Why this Noodle is so Important to Japan

this restaurant is 230 years old well not the building but the trademark is for perspective Tokyo the city is around 400 years old meaning that this place is half as old as the city it's in this place Sashi was opened by nunoya tah a merchant from Shinu in Nagano it serves one of the three major factions of a very special food in Japan soba soba from shin Sho is called sashina soba it's lighter in color and thinner from the soba you might be used to and it's made from buckwhat specifically from the Alps of Nagano this beautiful mountain range in the middle of the country this restaurant originally opened in Edo surrounded by samai tempos and feudal Lords that would regularly eat here even the emperor ordered soba from here and this shop represents how soba sort of evolved from what was originally this grain for porridge to a mushy flower past to the elegant and popular noodle dish it is today well actually soba isn't just one dish but rather a genre of many different variations we're going to navigate across the history of soba why it's so important to the Japanese and figure out how it became so integral to the culture of this country [Music] so it feels a bit incomplete to make a video about soba without coming to Nagano it's generally believed that soba turned into its noodle form in this part of the country and now Nagano is the most famous region in Japan for so this is Bal for all right so we just got off the bus and now we're in this small village called togakushi this town is one of the most highly regarded locations for soba and there's even a rumor that every household in this Village has at least one professional soba maker tokushi is filled with tempos and clean water which is very reminiscent to the kind of places that soan noodle started in so one of the things that makes tokushi SOA distinct is the way that it's prepared so after cooking the SOA it's washed with cold water from the mountains here and then it's plated in this horseshoe shape that's called a Bui [Applause] MTI yeah that is really refreshing so you're supposed to slurp the noodles but I'm pretty bad at slurping [Music] eating soba in a place like this makes you really feel like this tradition has existed for hundreds of years and while soba does date back to prehistoric Japan it wasn't as a noodle until relatively recent soba literally means buckwheat in Japan the grain came to Japan from Mainland Asia thousands of years ago but was originally only cultivated as an alternative to rice because soba could grow in poor conditions like during droughts or famines a lot of farmers would grow it as a backup plan these Farmers would take the grains and cook it in a porridge something that's similar to J but with buckwheat instead of rice it's been regarded that soba in this form did not taste good it was really only eaten to prevent starvation to make it taste a bit better these SOA grains were made into flour and baked in water to become this pace which is very akin to something like modern day sagaki now I've never had sagaki before so let's try this out not certain if this is the right way to eat it but we were told to eat it however we [Music] like it's like superfood hang on I need to eat more of this to see if I actually like it or not the texture is nice it's like Mochi but imagine if Mochi tasted like water I don't know if I like but this was still only really done to prevent people from starving but it was a necessary step for soba to become this so throughout several centuries noodles were slowly creeping their way into Japan from China the first record of soba being turned into noodles was in a temple in the kiso valley of Nago apparently the temple would feed its workers nudles made with soba because of nagano's terrain and climate it was quite hard to farm really much of anything on a big scale here Soo was really the best thing to grow in Nagano and this prefecture loves it all right this place is officially crazy about soba like they have soba ice cream and it's really good why why does this work so Soo was really one of the best things to grow here and Nago really loves it I mean everything in front of me is made with soba we have soba Dongo soba noodles soba gaki and soba tea like even the tea here is made with soba soba Dango let's see what this is like never had it before holy cow that's so good while I think rice is probably good for maybe more sweet amay Dongo soba is really good for like that savory Umami taste this place is also littered with temples and Buddhist monasteries so soba is sometimes still synonymous with this zenes [Music] aesthetic however soba in its most modern form most likely comes from ETO or now Tokyo around the 1600s soba was beginning to move down from the mountains of Nagano into the growing city of Edo and at the same time a majority of this city was destroyed by a fire and by the way one really crazy fact about this fire is that it was started by probably the worst kimono in history this kimono was owned by three girls all of whom died before they were even old enough to wear it so after that they burned the kimono cuz who wouldn't at that point and a huge gust of wind caused the fire to engulf the entire city more than half of Edo was destroyed and needed to be rebuilt and when it was soba shops opened [Music] everywhere it was even estimated that at one point every city block had at least one or more restaurants serving soba it didn't matter what class of people you were Samurai Royal or peasants everybody ate soba noodles and to this day you can sort of see this spread of soba everywhere so yeah that's a lot of soba history but that means there's a lot of different kinds of soba out there one of the most iconic soba is kit SOA which is basically fried tofu on top of soba the name kittin comes from spiritual foxes that often live within shrines like the famous fushima Shrine in Kyoto it's believed that kittin love fried tofu and the soba is kind of a tribute to them unless you're in Osaka where it's called tanukis SOA because Osaka likes to be different by the way this Osaka thing actually is pretty confusing to a lot of people because the rest of Japan has its own version of tanukis SOA this SOA since Osaka calls kits SOA Tanuki SOA they have to call Tanuki SOA ha SOA by the way Tempa in general actually goes really well with soba which is why there is also Tempa soba as well beyond that there's a huge of even more dishes there's a soba with duck soba with dried Herring a soba that only uses vegetables from local mountains a soba that slides down a bamboo water slide and cold soba zadu soba this is what I think is soba in its simplest form it's basically a batch of noodles on a bamboo plate you can eat it by dipping it in a sauce called suu and it's honestly like slurping cold water down in noodle form soba in this form may not be as old as some other Japanese Traditions like onid or miso but it's so important to the people here and is cherished as a food that honestly kept Japanese people alive and healthy while Japanese people are obsessed with rice eating too much of it is actually really unhealthy if most of your diet was made up of rice you could develop a thomine deficiency which isn't pretty during the rise of Edo the city actually had a lot of people suffering from this because they ate too much rice soba however has a lot of thiamine and people started eating it to keep their bodies healthy and maintain a balanced diet from the very beginning soba started as a grain to keep people from starving to death and now soba is eaten to maintain a good nutritional balance I honestly never realized how important and enduring soba is to Japan I've always liked it but to know that it's constantly kept people alive in the worst of times puts it under a whole new light for me in fact SOA has a lot of positive connotations tagged to it among the Japanese it's even specifically eaten for new years's to bring good luck and it's not surprising to me to see so many SOA shops being Generations old when soba was on the rise to becoming the popular dish it is today there were originally three major factions yaboo from Edo taba from Osaka and sashina from Nagano and what's amazing is that you can try all three of of them today in [Music] Tokyo so this 230 year old restaurant still maintains the original sashina style from centuries ago this is what I really love about food like paintings and books it's a window into a past that's so far beyond us but you can't eat a painting and you can't eat a book well at least you're not supposed to however to eat something that's relatively been the same for centuries is something I don't think we give enough appreciation [Music] for that's very delicate for SOA it's a lot closer to something like soen like rice noodles almost I mean even the color is different uh soba is usually kind of a bit beige but this is pretty much white I also got the soba with this kagit which the shop is apparently famous for it's like Tempa almost [Applause] yeah it's basically Tempa it's really good all right so I'm heading over to another shop called tanon tsaba the name taba means sand place or sandbox in Japanese and this style of soba is named this because it was developed during the construction of Osaka Castle in a shop next to where they store sand for the construction site the trademark for this shop is over 150 years old serving the same tabas SOA from Osaka so apparently this shop uses the inner parts of the buckwhat which apparently has a more mild flavor but that's made up for by theu which uses an aged soy sauce yeah suu definitely has a strong flavor to it it's really nice Definitely tastes very fermented now the very last shop that I'm going to try specializes in a skoa soba that comes from Tokyo yabu soba this place is called Konda yabu and it's around 140 years old yabu soba is supposedly the strongest tasting soba among the others now I don't know exactly what strong tasting soba is supposed to mean so I can't wait to try it out all right so this is yabu soba it is uh actually a bit green apparently yabu SOA means green soba it uses a species of soba that has a a green shell or something of that sort and they use that green shell which gives the this interesting color I like that a lot it goes really well with the suyu in terms of food it's still subtle but for SOA it is pretty flavorful so I kind of get where they're coming from also this place serves soba Sushi I've never had soba Sushi I didn't know that was a thing it's jarring I'll say that without much it's going to take a it's going to take some getting used to about a year ago I made a video on onii this ubiquitous food that I didn't give much thought to and discovering the history of it gave me a genuine appreciation for it and what it meant to Japan going through the history of soba and discovering all these different places that serve it I now feel the same way about soan noodles it's an amazing tradition that is incredibly important to Japan and the people here one of my favorite things about this country is that you can visit shops that are literally hundreds of years old where the recipe has mostly been unchanged not everywhere offers this privilege but I get why Japan does it with so many of their dishes it connects the people in the modern era to a time of their ancestors and that is extremely intimate soba holds amazing significance that I had no idea about and there's still so much more to the food I didn't get the chance to cover but if you ever come to Japan or are already here know that this centuries old tradition is only a door away [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Matthew Li

Views: 12,272

Keywords: off the menu, matt li, matthew li, soba, japan food, japanese food, soba history, food history

Id: dwO1wtuUPbU

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024