Man and Soba Man

It’s said among professional Japanese cooks that three years are required to master the art of the soba noodle: the first to learn to mix the dough, the second to learn to roll, the third to learn to cut.

Watch the movements of Haruhiko Ishidoya and you’ll see why this might be true. He works at Honmura An, an elegant Manhattan restaurant that claims to be the one place in the United States where authentic soba cuisine is served. On a Friday morning, just before lunch service, I watch Ishidoya make soba --the thin buckwheat noodle with a nutty consistency--from scratch. His movements are stylized and exact, to the point of ritual. First, he mixes the buckwheat flour with water in a large lacquer bowl, grinding the coarse dough through his fingers. Then he rocks in a quick rhythm; a kinetic force rises in his body and flows through his hands, imbuing the dough with elasticity and resilience.

The best soba is made from almost pure buckwheat flour. Which is why it takes a true soba chef so long to learn to handle the dough. Buckwheat has little or no gluten. If not worked just right, the dough chaffs and cracks. Even in the highest-grade soba, a touch of whole-wheat flour is usually mixed with the buckwheat as a binding agent. In commercial soba, the wheat content can be as high as 70%.

After kneading, Ishidoya whirls the dough into a ball and rolls it out on a table of raw cypress wood, manufacturing a paper-thin sheet 12 feet long and a yard wide. Folding the sheet like fabric, he wields a tall cleaver guided by a board ( komaita ) to julienne the thick-stacked bolt.

Ishidoya scoops the noodles with long chopsticks and flips them into wooden trays. The trays are then ferried to the kitchen while Ishidoya cleans his work surfaces and implements.

On this day, Ishidoya and Hideji Asanuma, the eldest chef in the kitchen, man the noodle-cooking station during lunch. Although it takes only half a minute to cook soba , the process has its complexities and perils.

Asanuma waits with pre-measured portions of soba on a zaru , a shallow concave mat of woven bamboo, its handle wrapped in rope. His fingers pluck and shake the soba , gently loosening their mass.

Meanwhile, Ishidoya ladles fresh steaming water from two wells on either side of a massive stainless-steel floor unit ( kama ) that contains a huge central cooking vat. The infusion of fresh water allows him to cut the starch that accumulates from previous orders and to bring the water up to a perfect roll, that fine line between a simmer and a boil.

When Ishidoya deems the water right, he slides the zaru into the vat. The soba strands float free. He caresses the noodles with his long cooking chopsticks, separating them. Thirty seconds later, he lifts the zaru , cooked soba cradled in its bed, from the water and hands it to Asanuma.

Asanuma whisks the noodles under spigots of cold running water, tossing and shimmying them with the zaru . The running water lowers the soba’s temperature and purges surface starch. He then places the soba , zaru and all, into the cold plunge, another massive vat filled with cold water. He works his fingers through the noodles as though shampooing a delicate head of hair.

Although the soba are handled constantly, they must keep their edge. The purity of line--the aesthetic of the cut--must emerge intact.

During soba cooking, there is an expectancy in the kitchen, a focusing of attention. In general, Honmura An’s kitchen is quieter than its Western counterparts. It’s also smaller--about 12x8 feet, with most of the space taken up by a central prep island that stretches from floor to ceiling. Yet five men work in it--and they wear sandals . . . with clean white socks!

Moving from station to station entails only a couple of steps. A step from the cold plunge, against the kitchen’s back wall, is a tiny tempura station. Like that for soba , the traditional apprenticeship for a tempura chef is three years (for a sushi chef it’s five). Honmura An’s chefs are trained in both soba and tempura.

Tempura and soba have long been paired in Japanese cooking. In Japan you can get bowls of noodles served with drippings of fried tempura batter, kakeage. The starch from the batter and noodles flows into the soup and swells, producing a spongy mass.

Often, soba is served in a deep ceramic bowl ( domburi ), swimming in soup and topped with an assortment of savory garnishes, including sliced duck, whipped mountain yam, button mushrooms, wild greens, seaweed and tempura.

In a cleaner direction, soba is piled on a bamboo mat in a shallow lacquer box. In this presentation of Zen-like simplicity, called seiro , the unadorned soba must be perfect. Purists even abstain from using the dipping sauce or condiments that accompany the dish. If the noodles aren’t first-rate, seiro is an abysmal failure--sticky, clotted and parched. When it is good, however, it is slippery and adhesive at once and its earthiness feels almost alive.

After the noodles, the most important part of soba cuisine is the dipping sauce called dashi. Smoky, mellow and slightly sweet, dashi --a mix of soy sauce, the sweet rice wine called mirin , konbu (kelp), dried bonito and sugar--is a chef’s signature. The sauce can be served hot or cold and is also used as a soup base.

With the dashi and soba come specific condiments. They are: grated daikon, wasabi, scallions and shichimi togasashi , a seven-flavored spice that includes red pepper flakes and dried mandarin orange peel.

It should be mentioned that slurping soba is de rigueur , that dried soba of fairly good quality can be bought in most specialty supermarkets and that it’s always to seiro that the true soba lover returns.

For all its tradition, soba noodles are a relatively recent innovation in Japan, going back just four centuries. But buckwheat originated millennia ago in southern China. It spread westward through the Asian Steppes into Europe and the New World. It also moved east into Korea, and from Korea to Japan. The roots of Japanese buckwheat go back more than a thousand years.

In Japan, they tell a story that when Buddhist monks climbed into the high mountains for long and arduous retreats they carried with them only a cooking pot and a sack of ground buckwheat. So nutritious was the buckwheat that they were able to survive on it for weeks.

As the monks intuitively understood, ground buckwheat surpasses chicken, beef, soybeans, cheese and peanuts in utilizable protein. It’s high in fiber. And some studies now suggest that eating buckwheat lowers cholesterol.

Buckwheat noodles, or soba (in Japanese, soba refers to a variety of buckwheat products), came to the fore during the Edo period, when Tokyo was transformed from a small provincial waystation into a major metropolis. Soba was a quick, cheap, nutritious meal, a staple of the laborers who built the city.

As the city developed, working-class soba shops boomed in Tokyo; their numbers probably outstripped all other kinds of eating establishments.

Early in the 19th Century, soba split into high and low cuisine. The haute cuisine evolved as samurai began to patronize a few select soba shops. The chosen shops transformed themselves from utilitarian noodle stands to sumptuous restaurants, replete with exquisite interiors, costly serving implements and the highest-quality soba.

It’s estimated that 40,000 to 50,000 soba shops exist today in Japan. Often, they’re no more than a cramped counter fronted by a line of rickety stools. Most sell machine-made, mass-produced noodles for as little as $3.

There are also 40 to 50 haute soba restaurants in Japan, each run by a chef with more than 20 years of experience who presides over young apprentices eager to learn the master’s secrets.

At New York’s Honmura An, all three chefs were trained by master soba chef Nubuo Kobari, who owns two soba restaurants in Tokyo. Kobari comes to the New York restaurant several times a year to sharpen the kitchen’s grinding stone by hand, and his son, Koichi Kobari, manages the place.

One particularly difficult dish Honmura An serves is soba sushi. Noodles are rolled in nori with mashed prawns, omelet, shiitake mushrooms and mitsuba herb. The roll costs $24, and after observing Hideji Asanuma make several of the rolls during dinner service, I understood the price.

Asanuma spends more than 20 minutes on each roll. His first step is to place a full portion of cooked noodles in the warmest part of the kitchen, high on a shelf of the central prep station, to allow them to dry. In Japan, during the humid summer, the soba is actually fanned. If wet, the crisp sheets of nori soften and the roll turns to mush.

Then Asanuma takes a gleaming sheet of nori , places it on his bamboo rolling mat and layers it with the dry soba , building a noodle cover perhaps half an inch thick. He lays down the other ingredients, patiently compacting them into a central core. Then he rolls the mat until the nori encases the soba . He finishes the construction by placing the mat over the top of the roll and leaning on it gently, applying a shiatsu -like pressure, until the roll is coherent and firm.

Asanuma gives his knife a few quick sharpening strokes on the back of a ceramic bowl and trims the strands of soba poking out the roll’s ends. Dipping the knife-end in water, he lets the water glide down the blade before severing the roll in 10 even slices. He arranges the slices like a necklace on a round platter. The dish leaves the kitchen without garnish or accompaniment.

Like so much else in Japanese culture, the cuisine Honmura An serves has been refined from folkways into something of great elegance and sophistication while leaving an essential roughness and simplicity intact. There is a clarity and austerity to the food reminiscent of the rock gardens in Kyoto temples. And the process of cooking soba-- the series of pools and baths--is quintessentially Japanese: Immersion upon immersion until the clean taste sings.