The final day of spa week ~ I am going to miss it. I feel so much better when we eat like this, but Rob is getting antsy and craving braised meats....
Anyway, I had a lot of time to play today and I knew I was doing tuna, which I wanted to pair with soba noodles. Soba noodles are a traditional japanese buckwheat noodle and I love eating these in salads. Most recipes start with "Follow directions on noodle package". That wasn't good enough for me ~ I wanted to make them myself, seeing as how I have a pasta maker and all. I did some searching for recipes and I emailed a local blogger to see if she had ever made them. She told me no, but sent a link to a recipe, which was more than I was getting in my search efforts. I decided to forgo the kneading with the feet and try to make it in my KitchenAid as well as quartering the recipe. The first round was a disaster; the noodles broke into little pieces when I cooked them and the dough was really hard to work with. Of course, anyone who understands the science of flour knows why this happened; the pasta recipe had almost no gluten in it and gluten is what makes the pasta elastic and chewy. So I scrap the first batch and started again, this time going equal parts semolina and buckwheat flour. The pasta comes together beautifully, I adore my new attachment for the Kitchen Aid, although the final flavour is lacking some of that nuttiness that is synonomous with soba noodles. Maybe next time I will try the kneading with the feet method....
4 comments:
Congratulations on your soba-success! I'm going to have to try it myself, now, of course. Soba is something that is very much on my approved list of foods right now, and I'm getting very intersted in cooking more with buckwheat, also.
The whole dish looks delicious, by the way!
I loved reading about your spa week. Every dish looks fabulous.
I hope commercial soba noodles aren't made with feet...
The picture looks divine, Linda. I keep looking at the seared tuna and drooling.
Good luck with your soba making. I would love to have a kitchen aid let alone a pasta attachment. Alas, I have NO idea where I would put it as I have little enough room as it is.
awww i love eating that way too... men always get in the way ;) i love all the dishes, im going to try that lemon marinated chicken if the bird flu ever goes away. have a good day!!
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