Noodles

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Recipe of the Day: Hooni Kim's Japchae

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By Leslie Brenner

Do you enjoy stretchy noodles, vegetables and sesame? If so, you’ll love japchae — a beloved, homespun Korean comfort dish. The noodles, made from sweet potato starch, are called dangmyeon. This version of the dish is adapted from My Korea: Traditional Flavors, Modern Recipes, the outstanding 2020 cookbook by New York City-based star chef Hooni Kim.

Make it once, savor those stretchy dangmyeon noodles, and I think you’ll be smitten. Want to make it gluten-free? Swap gluten-free tamari for the soy sauce. Want to make it vegan? Use water instead of the dashi. It’s a delightful weeknight dinner — one that pays delicious leftover dividends, if you’re serving fewer than four.

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Rapini-to-riches tale: A New York chef’s recipe inspires a fresh take on a favorite weeknight pasta

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By Leslie Brenner

For years — decades, even — the favorite weeknight dish in our household was pasta with rapini and Italian sausage. It’s easy and quick (about 5 minutes of prep), and that combo of slightly bitter greens with salty sausage and comforting grated parm is a winner. I’m not the only one who loves it — there are a gazillion recipes for it floating around out there.

At some point, we cut way back on white flour for health reasons, and our pasta consumption plummeted. We’ve tried myriad commercial whole-wheat pastas, but they usually eat like a punishment, cardboardy or gummy or both. We still eat pasta — joyfully and with gusto! — but it has become more a special treat than a weeknight habit.

Now, thanks to a dramatically better whole-grain pasta that’s new on the national market — Sfoglini Organic Whole Grain Reginetti — and a new approach to the beloved rapini-and-sausage marriage, we’ve made pasta a weeknight-at-home thing again.

In the old days, my rendition of the dish was cartoonishly basic. I’d put up a big pot of salted water to boil, trim the rapini, drop it in the boiling water, leave it 3 or 4 minutes, pull it out with tongs, shock with cold water, and cut the stems into large pieces. Next I’d heat olive oil in a sauté pan, crumble in and brown some Italian sausages, add a little garlic if I wasn’t feeling lazy, boil pasta (usually penne or farfalle) in the water that had turned green from the rapini, and while the pasta was boiling, toss the rapini in with the sausage and cook for a minute to pick up the flavor, along with a big pinch of Aleppo pepper or chile flakes. Sometimes I’d add a splash of white wine. Once the pasta was done, I’d toss it with the rapini and sausage, grate some parm on top and pass more parm with it at the table.

Farfalle with rapini and sausage, the old way. This one was made by a family member, who fancied it up with shallots.

A recipe in Missy Robbins’ 2021 magnum opus, Pasta, made me fall in love all over again.

The Robbins recipe — Orecchiette con Cime di Rapa — is the Puglian grandmother of my old favorite weeknight pasta. But as the New York chef explains in her headnote, in Puglia, the rapini (cime di rapa) is paired not with sausage, but with anchovies. Orecchiette, or “little ears,” is the traditional pasta shape for the dish — a tradition I generally left by the wayside, as I’m not a fan of store-bought dried orecchiette; hence, my use of penne or farfalle.

As an anchovy enthusiast, I was keen to try Robbins’ version — which I did posthaste. I didn’t wait until I had time to make handmade orecchiette as the recipe directed; I grabbed a box of farfalle I had in the pantry. Wow — what a fabulous dish, and so completely different than my eons-old approach. Robbins has you pull off all the rapini’s leaves, chop them finely, chop the stems and florets pretty small as well, and braise it all so the rapini breaks down into a “kind of ragù.” The anchovy, aided and abetted by grated pecorino romano cheese, supplies abundant umami. Toasted bread crumbs add garlic-flavored textural pizzazz. So damn good!

Finely chopped rapini leaves

Meanwhile, a New York-based chef friend introduced me to the Sfoglini pasta, which has beautiful texture and excellent flavor. I hadn’t realized I could find the product (from a company also based in New York) in my neighborhood Whole Foods. How great would it be, I asked myself, to adapt Robbins’ rapini-into-ragù technique to my old favorite recipe, using the whole-grain reginetti? The ruffly shape of the pasta would be perfect with this sauce. I’d use Italian sausage instead of anchovies, crumbling it a little more than I used to, and swap Parmigiano Reggiano for the pecorino romano. Sure, finely chopping the rapini leaves and toasting bread crumbs would add a few minutes to my old standard, but I suspected the upgrade would be worth it.

And it is!

My recipe takes a bread-crumb short-cut, using store-bought plain ones rather than starting with a country loaf. You’ll be left with enough extra crumbs to make the dish again.

Whole-grain reginette and rapini

Down the rabbit hole

Now the rabbit hole part. I was not terribly surprised to learn from Robbins’ headnote that orecchiette con cime di rapa, which has variations in Puglia (sometimes it has clams, sometimes bread crumbs) features anchovies, not sausage; it makes sense, as historically it’s a poor seaside region where anchovies would be more accessible and affordable than meat. But Robbins and her co-writer, Talia Baiocchi, suggest that the combo of orecchiette, rapini and sausage is not Italian at all. Rather, the dish picked up its sausage variation on the way to America, and “ran with it to the point where most Americans assume it is traditional.”

Really? The combo of Italian sausage and rapini just seems so Italian.

I cracked my books and hit the internet, but after weeks of research, I have not found any definitive citation that tells whether pasta with rapini and sausage is traditional anywhere in Italy. Certainly the combination exists there; I have found several mentions of cavatelli with rapini and sausage, including one from Naples. And I’ve turned up several references to whole sausages cooked with rapini (but without pasta) in Puglia. I’ve also found a few one-off references to various other pastas with rapini and sausage — with maltagliati (on a site based just south of San Marino), with pici (in a Puglia-meets-Tuscany mashup recipe from La Cucina Italiana), or with cavatelli (on a Milan-based site). But altogether, I found so few references that it seems unlikely that it’s traditional.

The 10 or so Italian cooking reference books on my shelf turned up exactly nothing on the subject.

So for now I throw up my hands. Maybe someone will magically appear and supply a definitive answer, or at least a meaningful lead. (In a few days, I’m having dinner with my friend Carlo — who shed essential insight on the permissibility of putting ragù Bolognese on spaghetti. Perhaps he’ll have the answer.)

In the meantime, enjoy the pasta.

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On a hot summer evening, nothing refreshes like a basket of chilled oroshi soba

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By Leslie Brenner

There’s an unforgettable flavor and a soothing, cooling ritual I inevitably crave when temperatures soar: oroshi soba. That’s the name for the traditional Japanese dish of cold buckwheat noodles served with grated daikon and tsuyu, a savory chilled dipping sauce. Often served on a basket or a mat, it’s a humble dish, but it’s one of my favorites in the world.

Here’s how the ritual goes. You drop the grated daikon into the tsuyu; it sort of dissolves into it like a snowball. (“Oroshi” means grated vegetable.) You can also stir in some sliced scallions and a little wasabi, if you like. Pick up some noodles with your chopsticks, dip them into the sauce, lift to your mouth and revel in the moment: The nutty, earthy noodles, the sauce’s direct umami and the snappy, uplifting bite of the daikon all combine into an incredibly resonant flavor-chord, made all the more fabulous because it’s so refreshingly cold and wet.

It’s that unmistakable flavor-chord that plays in my memory summer after summer — a taste-memory loop that’s lasted now for decades.

I first happened upon oroshi soba 21 years ago. I had just moved back to Los Angeles from New York, and the L.A. Times’ Food editor at the time, Russ Parsons, invited me to lunch at a modest family-style Japanese diner in Little Tokyo, just a couple blocks from the Times’ historic headquarters. Those cold noodles and their flavor chord did a number on me, and I was hooked. When I joined the paper two years later, the diner — Suehiro (it’s still there!) — became a favorite. I always ordered the same thing: Not the plain and also traditional zaru soba, served without daikon, but the oroshi soba. For me, the chord’s high daikon note is essential.

Two recommended brands of dried soba: Kajino Kokusan Soba (left) and Shirakiku Japanese Style Buckwheat Noodle. Dried soba often comes bundled in 100-gram portions.

A few years later, Russ and I had another soba lunch, this time with me as Food editor and Russ as our California Cook columnist. It took place just south of L.A., in Gardena, at a tiny, under-the-radar spot called Otafuku. There the chef-owner, Seiji Akutsu, made incredible soba by hand — a rarity at the time, even in Southern California with its deep Japanese culinary culture. I can’t remember if Russ had been there before that, but he wound up writing about Otafuku (which is still open a quarter-century after it debuted). Russ’ piece, “Art of the Noodle,” is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about soba.

Weirdly, oroshi soba played a key part in my decision to move to Dallas, Texas some years later: Communing with a zaruful of exquisite handmade soba at Tei-An, an extraordinary Japanese restaurant that had just opened the previous year, I could suddenly see myself living there. (To this day, Tei-An one of my favorite restaurants — not just in Dallas, but anywhere.)

Still. A person can’t eat at Tei-An whenever she wants, and so there are times I’d like to enjoy an icy plate of oroshi soba at home.

Recently I started looking into how to make that delicious tsuyu, the dipping sauce. If I could do that and find a decent dried noodle, the rest would be a breeze.

Dashi, shown with its two components besides water: kombu (top left) and bonito flakes. The resulting stock is a key ingredient in tsuyu.

A recipe in Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art solved the tsuyu part of the puzzle lickety-split: One taste, and I knew it was exactly right. Make a batch, and you’ll have a goldmine in your fridge: It keeps for several months, and the recipe yields enough to keep you in cold noodles longer than a Texas heat wave. Whenever the oroshi soba craving bites you, you can have it on the table in the time it takes to boil the noodles and grate the daikon.

READ: Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

Preparing the sauce might seem a little daunting, as it involves first making dashi — Japan’s essential stock. But it’s totally worth it: Dashi is quickly made and you can freeze what you don’t use in the tsuyu, which means you can later make scratch miso soup at a moment’s notice. Once you have the dashi, the tsuyu is quick to come together as well: Just add soy sauce, mirin and a touch of sugar over the heat, then drop in a flurry of bonito flakes. Wait 10 seconds, strain, let cool and it’s ready. You can put together both in the span of 30 minutes.

The dried noodle part is a little tricky, as those made from 100% buckwheat can be a bit sawdust-like. The best dried noodles combine buckwheat flour and wheat flour, with a high enough proportion of buckwheat for great flavor, but enough wheat flour so the texture’s right.

I asked Teiichi Sakurai, Tei-An’s chef, owner and soba master, if there’s a one he finds tolerable. He recommended Kajino Kokusan, which I found at the best Japanese supermarket in our area, Mitsuwa Marketplace. I also looked there for the brands recommended by Mutsuko Soma in a taste-test story published in Food & Wine magazine in 2019. (Soma is chef at Seattle’s renowned soba restaurant, Kamonegi.) I didn’t find those exactly, but did find a dried soba from Shirakiku — one of the brands she recommended. (The specific noodle is Shirakiku Japanese Style Buckwheat Noodle.) Both it and the Kajino Kokusan are very good. Even better, with a lovely, springy texture and deeper flavor, was a fresh noodle I also found at Mitsuwa — Izumo Soba Noodles from Soba Honda.

If you find yourself staring down an assortment of unfamiliar dried soba, I’d suggest choosing one imported from Japan that lists both buckwheat flour and wheat flour in the ingredients, with buckwheat listed first, and no other ingredients besides salt.

OK. You should have what you need. If you want to turn your soba moment into dinner, you don’t need to add much — I like to start with something vinegary, like a simple sunomono salad. Or pick up some tsukemono at that same Japanese grocery — shibazuke, the purple one made with eggplant and shiso, would be dreamy.

And then enjoy that cool, slurpy, umamiful tangle of buckwheaty goodness.