It’s That Simple is our series about recipes so easy, you can make them with your eyes closed. Think tiny ingredient lists, laid-back techniques, and results so delicious you’ll text home about them.
One of my earliest memories is slurping Japanese zaru soba prepared by my mother. I was little and shirtless, a kitchen towel wrapped around my neck, legs dangling off the chair, with the loud hum of our window AC unit nearby. These cold buckwheat noodles were instant refreshment on the stickiest of summer days, when dinner needed to be quenching as much as filling.
Now, when the humid weather rolls around, I call on this dish to replenish me from the inside out. Start with cooked, drained, and rinsed soba noodles. My mother would scrub them like laundry, ensuring every last bit of starch was washed off. This shocks the noodles to halt cooking and prevents them from clumping.
Next, make a mentsuyu, a savory noodle soup base. Now you could buy mentsuyu pre-made and stock it in your fridge for instant zaru soba. But making it at home is really straightforward. Typically, mentsuyu features dashi, mirin, soy sauce, and sake. To keep it supremely simple (and pantry-friendly), I skip the sake and my family is none the wiser. Instant dashi is a convenient umamibomb powder I substitute in for the homemade stuff. Serving it with a couple of ice cubes both gently dilutes and intensely chills the mixture, like a martini on the rocks. I like to top my soba with sliced scallion, crisp nori, a squeeze of wasabi, and a mound of daikon. Don’t skip that last one—when grated, this bittersweet radish is like fluffy snow, melting into the sauce.
You could arrange the zaru soba in neat bowls like my mother would do, creating picture-perfect compositions. But I often devour it straight from the colander, noodles strewn about and messily dipped into the mentsuyu. Minutes later, gone.
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