Oroshi Soba

On a hot summer day, there’s nothing as refreshing and satisfying as a basket of chilled soba (buckwheat noodles) and dipping sauce. We particularly love oroshi soba — cold noodles topped with grated daikon (oroshi means grated vegetable), sliced scallions, wasabi and snipped shreds of nori (seaweed). We love to drop some or most of the grated daikon, sometimes along with a little wasabi, into the dipping sauce, tsuyu. Some people serve the condiments separately, adding whatever they like to their sauce.

For a bonus treat at the end, you can add some hot liquid the noodles have cooked in to what’s left in everyone’s cup of dipping sauce, to be sipped as a delicious broth. (If you want to do that, be sure to save the noodles’ cooking water, and bring it to the table in a teapot when everyone’s done eating their noodles; everyone can add as much hot liquid as they like to their cup.)

The tsuyu part of our recipe is adapted from Shizuo Tsuji’s classic 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. It requires dashi — Japanese stock — which you’ll need to make first. The good news is unlike French stock, which takes many hours, dashi is made in just a few minutes. Use the rest of the dashi to make Miso Soup, or freeze it (we freeze ours in ice cube trays) for later use. Then make the tsuyu. Again, good news: The tsuyu will keep in a covered jar in the fridge for several months, so once you prepare it, you can put Oroshi Soba together in the time it takes to boil the noodles and grate the daikon.

READ: On a hot summer evening, nothing refreshes like a basket of chilled oroshi soba

Buy the best soba noodles you can find — which is a bit tricky. Dried noodles made from 100% buckwheat can be a bit sawdust-like. The best dried noodles combine buckwheat flour and wheat flour, with a high enough proportion of buckwheat for great, nutty flavor, but enough wheat flour so the texture’s right. We asked Teiichi Sakurai, chef and owner of Tei-An, the superb handmade soba-focused restaurant in Dallas, Texas, if there’s a dried soba he’d recommend. He likes Kajino Kokusan Soba, which they stock at our local Mitsuwa Marketplace in North Texas. We also looked at Mitsuwa for the brands recommended by Mutsuko Soma in a taste-test story published in Food & Wine magazine in 2019. (Soma is chef at Seattle’s renowned soba restaurant, Kamonegi.) We didn’t find those exactly, but we did find a dried soba from Shirakiku — one of the brands she recommended, and it was very good. (The specific noodle is Shirakiku Japanese Style Buckwheat Noodle.) Even better, with a lovely, springy texture and deeper flavor, was a fresh noodle we found there — Izumo Soba Noodles from Soba Honda.

Most Japanese sobas come in 100-gram bundles, which is convenient, as that’s the proper serving size for one person. For bigger appetites, you might want to up that a bit. It’s nice to serve this on a zaru (Japanese basket used as a colander), as is traditional. Otherwise, a bowl is fine; just make sure the noodles are well drained.

Makes 2 servings.

Ingredients

200 g (7 ounces) dried soba

115 to 140 g (4 to 5 ounces) daikon, peeled

2 thinly sliced scallions, green and white part

Toasted nori (dried seaweed) snipped with scissors into thin ribbons or shreds

Wasabi, for serving

80 to 120 ml (3 to 4 ounces) tsuyu (dipping sauce), recipe follows

Instructions

1. Bring a medium pot of water (not salted) to boil over high heat. Add the soba noodles and cook 4 or 5 minutes, until they’re tender but still springy. Use a spider to transfer them to a colander, and rinse well with cold water. Lift the noodles with your fingers while the water’s running over them, so the surface starch washes away. Drop some ice cubes onto the noodles and toss gently. Set aside.

2. Use a fine microplane grater to grate the daikon. Use your hands to squeeze most of the moisture out of the grated daikon, and set aside.

3. Remove the ice from the soba noodles and let them drain, then divide them between two zaru baskets or bowls. Scatter half the sliced scallions and half the nori over each, then top each with half of the grated daikon; place a little wasabi on the side of each zaru or serve separately. Serve immediately, each portion accompanied by its own teacup of dipping sauce.

To make the Tsuyu

In a medium saucepan, combine 590 ml (2 1/2 cups) dashi, 6 tablespoons soy sauce, 4 tablespoons mirin and 1 teaspoon sugar. Bring the mixture just to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir in 1 ounce (30 g, about 3 cups loose) bonito flakes and immediately remove from the heat. Let steep just about 10 seconds, then strain the sauce into a jar, and discard the bonito flakes. Let it cool to room temperature before serving. Stored covered in the refrigerator, it will several months.