On Noodles

It's not often that I think a cooking project is beyond my reach. This confidence is based partly on the fact that I'm not terribly afraid of abject failure (familiarity breeds comfort). I'm therefore willing to try my hand at anything in the kitchen. This general philosophy, coupled with my secret desire to know how to reproduce, from scratch, all my favorite foods, ensures not only that I always have some kind of interesting food project on the go, but that when the revolution finally comes, I'll still be able to eat well.

However, I've been toying with tackling one particular challenge for quite some time now and have been more than a little put off by the work involved. On the surface it has all the hallmarks of my kind of kitchen task: it's a lengthy process which calls for curing, hot smoking, aging, cold smoking, culturing, with an overall completion time of something like a month. I should love it. The cause of my hesitation is the lack of information I can find about the finer details of these steps, and the little information I can find is written in Japanese. Given the amount of work involved, I'm a little reluctant to wing it.



Allow me to take a few steps back. I am obsessed with noodles. Not Western pasta (though I eat enough of that as well) but Asian-style noodles. I love them in nearly every incarnation: Thai and Chinese stir fries, Malaysian laksa, Vietnamese salads. My favorite of noodle dish hails from Japan. Noodles in Japan, made from rice, buckwheat, mung bean, or wheat, are ubiquitous. Hot or cold, they are just as likely to be served at breakfast as dinner and make up a giant portion of the lunch take-away trade. While ramen are probably the best known outside of the island country, udon, a fat, chewy, wheat noodle, typically served in a dashi broth, are king of noodles as far as I'm concerned.

This obsession lead directly, of course, to my wondering if I might not be able to make the dish from scratch. Noodles are no problem. I've been making noodles of some description or other since I was very young, and udon, made from wheat flour, are simply a variation on the familiar technique. The broth in which they are served, dashi, is another story all together.

Dashi is made up of two primary components – kombu and katsuobushi - and then seasoned with mirin and soy. Some quick research tells me that producing my own kombu, a type of dried seaweed, is out. It is farmed on ropes at sea in China, Japan, and Korea and, as there are about 8000 species of seaweed and I'm looking for just one of them, it is not really something I can just pop down to the beach to collect. The other major component, however, seemed to be within reach.

Katsuobushi is also known as bonito; it is a dried fish product made from slipjack tuna (which are also called bonito in some fish markets). It is usually sold in bags of flakes and has a sweet/savory vaguely fishy flavor. Incidentally cat's like it almost as much as I do. When sold fresh, bonito are quite a handsome fish, and recently there's been something of a glut of them on the market here in Sydney, making them quite cheep.

Enter confusion and doubt. While I can find plenty of recipes which call for bonito in some form or another, there is precious little information in either my books or on the world wide interweb on how to turn a whole, fresh slipjack tuna into something which might be used to make dashi. The one page I could find with what seemed like comprehensive instructions is written in Japanese and the magic of google translate yielded helpful hints such as “choose oak or oak.” The translation sort of fell apart beyond that.

So, armed with less than a general idea and some pretty confusing babbelfish babble, I purchased a couple spanking fresh bonito. I filleted, boned and skinned the fish (it breaks down into four sections, like a tuna, for those keeping score). Next, I cured it for a week in a mix of salt and honey (50/50 by weight). After a good rinse, I hot-smoked it for an hour, cooled it overnight, and then warm-smoked it (I was aiming for 70ºC) for 5 hours. After a rest, uncovered in the fridge overnight, I warmed smoked the fillets again for 5 hours. Smoking went on like this for about 5 days, until the fish was quite dry (“like a plank of wood” according to my sketchy sources; I'm storing it outside of the refrigerator now).



At this point, I was supposed to introduce some kind of fungus and ferment for a couple weeks, then kill the fungus by leaving the fish in the sun for half a week more. Upon reading these instructions a series of thoughts came to mind: What kind of fungus? Really, in the sun, like on the kitchen's roof? Did that even translate right? Are these steps going to happen?

They didn't happen. I love fungus as much as the next guy, but the fact is some fungi are not so good for your health, and I'm not about to encourage random, potentially lethal organisms to set up shop in my future lunch. I imagine I'm forfeiting a fair bit of the subtly of the flavor in properly produced katsuobushi, but, honestly, what I ended up with isn't bad at all.

Lets make some noodle soup.

For the Noodles

200g flour
150ml water
¼ tsp table salt

Dissolve the salt in the water and pour this over the flour in a bowl. Mix together to form a stiff dough. Knead by hand for ten minutes. Cover and rest for 1 hour.

Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Roll out the dough to ¼ cm thickness, dust generously with flour, fold in half or thirds, and cut into noodles ¼ cm wide.

Blanch in the boiling water for 2 minutes, shock in cold water and drain. Store in the fridge until ready to serve.

For the Dashi

1.5 L water
15g kombu
40g thick bonito flakes

Soak the kombu in the water for half an hour. In a pot, heat the two over low heat for about 10-15 minutes. It is paramount that you do not let the water boil. Remove the kombu before the water boils. Add the bonito flakes, increase the heat to high, and bring the liquid to a rabid boil. Boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and strain.

Bringing it All Together

1L dashi
2 Tbsb light soy sauce
2 Tbsp mirin

Heat the dashi and add the soy and mirin. Taste, and add more of either soy (salt) and mirin (sweet) to achieve a balance (I like mine quite salty). Add the prepared udon noodles and simmer for 1 minute. Serve with any number of toppings: wakame, green onions, fish cakes, tofu (silken, firm, or fried), tempura (or the little bits of fried tempura batter), egg, or a host of others I probably don't even know about.

Oh, and slurping is not only considered ok, it's a requirement. It cools the thick noodles on the way in. Suck away, people.