Contents
Japanese noodles made from buckwheat flour, usually cut with wheat flour for strength. Nutty, faintly bitter, and one of the very few noodles designed from the start to be eaten cold rather than merely tolerated that way.
Read the buckwheat percentage
This is the only specification worth checking, and cheap soba often buries it:
- Juwari (十割) — 100 % buckwheat. Fragile, expensive, the best flavour, and the only genuinely gluten-free soba.
- Ni-hachi (二八) — 80 % buckwheat, 20 % wheat. The classic ratio and the best balance of flavour and durability.
- Below ~40 % — mostly wheat noodles coloured brown. They stop tasting of buckwheat.
Most supermarket soba is in the last category. Check the ingredient list order, not the front of the packet.
The one technique that matters
Rinse harder than feels reasonable. Buckwheat sheds enormous quantities of starch, and unrinsed soba sets into a single block within minutes. Rinse under cold running water, rubbing the strands between your hands, until the water runs clear and the noodles squeak. Then plunge into ice water for thirty seconds — the cold shock is what gives good soba its snap.
Boil in unsalted water; the dough already carries the flavour. Four to five minutes, and it goes from perfect to pasty in about sixty seconds.
Sobayu
The starchy buckwheat cooking water is traditionally poured into the leftover dipping sauce and drunk at the end of the meal. It is not a gimmick.
Keeping
Dry, a year. Cooked, best within twenty minutes and not worth storing — soba is the one base in Cold Meals that does not batch.
Elsewhere on the site
Used in: cold soba bowl
Related: rice noodles · soy sauce · nori · Buckwheat (growing)