Earth Hour: Udon Noodles Soup

Over lunch at Tachibana, I wondered if I could make Udon noodles. After looking online, I learned that the recipe was ridiculously simple: flour, water and salt but, the process seemed rather bizarre and involved stepping on the dough.  Of course, I had to try it and Stacy agreed to join in. We chose an epicurious.com recipe for self-stomped noodles.
So...we started! At first, we didn’t think that it would come together; basically, it was just flour and not much water and we wondered how well the dough would stick together without oil or egg  to make it bind. It was very crumbly and at first, I couldn’t get it all to stick together but, with only one additional TBS of water, it quickly became a soft, pliable dough. Amazing! Then came the “stomping”. After a short debate over bag size, we went with the one gallon freezer bag instead of the 25 gallon brining bag. This worked great and Teri arrived in time to aid the stomping efforts. Stomping felt weird but, the dough yielded nicely and the process was very effective and we all talked about stomping our next pie crust.

I tried to roll the dough right after stomping but, it tended to spring back so, we decided to let it rest a few minutes. After that, it rolled out nicely though I did stand up on a low stool to give myself more leverage to get it nice and thin. Next came cutting, the recipe said to fold it like a fan but, we vetoed that as too hard so, we rolled it up but, that made it too hard to get an even cut. In the end ,we just laid it out flat on the cutting board sliced it into ribbons.


Stacy, being far more patient than me, did the slicing. The dough handled very nicely and didn’t stick together and we were able to pile the fresh noodles onto a plate. I covered them with plastic wrap until we were ready to cook them.

Once the amazing broth (that’s another story about how cool seaweed is) was ready, we boiled the noodles for about 5 minutes, drained them, used tongs to put them into bowls and ladled the soup onto them. Yum! Absolutely worth the effort, I can see myself doing this more often!