Soba Noodle Class

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the Tsukiji Soba Academy, which offers classes on how to make soba noodles from scratch. These range in difficulty from one time weekend workshops for novices to a series of classes designed for professionals. I emailed to sign up for a 3-hour workshop for novices, and soba master Akila Inouye wrote me back with the date and time.

Sensei Akila turned out to be a jovial fellow and a wonderfully patient teacher. He first jotted down the basic steps for making soba noodles. As it turns out, soba noodles are made by simply mixing 80% buckwheat flour and 20% regular wheat flour, then adding 40% of the flour's weight in water. So, you would mix .8 kg buckwheat flour, .2 kg wheat flour and 400 ml of water together for your dough. "How many servings does this make?" someone asked. "Ten Tokyo servings...which would be two American servings," Akila joked.

Notice that the final product is 1.3 mm wide and 1.5 mm tall, so the soba noodles are actually not square on the vertical slice.

Next, you knead the dough for a few minutes, then shape it into a light bulb, then a cone, to bunch the creases on one end. With a few deft gestures, Akila pressed the dough into a round disk, and all the folds had been smoothed out.

The next two steps are "very easy," and involve rolling out the dough and then slicing it into noodles. Take a rolling pin and press the dough evenly and uniformly from 15 mm thick to 1.5 mm thick. There are plastic disks of varying heights to show you when you have flattened the dough to an appropriate amount. After you flatten the dough to 8 mm, you stretch it into a rectangular shape, which eliminates wasted dough, then gently flatten to 1.5 mm thin. Easy, right?

Finally, you dust the dough with uchiko, a starch powder that prevents the dough from sticking, and fold it into thirds. With your fingers gently pressed on a soba cutting board, slice the dough and keep the blade perpendicular to the table. After each slice, tilt the knife the the left slightly, which slides the top cutting board 1.3 mm over. Then, slice the next batch of noodles. In just a couple minutes, Akila had cut his dough into beautiful, uniform soba noodles.

Now it was time for us to try our hand at making soba noodles. I mixed my flour and water, then kneaded and patted it into a disk. The rolling proved to be a lot harder than it looked. After a few missteps, my dough had torn in one corner, and it was no longer uniformly square. Alas. Like a good sauce though, cutting the noodles hides a lot of mistakes. "How long should we boil these for?" someone asked. "If you have thin noodles of the right size, it should be 3 1/2 minutes. Otherwise, cook them for 4 minutes." Akila replied. "What about these?" I asked. Akila inspected them carefully. "Hmm, 4 minutes!" Oops.

Here I am with my finished tray of soba noodles. I ended up taking home two extra boxes from the two French students in the class because they didn't have any place to store or cook them. Unfortunately, after putting them in the hostel frig, I dashed off to the airport the next day and completely forgot to tote them home with me. :(

For one final lesson, we were taught how to properly slurp our noodles. Forget what your mother said about not making noises while chewing or eating; the Japanese show their appreciation of noodles by slurping them noisily. To eat soba noodles, you first taste the noodles by themselves and appreciate the texture and taste of the buckwheat by itself. Next, drop 2-3 noodles into the soba dipping sauce in the cup. Slurp them up noisily, and keep the noodles contained between your chopsticks to minimize flicking sauce into your face. Next, eat a little bit of the onion with the noodles. After you finish the noodles, fill the soba sauce cup with the leftover boiling water. This creates a thick, creamy mixture that is a perfect finish for your meal.

"Thanks for coming!" said Akila. "Don't forget to friend me on Facebook!"

Needless to say, that is the first thing I did when I got home.