A quiet soba abomination
You don’t really know soba, and neither does the rest of America, but we’ll make it work anyway. Soba is a buckwheat noodle that is usually made fresh in Japan, and served dried in fast food joints there and stateside. When I think about soba, I think of someone with 40 years’ experience making soba pressing a sheet of buckwheat paper thin, rolling it up, and then cutting it with a special tool so finely that it tracks more like angel hair pasta. There is only one place outside of Japan that I have found with a proper soba master, and that is Kamonegi, in Seattle. For the rest of us, there is dried soba, bought in bulk at a place like H Mart, boiled for a few minutes at home, maybe shocked in an ice bath, served cold.
I am about to recommend the grammar for a pan-cultural abomination. The things I put in a soba bowl do not belong in a soba bowl. Soba does not belong in bowls. Soba belongs on a bamboo mat, served fresh, with a light dashi-base dipping sauce; or in a soup, probably as part of a set meal.
At a high level, you’re making soba, poaching an egg, and throwing it all in with some veggies & a light sauce.
The sauce
The vast majority of Japanese food, from tonkatsu to shoyu ramen to teriyaki, involves a sauce made from four components: mirin, soy sauce, sake, and dashi.
- Mirin is rice wine vinegar.
- Sake is rice wine, fermented with kōji rice.
- Dashi is effectively bonito stock. Bonito is dried, preserved skipjack tuna, shaved into flake form.
- You probably know what soy sauce is. I have written text about it before.
Start with a 1:1:1:1 of these, mix to taste.
Add these into stock and you have the base for shoyu ramen. Add sugar and reduce; now you have teriyaki sauce. Up the mirin content and you have tonkatsu dipping sauce. Sauté some sliced beef in this with a pinch of sugar and serve with a fried egg, pickles, and rice on the side, and you basically pulled off Yoshinoya at home.
You do not need much sauce for a soba bowl, only enough to coat the noodles and keep them from sticking. I make my own in bulk and throw the rest in a ball jar, because I make lots of Japanese food when it’s nice out.
The toppings
The following go well in a soba bowl:
- Halved cherry tomatoes
- A half avocado
- A poached egg
- Carmelized onions
- Sautéed spinach with garlic
- Broccoli spears, blanched
- Shishito peppers, de-stemmed
- Roasted brussels sprouts
- Butter-sautéed cremini, oyster, or shiitake
Don’t overthink it. Grind some pepper on top, or add some tōgarashi.
You now have a meal. Impress your friends with it.