Don't.... don't think about the order of these too hard. Regardless, welcome to week 3 (kinda) of Adventures in Washoku! I'm continuing to tailor these assignments to Japanese cuisine in particular, focusing somewhat on traditional Japanese cuisine, or washoku (和食). Today, however, we're going a bit more modern with a popular street food favorite, yakisoba! Literally meaning "fried buckwheat" (焼きそば), yakisoba is a dish made from stir-frying ramen-style soba noodles with various ingredients (veggies, meat) and a sweet oyster-type sauce. Easy to make and easier to stuff in a bun as leftovers for the rest of the week, too. Yakisoba bread (焼きそばパン) is good stuff.
Anyways, on to the food!
Anyways, on to the food!
Week 3: Yakisoba
(recipe source: Here (including sauce) )
You may have seen instant yakisoba in the supermarket before, next to the pallets of instant ramen. Making it on your own, however, ends up being pretty easy! I went particularly with the recipe I found, but the versatility of the dish to be able to be made with basically whatever you have on hand is what makes yakisoba the perfect street food for school festivals or local matsuri all across Japan.
Aaaaaaand... chopped!
Slicing everything up was the easy part. (And this week's required technique!) The key, or so I'm told, is to allow everything to fry with as much contact to the grill as possible, and to add different ingredients so that everything cooks at around the same time. Harder vegetables first, aromatics last. At least, that's the impression I got. It was a bit messy since I insisted upon using the griddle, and my ingredients ended up taking up far more of the pan than I thought. Next time I think I'll stick to using the wok instead.
(Man did it smell good, though...)
The cooking process was essentially adding ingredients until everything was together and cooked up nicely. Roughly, the order was Meat, harder vegetables, softer vegetables, yakisoba noodles, and finally the sauce (which I did make by hand, I just didn't take pictures of. Very simple stuff anyways.).
The resulting fried goodness was quite a treat, and will likely end up being my lunch for the next week. The aforementioned Yakisoba-bread, a common convenience store food, is essentially made by placing yakisoba noodles in what amounts to a hot-dog bun. Quite tasty, mind you, albeit full of carbs! To be honest, the pork belly could have used a bit more time to cook... but this being the first time I've actually cooked meat outside of hot dogs in the microwave, I think it came out pretty decent. Until next time, じゃあまたね！
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