Photo: Jnn · CC BY-SA 3.0
Izumo Soba (Dark Buckwheat Noodles in Stacked Lacquer Dishes)
Soba from Izumo in Shimane, made from buckwheat stone-milled with its husk, so the noodles are dark and strongly fragrant. It comes in three stacked round lacquer dishes: the tsuyu is poured straight onto the noodles, and what is left goes down to the next dish.
Ingredients
- buckwheat noodles · dried weight, the dark whole-milled kind400 g
- Tsuyu
- bonito dashi300 ml
- soy sauce100 ml
- mirin60 ml
- sugar1 tbsp
- To serve
- spring onions · finely sliced4
- nori · crumbled1 sheet
- daikon · grated150 g
- katsuobushi10 g
- momiji-oroshi · daikon grated with red chilli, optional2 tbsp
Steps
- ⏲ 3 min
Boil the mirin briefly to drive off the alcohol, add the soy sauce, sugar and dashi, bring back to the boil and leave to cool, then chill.
- ⏲ 5 min
Boil the noodles in plenty of water for the time on the packet.
Move them to cold water, rub them clean and drain well.
Divide the noodles among three round dishes per person and top with spring onion, nori, grated daikon and katsuobushi. Serve them stacked.
Pour 2-3 tablespoons of tsuyu onto the top dish and eat it. When it is finished, pour what is left into the next dish, adding a little more if needed.
Variations
- Kamaage soba. The noodles are served in their own cooking water, and each diner adds concentrated tsuyu to taste.
- Egg yolk. Some shops now put a yolk on the warigo, as in the front dish in the photograph.
- Nameko and grated daikon. Warigo heaped with toppings is common too.
Tips
- Pour, do not dip. The tsuyu goes straight onto the noodles.
- Pass the tsuyu down. What is left goes into the next dish.
- Three dishes a person. They are served stacked.
- Choose dark noodles. Buckwheat milled with its husk gives the colour and the strong aroma.
- Kamaage is never rinsed. It stays slippery, but the buckwheat flavour comes straight through.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- Soba that is not washed. Ordinary soba is rubbed in cold water after boiling to wash off the surface starch. Izumo's kamaage skips that step and serves the noodles in their cooking water. Japanese Wikipedia notes that the slipperiness stays, so the noodles go down less smoothly, but the taste and aroma of the buckwheat come through more directly. During the festival for the visiting gods, stalls outside the shops could not easily rinse noodles, and people ate the new season's buckwheat as warming kamaage.
- Warigo began as a lunch box. It comes from the tiered boxes that Matsue's men of leisure used to eat soba outdoors in the Edo period. They were square or diamond-shaped until about 1907, when they became round lacquer dishes because the corners were hard to wash clean. The tsuyu jug has a narrow mouth because the broth is poured from it, never dipped into.
The basics behind this dish
- Dough and Gluten: When to Build It and When to Avoid ItThe same flour and water becomes a dumpling wrapper or a tender pancake. The difference is whether you built gluten or avoided it — and kneading and resting do different jobs.
- Why Sauces Split: Emulsions and Pan SaucesA cream sauce breaking and a carbonara scrambling are the same failure. Temperature and emulsifiers — plus how to bring a split sauce back.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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