Vegan-Adaptable

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Tangy, umami-ful and infinitely riffable, this cabbage salad (vegan or not!) hits all the right notes

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By Leslie Brenner

Cabbage, as the New York Times proclaimed in a story in March, has become the “darling of the culinary world.” At restaurants around the country, you can find it charred, sauced, braised, stuffed with ’nduja, set on taleggio fondue, drizzled with tahini, basted with kelp butter, filled with smoked fish.

To me, a head of cabbage in the fridge — whether Napa, or red or standard green — is a cruciferous insurance policy that’s particularly valuable in the summer. Unlike ephemeral lettuce, which wilts if you look at it sideways, cabbage is always there for you, cooking not required.

Cabbage salads are wonderful for so many reasons. To begin with, they’re substantial enough to be a standalone lunch. They also take well to getting dressed up — and they hold their dressing really well without sogging out.

Of course you could make a perfectly serviceable cole slaw, but why not live a little, and really take that cabbage to town?

Recently my family has flipped over a cabbage salad dreamt up by my son Wylie. The idea at the heart of it is a tangy dressing based on lime juice and miso, with sesame oil, a little heat from gochujang and plenty of shredded fresh ginger. Toss that with a lot of shredded cabbage — of any kind (Napa, green cabbage, red cabbage), along with with sliced celery, red bell pepper and fresh herbs, whether cilantro or Italian parsley, plus scallions or red onion.

We usually include some kind of protein — usually tuna, tofu or chicken — and enjoy it as lunch-in-a-bowl. Or skip the protein, and call it a side dish.

It’s infinitely adaptable! Feel like finishing it with sesame seeds? That adds pizzazz. Or maybe you want a little more crunch: Go for chopped toasted cashews. You can’t go wrong.

Looking for something fresh to bring to a picnic or potluck? This travels well, and its gorgeous colors make it the life of the party.

Red Napa cabbage

Designing the salad

Your choice of cabbage determines the texture, look and crunch. If you’d like it green with lovely texture, use Napa cabbage. Regular green cabbage, a little sturdier, offers more crunch. You might use a combo of Napa and red cabbage. Or entirely red cabbage — that works, too. One day I found some gorgeous organic red Napa cabbage — it was brilliant in this.

Wylie’s Convertible Salad, made with Napa cabbage, red cabbage and tuna, finished with nigella seeds and toasted sesame seeds

Protein-wise, there are many ways to go. The first time Wylie made the salad, he included a can of flaked tuna. Salmon would work too — whether it’s leftover from dinner, or you open a can. Or sardines!

As its inspiration was California-style Chinese chicken salad, it’s particularly appealing with shredded chicken. Harbor a head of cabbage in your crisper, and whenever you find yourself with leftover rotisserie chicken — or any leftover cooked chicken — you’ve got a great match.

Lately I’m loving it with tofu, as I often want a satisfying vegan lunch. Pressed tofu — also a great thing to keep in the fridge — is super nice in it, cut into strips. For a different mood, extra-firm tofu adds nice softness, and those little pillows pick up the dressing so nicely.

The salad, made with extra-firm tofu, red cabbage and scallions, and finished with cashews

Ready, set, slice

Yes, there’s quite a bit of slicing involved. Look at it as a great opportunity to practice your knife skills. Or maybe you have a mandoline? Grab that cabbage and slice away — you’ll be through it in a flash (watch your fingers!).

RECIPE: Wylie’s Convertible Cabbage Salad

May many of your salad days be cabbage days.

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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.