Noodle Atlas · Soup
Kitsune Udon
- Intermediate
- 50 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, a sweet edge rounding the corners, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 400g udon: frozen sanuki udon is genuinely the connoisseur's home choice (better chew than most fresh packs)
- The broth (kakejiru): 1L dashi (kombu-shiitake dashi for vegetarians) + 3 tbsp light soy (usukuchi, for the pale Kansai gold) + 2 tbsp mirin + 1 tsp sugar
- 4 pieces aburaage (fried tofu pouches), simmered 10 min in 200ml dashi + 2 tbsp each soy, mirin, sugar until glossy and swollen, the 'fox' of the name
- Scallions, sliced fine; shichimi togarashi at the table
- Optional: a slice of kamaboko for the pink swirl
The skills inside
DashiBraisingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Reviewed by hand
Method
- Simmer the aburaage in its sweet braise until it drinks the liquid and turns amber; set aside in its syrup.
- Heat the broth to just under a boil: kakejiru is never boiled hard; it goes cloudy and sharp.
- Cook the udon (from frozen, straight into boiling water 60–90 seconds); rinse briefly in hot water to clean the surface.
- Bowl the noodles; ladle the hot gold broth; lay the sweet fox pouches on top; scallions; shichimi to taste. Slurp the noodles, then drink the bowl.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dashi 29 recipes
- It is clear enough to read the bottom of the pan through it. Cloudiness means it boiled, or the kombu stayed in past the first small bubbles, and neither can be strained out afterwards.
- Pale gold rather than brown, nearer the colour of weak tea. A brown dashi has been cooked too hard or too long and will taste of the pan rather than of the sea.
- The kombu came out before the water reached a simmer, and it is supple rather than slimy. A slippery surface on the sheet means alginates have started to leach, and the broth will feel viscous on the tongue.
- Strained without pressing. Squeezing the flakes or the kelp forces out bitterness and fine particles, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
- Tasted alone it is savoury and faintly sweet with no fishiness and no bitter edge. Fishy means the katsuobushi steeped rather than settling; bitter means heat.
Where it goes wrong Heat, or time, or both. Kombu boiled gives up alginates and turns the broth slippery and faintly bitter; katsuobushi left to steep turns it sour and fishy. Almost every dashi failure is an excess of one of the two things the cook controls, and neither is recoverable once it has happened.
Braising 39 recipes
- The pieces went into the liquid already deep brown on their faces, and the pot floor gave up its fond to that liquid rather than keeping it.
- The liquid comes partway up the pieces and stays there for the whole cook (not submerged, not run dry), and it never boils: the surface trembles and no more.
- It went long enough for the collagen to convert: a fork twists in it with almost no resistance, and the piece still lifts out whole rather than falling into shreds.
- The liquid has become a sauce: it has body, it coats the back of a spoon, and it tastes concentrated rather than thin and washed out.
- The meat is moist and seasoned through to its centre, not dry fibres sitting inside a good sauce.
Where it goes wrong The oven or the burner ran too hot and the liquid boiled, so the fibres tightened and squeezed their moisture out: it shreds dry into a thin greasy liquid, and more time makes it worse rather than better.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Junmai or Ginjo sake
- Also Right
- Dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Japanese rice lager
- Zero-Proof
- Cold green tea (sencha)
Umami bridges best with umami: sake’s amino depth shakes hands with dashi and soy where tannic wine would argue.
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