Why is Tsuyu sauce for cold Soba noodles served on the side?
Why are they always served separately as a dipping sauce, instead of mixing it into the noodles like they do with soup?
Best Answer
The simplest reason is texture. The point of cold soba noodles is to taste them at the ideal texture for soba.
In a party situation, I've served cold soba with pre-mixed sauce, and there's a variant called wanko-soba in some parts of Japan (particularly Iwate prefecture) that is often served premixed in small bowls, but unfortunately, this results in the noodles softening fairly quickly. They'll never be as good as they are when you dip a few strands at a time as you eat them.
In fact, hot soba noodles deteriorate in texture as well, but this can be partially mitigated simply by slightly undercooking the noodles, since they will continue to cook in the broth.
Since soba is generally a quick lunch in Japan, you'll notice the quality decline in a hot noodle dish, but you'll probably eat fast enough to avoid terribly soggy noodles (unless you're one of my toddlers, but even they can plow through a bowl of soba faster than they will almost any other food).
Cold noodles will get soggier, but they will not "cook", so undercooked noodles aren't practical in that case.
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How do you eat cold soba dipping sauce?
It is not considered rude to leave some unfinished soup in the bowl at the end of the meal. For soba that are served with a dipping sauce (usually the cold ones), mix some of the green onions and wasabi into the dipping sauce first. Then, you eat the noodles with a slurping sound after dipping them into the sauce.What is Tsuyu used for?
Mentsuyu, or tsuyu, is a concentrated, multipurpose Japanese soup base. When diluted, the robust base can be used as a dipping sauce for fried items, like tempura and cold noodle dishes (like somen noodles or zaru soba, with cold soba noodles), or as the foundation for hot noodle soups like ramen or udon noodles.What is Tsuyu soba?
Zaru Soba is a traditional chilled noodle dish made from buckwheat flour and served with soy sauce-based dipping sauce called Tsuyu (\u3064\u3086). The word zaru means \u201ca strainer\u201d in Japanese and the name of the dish was derived from the way the noodles are served over a bamboo strainer during the Edo Period.How do you eat Tsuyu soba?
Soba noodles can be eaten either cold or hot. Hot ones are usually served in a bowl of steaming broth, with the side dishes placed in a soup or on a separate plate while cold ones are eaten by dipping them into a small bowl of sauce known as tsuyu.Zaru Soba | Cold Summer Noodles | COLD SOBA NOODLES -ざるそば | Japanese dipping noodles
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