When I was living in Japan, I had a love affair with noodles. It started out with cup Ramen (Cup Ramen in Japan is the bomb!!!) and then quickly progressed to my local neighborhood ramen shop. It was delicious...and perfect food for a cold Nagano winter day.
I moved to Nagano where they make Soba, or buckwheat noodles and fell in love. Absolutely delicious. I met a man named Kashiwagi Sensei, who owned what I feel is the absolute best Soba shop in the world, located right across from the Nagano JR Station. His noodles were fantastic and I always envied his noodle cutting ability.
Although I have not yet mastered the art of soba, or even the art of noodles, here is my "poor man's" rendition of chinese noodles...they work fairly well and I prefer them to store bought/machine made noodles any day.
Ingredients
3 cups all purpose flour
1 cup cold water
1 tablespoon corn oil
Place the flour in a large bowl and make a well in the middle. Slowly pour a little bit of the water into the well and stir it will a spatula. Add more of the water and it absorbs into the flour. Turn it onto a lightly floured pasty mat and kneed by hand until smooth, about 5 minutes. You do not want to overwork the dough, otherwise it will get hard.
In the meantime, bring a pot of water to boil. Add a little vegetable oil to the water.
Roll the dough out into a rectangle. Sprinkle some more flour on the surface, flip and add a little more flour, insuring that your dough will not stick to the mat. At this point, I am ready to cut the dough.
Transfer the dough to a floured cutting board. You do not want to cut the dough on the pastry mat, because you would ruin your lovely pastry mat or counter. To transfer the dough I let it hand on top of the rolling pin (see picture).
Once I transfer it to the cutting board, I flour the surface of the dough once again.
I then cut the dough in half and deal with that one half.
I then take one half of that half and lay it on top of the other half like this:
I then cut that double sheet of dough.
And proceed to slice the dough into thick strips.
Now that dough is going to get soft and will want to stick to anything. So immediately after cutting up a quarter of my dough, I pop those noodles into the boiling water. You will need to stir the noodles with a long chopstick for the first 2 or 3 minutes, as the dough will be incredibly sticky and you do not want all of your noodles to bunch up.
After you have done a batch, take a hand strainer or one of those spaghetti spoons. and transfer the noodles to a large bowl. Continue this process until all the noodles have been cooked.
Your bowl of noodles will look a little clumpy and stuck together. No worries. Just transfer them back to the water you cooked them into for 10 seconds and then should separate easily. Drain them in a colander and place into individual bowls.
I usually serve these noodles with braised spareribs, although they work equally as well in yakisoba, or with a simple sauce of soy sauce, raiyu and vinegar.
No comments:
Post a Comment