Zaru soba
How to eat soba
Except in China and Japan, it’s generally considered being rude to make a slurping sound while eating noodles. But we Japanese usually slurp our soba. In the Edo period, the citizens of Edo (now Tokyo) in particularly liked to eat that way, and they thought it as "Iki"(sophisticated). I don't know if it's the best way, but why don't you try slurping our soba when you come to Japan?
How to make soba
Soba is mainly made of buckwheat flour and water, so usually it is brownish gray in color. The dough is kneaded and rolled out into a thin sheet, then cut into very thin strips and boiled.
Soba is served with a sauce made of seafood consommé, soy sauce, and mirin wine (sweet sake used as seasoning). You dip the noodles in it before you eat them.
Varieties in soba
We also eat soba in hot soup with various toppings, such as tempra (fried prawns), kitsune (fried tofu), egg, stewed chicken or beef, vegetables and seaweed as you like.
Soba shop
Yomogi soba
We sometimes eat different flavored soba noodles, such as green-tea soba.
This is Yomogi-soba, which is flavored with young leaves of Yomogi (mugwart) in early spring. This soba shop serves at least 30 dishes of Yomogi-soba a day.
About buckwheat
Have you ever seen buckwheat seeds?
They can survive the cold winter weather and grow very quickly in unfertilized land. It's suprising that we can harvest them in 8 weeks.
Therefore, emigrants carried buckwheat seeds in their pockets in order to ensure a harvest in an era when there were a lot of immigrations in the world.
Water mill
Water mills are used for grinding buckwheat or some other grains. We can see windmills for the same use in other countries. In Japan there are more water mills than windmills, because there are many rivers in Japan and we have abundant water. Therefore, until recently we could see water mills everywhere in Japan. However, grinding machines have replaced water mills, so we can rarely see them nowadays.
