Photo: MemColorLab · CC BY-SA 4.0
Udon (Noodle Soup)
Plump udon noodles in a clear dashi broth made from kombu and bonito. Dashi powder makes it even quicker, and sweet-savory fried tofu turns it into the beloved 'kitsune udon.'
Ingredients
- Udon noodles · frozen or fresh2 servings
- Broth (dashi)
- Water800 ml
- Kombu (dried kelp) · 10cm1 piece
- Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) · or swap 2 tsp dashi powder10 g
- Light soy sauce (usukuchi) · or 1.5 tbsp regular soy2 tbsp
- Mirin1 tbsp
- Salt · to taste0.5 tsp
- Toppings
- Aburaage (fried tofu pouch) · for kitsune udon, optional2
- Scallions · sliced2
- Shichimi (or chili flakes) · optional1 to taste
Steps
- ⏲ 7 min
Warm the water and kombu over low heat. Just before it boils (bubbles at the edge), remove the kombu — boiling it turns the broth slimy and bitter.
- ⏲ 3 min
Add the katsuobushi, steep 1–2 minutes, turn off the heat, let it settle, and strain. (With dashi powder, skip this and just dissolve it in the water.)
- ⏲ 2 min
Bring the clear dashi to a simmer with the soy sauce, mirin, and salt; taste and keep it slightly under-seasoned.
- ⏲ 4 min
For kitsune udon, blanch the aburaage to remove oil, then simmer 2–3 minutes in a little broth with soy and sugar until sweet-savory.
- ⏲ 2 min
In another pot, cook the noodles per the package (about 1 minute for frozen) and drain.
- ⏲ 1 min
Put the noodles in bowls, pour over the hot broth, top with the tofu and scallions, dust with shichimi, and serve at once.
Variations
- Kake udon: Just broth and noodles, no toppings — the basic form.
- Kitsune udon: Topped with sweet-savory fried tofu (shown).
- Bukkake/zaru: Cold noodles with concentrated tsuyu for summer.
- Tempura udon: Add shrimp tempura for a hearty bowl.
Tips
- Don't boil the kombu — pull it just before boiling for a clean taste.
- Short on time? Dashi powder or tea-bag dashi works fine (dissolve and season).
- Keep the broth slightly under-salted — the noodles bring it up.
- Frozen udon is chewier than fresh and great for home cooking.
- Blanch the tofu to remove oil before simmering so it soaks up the sweet-savory flavor.
More detail and the reasons why (4)
- The broth is under-seasoned because the noodle is a salt source, which is the reverse of the rule. Salted water is usually the only chance to season a noodle — whatever it absorbed while boiling is all it gets (cooking noodles). Udon dough is salted heavily, so the traffic here runs the other way: salt leaves the noodle for the broth it is sitting in. Soba dough is salted too, and there the instruction is different: no salt in the water, because more only makes it salty, and a dipped noodle is not sitting in a liquid at all. This one does, so the reading you can take before the noodles go in is not the seasoning anybody eats.
- Which strength you make it at is set by how much of the noodle meets it. The variations above differ not in how much liquid there is but in how strong it is. Soba makes its tsuyu concentrated and dips only the last third of each mouthful, because submerging the lot makes it salty, and then dilutes that identical tsuyu three or four times for the hot version. Kake udon is the poured case and wants the dilute end; bukkake and zaru are the dipped case and want the concentrated one. Bun cha sits further out still, built dilute from the start because everything is submerged in it.
- Blanching the aburaage is taking fat off the outside, and it blocks something going in. That is not the ordinary case (blanching): where what has to come out is inside, you start in cold water and climb slowly, but where it is fat sitting on the surface neither is needed, and the job is done in seconds. Eomuk bokkeum and budae jjigae do it so a sauce can cling and so the film does not float on a broth. Aburaage is fried tofu, and its film stands between the simmering liquid and a sponge that is supposed to drink — so here the thirty seconds is what makes the next two or three minutes work at all.
- "Just before it boils" is a sight because there is no clock for it. Kombu is not like fish bones or chicken (stocks and broths): two things come out of it and they leave at different temperatures, so the savour arrives at 60-80°C and the slippery compounds and the bitterness follow above that. How long a pot takes to climb through that window belongs to the pot, which is why the instruction is bubbles at the edge rather than a number.
The basics behind this dish
- Stocks and Broths: Clarity, Time, and Why You Do Not Salt ThemWhat separates a clear stock from a cloudy one is temperature, not ingredients. Why you start in cold water, how long each ingredient wants, and why salt comes later.
- Reviving Leftovers: Reheating by Texture, Not by DefaultThe microwave is not the right tool for everything. What you do depends on what degraded — moisture, crispness, or starch — and the three want opposite treatments.
- 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.
More of the same kind
More from this country
✏️ Improve this recipe
Sign in to edit.
Written with AI · how we check it · Edit history
https://cookiki.com/en/r/udon · cookiki · User contributions are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.