Homemade soba noodles in vegetable broth

Globalization has brought us delicious dishes from distant lands, including all the pasta consumed in Japan, such as these homemade soba noodles what can we make with the robot's pasta attachment KitchenAid and we put it into an Oriental-style vegetable broth. Yum.

Soba is the Japanese word for buckwheat (alforfón), a gluten-free pseudocereal. This grain is the second most commonly used traditional grain in Japanese cuisine, after rice. For the traditional style of making soba noodles, called ni-hachi, a ratio of 20% wheat flour to 80% buckwheat flour is commonly used.

Since buckwheat lacks gluten, adding wheat flour makes the dough easier to handle when preparing it and less brittle, giving it more body even with that small proportion of gluten. Purists prefer a higher percentage of buckwheat, as the closer the ratio gets to 100%, the more intense the distinctive flavor that buckwheat imparts. In our recipe the proportion is around 27% to make things easier… if you enjoy the experience, you can always make it again with a higher proportion of buckwheat, but always at your own risk...

The traditional way to eat soba noodles is very simple; we have opted for a vegetable broth instead of the traditional one dashi, of fish, and some chunks of vegetables too.

Japanese soba masters say that this pasta can, of course, be made with an electric pasta machine like the one we used, but that the charm lies in the process—in the kneading and the hand-cutting... We don’t doubt it, but we’ll leave that for another day.

WMF Kitchen Scissors 21 cm, WMF pouring ladle, Revol round porcelain plate, KitchenAid and KitchenAid pasta attachment

Ingredients

Homemade soba noodles:

• 160 g buckwheat flour
• 60 g of plain wheat flour
• 115 ml of water

Broth accompaniment:

• 600 ml of homemade vegetable broth
• 1 onion
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 good splash of sunflower or olive oil
• 3 tbsp tamari sauce
• 100 g of mushrooms
• 2 carrots
• Chives to taste

Production

Homemade soba noodles

1. Weigh the flour and sift it with a sieve if it’s whole wheat like the one I used; this way you’ll avoid the tears that bran can cause when rolling out and cutting the noodles. If you want to use everything, run the bran through a clean coffee grinder and return the finely ground bran to the flour.
2. Put both flours in the bowl of a stand mixer (with the paddle, if you're doing it in KitchenAid) and mix them. Add the water and mix until the dough comes together. If it doesn’t come together, you may need to add a bit of water to adjust, since every flour is different and has a different absorption capacity.
3. You should get a soft dough that feels moist but not sticky. Shape it into a disk, put it in a plastic bag, and let it rest for 30 minutes.
4. If you make the pasta with roller, thoroughly flour the table, roll it out to a thickness of 1,5 mm, fold it into three parts, like a letter, and cut it thinly into long spaghetti.
5. If you use the KitchenAid pasta maker attachment, divide the dough into three parts, keeping the part you don’t roll in the bag, and run the dough several times through the roller on setting 1. Once you have a strip of uniform width (more or less), switch the attachment, lightly dust the pasta strip with flour on both sides, as well as the pasta attachment itself, start the machine and form the noodles. Be careful because the dough is delicate and its own weight can cause the noodles to break. Dust the formed noodles with a little flour again so they don’t stick to each other.
6. Group the noodles into nests and, if you’re not going to cook them right away, freeze them in zip-top bags.

Broth accompaniment

1. Finely chop the onion and the garlic, and sauté them in the oil.
2. Add the broth, the carrots sliced thinly or cut into matchsticks, the mushrooms sliced very thinly, and the soy sauce, and cook until the vegetables are tender.

Plate assembly

1. When the broth is ready, cook the noodles in plenty of water, in a separate pot without salt, until they are al dente, about 2-3 minutes; you need to keep tasting them.
2. Drain the soba noodles well and cool them under the tap with cold water until the water runs clear. Let them drain thoroughly and divide them among 4 bowls or plates.
3. Pour the hot broth over the soba noodles, garnish with chopped chives, and serve immediately.

If you’re fans of Japanese cooking, you’ll love these homemade soba noodles, which are much more aromatic than the store-bought kind. I’m sure a Japanese soba master would find plenty of faults with them… but we’re happy with them.

KitchenAid Pasta Attachment