Hokkaido - Soba Master

It Ain't As Easy as it Looks
After our Otaru afternoon we headed to the outskirts of Sapporo for a soba making class.  If you're not familiar with soba noodles, they're made from buckwheat and are often eaten cold with a dipping sauce.  The word "soba" means buckwheat in Japanese.  I was really looking forward to this and it didn't disappoint.  This is the finished product that Dodo, David (a colleague of Dodo's) and I made.  Looks good, right?  The small round container holds the dipping sauce.

We made our noodles in a large teaching kitchen. The soba masters instructed in Japanese and our tour guide translated into Cantonese.  Dodo seemed reluctant to share the English translation with me and I thought about her competitiveness.  She was planning to outdo me in noodle making.  I wisely put her on my team to avoid this. 

We got a hands on demo from some of the masters. The ingredients could not be simpler: buckwheat, bit of salt and a precise amount of water.  The mixing is done my hand.  You shape your hands like a cat claw and mix in circle eights.  Water is added three times as you mix.  Your goal is to end up with pea-sized dough pearls which are then combined into a large ball.  You knead the ball of dough for what seems like hours.

You then shape the ball into a flat disk by hand before applying a long rolling pin to it. Our tour guide was laughing as he explained - I don't think he held out much hope for us.

Through a series of deft rolling pin moves, the rounded dough becomes square. At this point, you spend a lot of time ensuring the dough is evenly flat - the target thickness being about 1.75 mm.

When you get the dough thickness correct, you triple fold it and cut it with a large soba knife.  There is a board placed across the dough to help guide the cutting.  The width of the noodle should also be about 1.75mm and getting this right is very hard.  The cutting technique is tough - you place the knife against the wooden board's edge, cutting straight down through the dough and once done, you tilt the knife blade to move the board and repeat.  These experts could do it effortlessly and end up with identically sized noodles.  They're dusted with a bit of flour and placed in a wooden box.

I got the feeling that most in the audience were not daunted by the task.  I knew better.  I wasn't too worried about the mixing, kneading or rolling.  The cutting, however, looked very delicate and difficult.

Now it was our turn.  We washed and teamed up.  The lady in the middle is Karine, the wife of one of Dodo's colleagues and next to her is Chingyi - Dodo's right hand workaholic teammate.  They put on a brave face but they were worried.  Working babes in Singapore don't have a clue about anything kitchen related.

I recruited David to my team on purpose.  If the Big Boss is known as the drinker, David is known as the eater.  He's from Hong Kong and knows all the best places to eat there.  He cooks a lot as well.  I enjoy him, he is a real character.  He started us off with the mixing.

 

Soba has an interesting back story.  During the Edo period wealthier people ate a lot of white rice and were susceptible to beri-beri, a disease of the nervous system caused by lack of thiamine.  Someone figured out that by eating thiamine-rich soba once a week, you could avoid the disease.  Dodo didn't know any of this as she applied her cat claws under the master's watchful eyes.

There are five levels of soba master in Japan.  Our master was a level three and was still at it, trying to attain perfection well into his seventies.  He paid close attention to the amount of water we added, he was almost maniacal about it.  I took a turn at the mixing and did the kneading as well.

The main master stepped in to give me some rolling tips.  Everyone later teased me about my rolling - they said I looked super serious and wrapped up in it.  It was hard not to take it seriously with the masters lurking over your shoulder, pointing out inconsistencies in the thickness.

Then the hard part - cutting the dough into noodles.  We all took a turn and none of us quite got it right. Sometimes we made perfectly proportioned noodles and other times we made linguine sized monsters.

The act of cutting is not hard though the knife doesn't glide through the dough as I expected it would.  Tilting the knife to move the board is very difficult to do consistently.  Not only do you have to move the board exactly 1.75mm but you have to do it evenly.

Can you see some of those fat ribbons amongst the sleeker noodles?  I expected the soba masters to laugh and tease us but they were poker-faced pros who encouraged us.

 

As soon as we had our batch done, they were dumped in the pot to cook for a few minutes.  Once we fished them out we dashed them with cold water to stop the cooking and grabbed our chopsticks.

Not bad for rookies.  The eating technique is deceptively hard as well.  You grab a clump with your chopsticks, dip them in the sauce and then are slurp them loudly.  I cannot master the slurping part - I was raised to eat quietly.  In Japan, loud eating is a sign that the food is delicious.

I took a shot of the "Soba 101" steps for posterity.  The best part?  Eating the noodles.  Second best part?  Not having to clean up.  We hopped back on the bus and made our way towards Sapporo.