Kyoto & Kaiseki · Main
Nishin Soba
- Advanced
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, a sweet edge rounding the corners, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 2 migaki nishin, dried herring, about 150g
- 1 L rice rinsing water
- 1 L weak bancha
- 200ml sake
- 60g sugar
- 60ml koikuchi shoyu
- 30ml mirin
- 20g ginger, sliced
- 1.2 L dashi of kombu and katsuobushi
- 60ml usukuchi shoyu
- 40ml mirin, for the broth
- 5g salt
- 400g dried soba
- 2 kujo negi, sliced on the angle
The skills inside
DashiThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
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.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Soak the herring in the rice rinsing water in a cool place, changing it once, until a fingernail dents the flesh; scrape off any scales and rinse.
- Simmer it in the bancha for twenty minutes to strip the old surface fat, then throw the tea away.
- Set the herring in the sake, sugar and ginger under a drop lid at a bare tremble for an hour, then add the koikuchi shoyu and mirin and carry on until the liquid is syrupy and a chopstick pushes through the backbone.
- Season the dashi with the usukuchi shoyu, mirin and salt and hold it just below a simmer. Taste it pale and frankly salty; it has plain noodles to meet.
- Boil the soba in a large pot of unsalted water until the core is no longer chalky, drain, rinse under cold water to strip the surface starch, then dip it back into hot water to reheat.
- Ladle the broth over the noodles, lay a piece of herring on top and finish with kujo negi.
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.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
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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