Okinawa · Main
Sōki Soba
- Advanced
- 55 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, an earthy, grounding base, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 1.5kg pork neck bones
- 10g kombu
- 30g katsuobushi
- 800g pork spare ribs, cut into 5cm lengths
- 200ml awamori
- 60g kokuto
- 60ml koikuchi soy sauce
- 600g Okinawa soba noodles (wheat, alkaline, no buckwheat)
- 8g salt, or to taste
- 4 slices kamaboko
- 2 spring onions, sliced thin
- beni shoga
- koregusu (island chillies steeped in awamori), to serve
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
The words inside
Ribs: Baby Back vs. Spare vs. St. Louis
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
- Cover the neck bones with cold water, bring to the boil, then throw the water away and scrub both bones and pot clean of grey scum. Refill with 3 litres cold water and the kombu, pull the kombu out just before it boils, and hold at a lazy simmer for 3 hours. 180 min
- Meanwhile simmer the ribs in the awamori with water to cover for 1 hour, then add the kokuto and soy and cook down 30 minutes more, turning them, until they are sticky and the meat has drawn back from the bone. 60 min
- Strain the pork broth, bring it to 80C (176F), cut the heat, drop in the katsuobushi and leave 3 minutes. Strain again through a cloth without pressing, and salt it to just past what tastes right. 3 min
- Boil the noodles in unsalted water until they are springy rather than soft, drain, and rinse briefly in warm water to wash the surface alkali off.
- Load the bowls with noodles, hot broth, ribs, kamaboko, spring onion and a pinch of beni shoga. Koregusu goes on at the table, drop by drop.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
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.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.