Soba Noodles

Soba Noodles

Not long after I started this project I found surfing food sites salivating over pictures of food .  These cravings came from the burn out of really only eating brown rice with steamed veggies and pasta for about the first month.  Late one night while looking around I found myself reading about soba noodles.
I read that it takes three years to learn how to make them!  I lol'ed--buckwheat flour+water-->3 years?

That weekend I found myself at Natural Land with my girlfriend who shops there for her groceries. While she does her thing, I just wonder the store... Then I noticed--- BUCKWHEAT FLOUR!!! and it was only $5.

When I got home, I started the recipe search for my noodles.

I found a good walk through and basic recipe here:
http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-soba-step-by-step,0,4162417.photogallery
Basically
4 Parts Buckwheat flour
1 Part Wheat Flour
2 Parts water

Mix,roll, cut, and cook. 3 years???

First thing I noticed is how Play-doh like the dough felt, not at all like fresh pasta--like how I would have thought prior to making.  But unlike Play-doh this either dried out fast or changed from over-mixing and started crumbling.
   I added more water and mixed it further which seem to help until after rolling out the dough and folding it to cut the noodles it started crumbling again. I'm not sure if my problems were from dryness or the lack of gluten in buckwheat.  Other recipes I read afterward have more wheat flour (around 1 part wheat to 2 parts buckwheat) for the elasticity the gluten provides.

 Cutting my dough that was crumbling on the folds into thin traditional soba width noodles was a challenge. I had to cut them to about  the size of udon to keep then together.  You can see in the picture my noodles were too wide :(   They also were too short from breaking from falling apart at the folds while cutting.

I threw what I had into a pot of boiling water to cook.  Luckily, they didn't fall apart in the water! Testing  noodles along the way the tasted done after about 5 minutes.

I ate them immediately after draining them with some Trade Joe's low sodium soy sauce and Siracha.

 The Results

  My noodles were nothing like my fantasy noodles I wanted!!  I only used about 1/5 of my buckwheat (which means they only cost me $1 to make) so I have plenty to try again soon. I'll post more results from those experiments.

 

A video of a real soba master:

His Buckwheat is really white compared to what I have.