So, I tried the experiment today of cooking soba.

For those not familiar with soba, they're Japanese noodles made from a combination of wheat flour and buckwheat flour, which gives them a greyish-brown color (in an appetizing kind of way). They're about the thickness of thin spaghetti, but square in cross section rather than round.

I've liked soba the few times I've had it, though I think I've most often had it at fusion cuisine types of restaurants, which invariably slather it in a ginger-peanut sauce. A good ginger-peanut sauce can make cardboard palatable, though.

Though I don't see soba on many Japanese restaurant menus here, articles I've read on Japanese cooking say that soba is very popular in Japan, particularly in the North, where buckwheat is commonly cultivated. One popular way to eat them is to dip plain cold soba noodles in various dipping sauces.

So, when I was at 99 Ranch yesterday, I picked up some soba, and a little bottle of soba tsuyu or soba dipping sauce. And today for lunch, I made soba.

I started by cooking the soba according to the package directions. Or trying to, anyway - the directions were not very clear. (The soba came out fine, though.) The cooking technique was kind of interesting - you bring soba and water to a boil, add a cup of cold water, let the whole thing come to a boil again, and then take it off the heat and let it sit for 5 minutes.

While the soba was cooking, I took a couple of scallions and chopped them up. I also attempted to toast some sesame seeds in a non-stick skillet, but I was a little skittish with them, because I'd just read an article about how you shouldn't heat empty non-stick skillets to high heat, and the distinction between an empty non-stick skillet and one with a couple of teaspoons of sesame seeds in it did not seem to be large.

When the soba was done, I dumped it into a colander and rinsed it with cold water. Then I tossed the soba with the chopped scallions and sesame seeds, put it in a bowl, and just for some extra crunch and yumminess, put some snow peas on top. I put some of the soba tsuyu in a little bowl on the side.

If you want to see what it looked like, I put a photo on flickr.
(Apologies for the low image quality - I took that with my camera phone.)

So how did it taste? Pretty darn good. You can really taste the flavor of the soba prepared this way. Without the dipping sauce, it's a bit bland, but the sauce punches up the flavor without obscuring it. (The sauce, by the way, is a combination of bonito, soy sauce, and mirin - the flavor is very reminiscent of miso soup. To my knowledge, soba aren't usually used as soup noodles, but I think they'd be tasty in miso soup.) The sesame seeds stick to the soba strands, and add a nice sesame note. The scallions all ended up in the bottom of the bowl - if I use them again, I'll have to put them in a sauce that will bind them to the soba.

All the "serving suggestion" photos on the packages of soba and soba tsuyu show the soba with what looks like hijiki (a type of seaweed used as a condiment for rice and noodles) on top, so maybe I'll try that. I also think the soba might be good with something to give them a little spiciness - some chili garlic sauce, or something. Or, yes, a ginger-peanut sauce.

Still, the dish as is makes a pretty nice light lunch. And it's pretty darn healthy - A 2 o.z. serving of soba has 190 calories and 1 g of fat. Of course, the dipping sauce is loaded with sodium, but you don't really need all that much of it.