Zaru Soba (ざるそば)

Zaru soba looks almost too spare to be a meal. Noodles on a bamboo tray, sauce in a cup, a little wasabi and scallion. Then you taste good soba cold, and the quietness starts to make sense. The buckwheat aroma comes forward because nothing is covering it.

The one detail that decides it is the rinse. Boil the soba until tender but still lively, then wash it under cold running water with your hands until the surface starch is gone. This is not fussing. It stops the cooking, firms the noodles, and leaves each strand clean enough to carry the dipping sauce without turning sticky.

The sauce is tsuyu, built from dashi, soy sauce, and mirin. Make it stronger than a soup because the noodles touch it only briefly. Dip a small bundle, not the whole tangle, and stir the wasabi into the cup if you like it. Put the wasabi on the noodles and it falls off like a bad promise. The way we do it here is simpler: cold noodles, cold sauce, clean hands, nothing hidden.