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

7 ounces (200 grams) dried soba

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

2 thinly sliced scallions, green and white part