saok in from the top and sink to the bottom. Let it stand for no more than 4 minutes, and then strain into a storage container.
Do your best not to just keep taking finger licks from the jar, it’s really good shit.
dude;
your modified soy sauce recipe is awesome and I intend to make it…However, do you have a modified soy sauce recipe to match yamasa kombu tsuyu soup. I have the kombu and the dried bonita – and yamasa soy sauce…what else would I need and how would I go about making it? What do you think…can you help me with this??
thx cg
CG:
No problem. You see, the seasoned soy sauce recipe is the basis for the yamata kombu tsuyu as well. To use for Zaru Soba (cold buckwheat noodles), add some seasoned soy sauce to a smaller amount of room temp or cool dashi until it tastes too salty and strong to drink, but will be perfect for dipping noodles.
Or if you diluted the Yamata mix enough, it would be comparable to the hot soba soup recipe above…only making it yourself tastes better than the store bought stuff; and buying that yamata shit is expensive!!
This seasoned soy recipe is kind of a Japanese mother sauce, and when mixed with dashi or water in varying proportions, will yield completely different products.
I hope this helps!
Nate:
Thanks for your ‘pithy’ words. I made the seasoned soy sauce – and damn! it tastes great. I doubled your recipe, now I have alot of the good shit. The one question I have in preparation of the sauce is ‘how much or the iriko should I use per batch. I used approx. one tablespoon…and the sauce tasted a little fishy (ok for me), but others may not like the fishy taste. So, was too much…or in your world…too little?
cg
I’m glad you like it! 1 iriko is usually enough – and if you want to use it, you should scrape the guts out because they can be bitter and bad-fishy.
The iriko is part of the “authentic” Japanese taste… at least outside of Tokyo. In Tokyo I didn’t taste so much of it.
hmmm…
Personally, I like good fishy taste, but if I’m preparing Japanese (or for that matter Vietnamese or Thai), I go easy on the fishy flavors because most gringos can’t handle the love.
If you know what I mean.