New Year's Eve

On Dec. 16, I wrote about my buckwheat harvest and how I planned to make "Toshi Koshi Soba" for New Years Eve.
So we did it! We made "Go-Wari Soba." Which means that it is half buckwheat and half wheat flour (the gluten holds it together).
If you want to try it, you need:

Ingredients
150g Buckwheat flour
150g Wheat flour
129g water between 20-25 degrees C.

Start with 150g each buckwheat flour and wheat flour.
Measure the water into two cups- 90g in one, 39 in the other. 

Sift the flours together

Now you have 300g of flour ready to go

My helpers drizzle 90g of water while stirring with chopsticks.
Then mix it with your fingers to make it grainy.
Add the 39g of water a little at a time as you continue to mix it.
When the grains get bigger, stop adding water and make a ball.

Kneading the dough 100 times

Cover the dough and let it rest while you flour your rolling surface and get out the rolling pin.
In Japan, most serious foodies have a soba kit, with a big rolling pin and board.
I am not a foodie, I'm an eater. I use my table and a regular sized pin.

Press the dough flat with your palms.

Begin rolling the dough out. You are aiming for a rectangle.
After two or three times, roll the dough onto the rolling pin, and rotate it 90 degrees.
Then unroll it again, and continue. This should give you a relatively square piece.

When it is about 1mm thick, flour 1/2 of the sheet, and fold it in half.
It helps if you roll the sheet onto the rolling pin one last time before you fold it,
otherwise it will stretch and stick to your table surface.

Fold it in half again, (now it is four layers thick) and put it on a cutting board.
Use another cutting board as a ruler and cut the noodles about 1mm thick.
If you cut, and bump the ruler with the side of your knife, you can get a good rhythm going.

The noodles, cut and ready to boil.

Put a BIG kettle on the stove and get it boiling. 

Now you need to make the soup. I didn't take pictures of it, but it is so easy.

Ingredients:

6 cups of dashi-broth (made from dried bonito flakes, or "Katsuobushi". Look in an Asian Grocery. Most people use prepared granular bullion)

1/2 cup soy sauce

2 Tbsp of mirin

1 tsp of sugar

1 skinless chicken breast cut in bite sized pieces.

Dump it all in a pot and boil it until the chicken is done.

By  now the big kettle should be boiling. 

You will need a large bowl, with a smaller colander inside it, and a steady stream of cold water into the bowl.

Divide the noodles in four (I like to put them into the four bowls that we will use to eat with), and get ready, because this part moves fast.

1. Drop 1/4 the noodles into the boiling water, and stir it a few times to make sure the noodles don't stick to each other.

2. When the noodles float to the top and the boiling resumes, count to 15, scoop the noodles out, and put them into the colander. Rinse them lightly, drain, and transfer them to the bowl you will eat out of. (try one noodle to see if it is done to your preference, you can then adjust the time)

3. Repeat steps one and two for the other 3 bowls.

4. Ladle some of the soup into the bowls over the noodles, maybe sprinkle some green onions and tenkasu on top, and dig in. After finishing the noodles, put a ladle of the water used to boil the noodles into your bowl and drink it dry. 

A bit thick and thin, but delicious!
(We didn't have any green onion)

Buckwheat Harvest 2011

This year, I grew some buckwheat in the garden. I think it was a success. I ended up with one kilo of unhulled buckwheat. Not too shabby.

Buckwheat sheaves drying in early November

Growing buckwheat is quite easy. After planting it on August 15, I only weeded once, and thinned the stand at the same time. After that, it just grew (with a few waterings of diluted urine of course). And man, did it grow! After the weeding, it went to canopy in just a few days and shaded out most of what was below it. Then came the long flowering period, with lots and lots of bees. And by October 30, it was ready to harvest (But I was busy for a few days and finally got to it on November 2.)

To harvest the buckwheat, you just need a hand sickle and some long straw, or string.
1. Grab a handful of stalks near the base, and cut them with the sickle. Quite a few of them will break off, buckwheat stems are very brittle.
2. When you have a generous handful, take a few long straws and wrap them around the base twice, twist them two or three times, and tuck it under the band.
3. When you finish binding, stack the sheaves stems down along a fence, or drape them over the top rail.
4. After a week to ten days, they should be dry enough to thresh.

For the buckwheat I grew here, I threshed it by hand. It is not so hard- just grab a bundle and cut/untie the band. Then close your gloved fist around a few stalks at the base and pull it through your fist. The seeds will pop off onto the tarp you have of course laid on your threshing floor. Continue for longer than you thought it would take, and you have a bundle of buckwheat stems, and a lot of seeds and trash on the tarp. If you have a few sunny days coming up, dry the buckwheat and chaff for a few days, but you can winnow them right away if needed.

You need moving air to winnow effectively. If there is no wind, you can use a fan. I placed a cardboard box in the middle of the tarp, just below my fan. Then I slowly sprinkled handfuls of seeds and chaff. The trash mostly blew away, and I had a box full of fairly clean seed. So I did it again, and again.
Finally, I had one kilogram of buckwheat. I have a plan to make a hopefully more effective winnower from some cardboard boxes- look forward to that project next year.

I finally spread the seeds thinly in a shallow cardboard tray and have them drying indoors. I stir them occasionally. The plan is to make soba noodles for the traditional "Toshi Koshi Soba" on Dec. 31. The tradition comes from how busy the Japanese housewives are making "Osechi" (a special New Years boxed lunch) for the extended family at year end. The housewives prefer to make something easy and quick on New Year's Eve. It is bad luck to not eat all the noodles, so don't make too many.

The buckwheat patch is now resting until spring (I forgot to order cover crop seeds). What do you think I should put in there next? We went from: weedy pasture-potatoes-buckwheat-fallow- ????