What is important in soba making has often been said, "3 just-now", which means,.... 1. "Ground Just Now" (Buckwheat has been ground to flour) 2. "Made Just Now" (Noodles have been made after mixing, kneading, and cutting processes) 3. "Boiled Just Now". In contrast with other types of noodles, udon and ramen, soba tastes best when served immediately after made, kneaded, pressed, stretched, cut, and boiled because what people look for when eating soba is fresh flavor of soba and smoothness of noodles.
This 3-Just-Now approach in soba-making is considered one of the most important factors to making delicious soba. As soba flour tends to have many germs and high enzyme vitalization with oxidization it is attributable to the fact that the aroma is apt to getting let out of flour particles. One reason for this is that buckwheat flour is more lively. Its elements are easily affected when exposed to air or oxygen at each process of the 3 processes. The following describes ways we developed to prevent this aroma discharge from happening at each process.
As for "Ground Just Now", there has been an increasing number of those who wish to do home-milling on wheat. It is fine for those who can afford it, yet for those who cannot in time, money, or labor, we recommend that milled buckwheat flour in bulk be kept refrigerated. At our company, during the season of "new soba" (the first harvest of buckwheat of the year), we tested to see if we can enjoy good soba made from freshly milled soba flour that has been kept refrigerated over a year, in the next summer. We've done this many times with joy of tasting good soba each time.
Next is "Made Just Now", (in order to keep the aroma of soba intact inside noodles).
Many restaurants we visited serve soba without much aroma left in noodles as they finish making soba in the morning and keep them in a refrigerator until the evening when soba is finally served. Aroma, sensed when biting into or simply smelling noodles is one of what makes soba delicious. Yet, long storage of soba in form of noodle lines makes soba lose most of its aroma. To prevent this, we recommend freezing fresh noodle lines. Please check with our noodle research dept. for more information on this method.
Lastly, "Boiled Just Now"..... It is obvious that soba tastes good when served right after fresh noodles are boiled.
There are a number of soba restaurants we have visited across the country, and there are many that serve soba that is made with less than 80% of buckwheat . Although there are many restaurants with the sign, saying g2:8 sobah (soba made with the ratio of 20% of regular wheat and 80% of buckwheat in total flour usage; when only buckwheat flour is used, it is too solid to a dough), they serve soba that is probably made at 3:7, 4:6, sometimes even 5:5 ratios (buckwheat to regular wheat flour used). The more buckwheat is used, the harder it is to make noodles.
Next, we consider milling of buckwheat. Recently, many flour mills grind buckwheat to powdery particles, but if domestic buckwheat that is priced about 20,000 yen per bag is ground to such small particles, it becomes worthless as it doesn't have much aroma left when served.
We recommend adding 30% of roughly milled flour to powdery flour (70% of total flour volume). With this ratio of the flour mix, we can make soba that is transparent and somewhat rough with visible black particles (buck-wheat risiduals) when made to noodle lines and boiled. This is the best looking soba noodles we have ever seen. We believe that noodles have to be good looking as a prerequisite to be considered great noodles. |
Scaled Sketch & Spec 
