♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we travel to Los Angeles to visit with Sonoko Sakai, who teaches us how to make homemade udon noodles.

It's actually a lot easier than you think.

She serves it with a spicy meat and mushroom sauce.

And as an alternative, we have a simple soy broth, as well.

Please stay tuned for Japanese noodles at home.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

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♪ ♪ - Los Angeles is not just Hollywood, it's a city of diverse neighborhoods.

♪ ♪ You can find an overwhelming array of taco styles that represent the regional cooking of Northern Mexico in neighborhoods such as Silver Lake and Highland Park just east of downtown.

Today, the latter is experiencing a revival in its historic architecture and culture.

It's also home to Sonoko Sakai, author of Japanese Home Cooking.

Today, she's promised to give me a lesson on how to make homemade udon noodles.

Her home in Highland Park includes an abundant terrace garden, which provides many of the ingredients that Sonoko uses in her cooking.

- Hi!

- Hello.

- Oh, my God, you're already here.

(laughing) - People don't usually get that excited to see me, I mean... - I was just stepping on my dough.

So, I was going to make you do this today.

Do you want to try now or later?

- I don't have socks, though.

- Well, I have a present for you.

- Socks?

- (laughs) And I thought I should get... - Very good.

- I thought that red would be nice on you.

- Sailing.

This is nice.

- Yeah.

(chuckles) - Okay, thank you.

- Okay.

So, uh, yeah, this is my house.

♪ ♪ - Sonoko, thank you for having us in your home.

- Oh, thank you so much for coming all the way.

- What I love about this home is, you look at it from the street and then you realize, behind the house, there's all this property-- this great garden, there's an orchard, there's yuzu, there's persimmon.

It's pretty cool, I mean, it's, it's not New England.

- It's really lovely.

It's a little deceiving, because it looks like a really tiny cottage, but it's deep and it has potential.

- That's what my mother said about me years ago, I had potential, yeah.

- (laughs) - So, udon noodles.

- Yeah.

- So, let's define, what are udon noodles, as opposed to, like, soba noodles, for example?

- Mm-hmm, yeah, there's quite a big difference.

Soba is buckwheat.

- Now, if you go to the supermarket, though, very often, if you go look at soba noodles, you look at the package, it's just made with regular wheat flour.

So what's...

I don't understand.

- The problem is that most dried soba noodles, they're allowed to use primarily wheat.

- Mm.

- And that happened during the war, when there was a big shortage of buckwheat.

I think the Japanese standard is, if you use about 30%... - Oh, that's why.

- ...buckwheat, you could call it soba.

Soba is also a generic word... - Oh.

- For noodles.

For the older generation.

They'll say, "Oh, I want, I feel like soba."

It could actually be chuka-style, which is Chinese noodles.

It could be ramen.

- Oh, okay, I didn't know that.

- But generally speaking, we think of buckwheat.

- Right.

- Udon is made with wheat.

Well, noodles were brought from China.

But it's distinctly Japanese.

It's very...

The classic udon is pretty thick and quite different from other Asian noodles, I think.

- So, what, what gives udon that springy texture?

- Well, it's the way the flour's milled, but it's just basically salt... - Salt.

- ...and water, and the wheat flour-- there's nothing else, but it is a medium-milled flour.

So it's not cake flour, it's not bread flour, it's right in the middle.

So we could use all-purpose, and the udon in Japan, the flour itself comes mostly from Australia.

Australia makes the best udon flour.

- Really?

- Yeah.

Isn't it amazing?

- Is that because the climate is so much better, I assume?

- Well, it's very dry and they have the land.

Japan... - Right.

- ...is smaller than California, and most of it is mountainous.

It's not really suitable for growing acreage of wheat.

- Right, right.

- And any acreage that they have for growing food is devoted to rice and vegetables.

Okay, so we have this all-purpose flour.

And I like to add a little bit of an heirloom flour, like...

In this case, it's rye flour, and it's just ten percent.

We're just gonna mix it in.

There are people that make udon with whole wheat, but then it gets so hard and chewy.

- Mm.

- You don't have the lightness of udon.

♪ ♪ So, when I was growing up, it was my brother who made udon.

- Was he an older brother or younger brother?

- He's older, but dads make udon in Japan.

They're not necessarily soba.

Soba is, like, at another artisanal level, but udon is something that everybody, every dad makes.

- So for, like, you know, clumsy, stupid dads... - It's like barbecue.

- It's like doing hamburgers.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- It lets you do that.

- Yeah.

Like, "That's my, my thing."

You know, barbecue, right?

- Cheeseburgers and udon, yeah, it's perfect.

Same thing.

- (laughs) The thing about udon is, and you're going to experience this soon, is that you're just stomping on it.

It's a no-brainer.

Right?

♪ ♪ - So, you are famous, though, of stomping on your dough.

You develop the gluten in a udon noodle more so than an Italian pasta, right?

- That's right.

- There's more gluten... - Oh, yes.

It just, I didn't even think about that, but I think the stomping makes a huge difference, because I don't know how...

I mean, wheat pastas, you just knead it and, in a... - Right.

- By hand, or in a... - It's pretty quick.

- Really, we like to put our weight on it, and the hands are not good enough, so we stomp on it.

And even the artisan udon masters still stomp on it, even in these modern times.

So I think the stomping with your feet has a lot to do with it.

We call it koshi.

Koshi is... You know, like in a sumo wrestling, you go, "Boom, boom."

- Mm-hmm.

- Have you seen that?

- Mm-hmm.

- When you wrestle, you use your hips, that's the koshi, I think.

And, uh, you want it to have structure.

And udon is the primary example of something that has good structure in a dough, in a noodle.

- So I stopped to put on my, my socks.

- Ooh, I love it.

Okay, so I'm gonna give you one.

- Okay.

- And as you can see, it's double-bagged, so that in case the first one bursts, the second one saves it.

But you wanna leave the, the one, the inner bags open so that we don't... - Pop it.

- Pop it, okay?

And then let's just lay it down.

- And the top one open, as well, I assume, right?

- Yeah.

And we're gonna just stomp on it.

Are you ready for the exercise?

This is... - I want to see when you stomp.

Are you, like, jumping up in the air?

Or you're... What are you doing?

- Well, you could turn on the music if you like.

♪ ♪ We're kneading it with our feet.

Now we're gonna fold it.

- Yeah, yeah, you know, you... You're a little weird.

I like that.

♪ ♪ - So we do this over and over until you stomp on it about 100 times.

And then you let it rest, ideally at least one hour to overnight.

♪ ♪ The dough has rested, and we are ready to roll it out.

Just roll.

And hard thing about wheat noodles is, they're so elastic and they want to... You roll it out and they want to, they're like... - So... - ...rubber band, they want to spring back.

- So, pie dough, you want to be very careful not to overwork the gluten.

- Uh-huh.

- Is that something you have to worry about here, or do you want to work the gluten?

- Oh, you want to work the gluten.

- Yeah, that's what I thought.

- Yeah, you could do...

So we stepped on it.

It can take a lot, it's very forgiving.

I'm just going to roll it up.

Use this pin to kind of stretch it.

This.

- Hm.

- And then roll.

I am actually pulling this way, you see?

I'm using my triceps.

Like that.

- That's cool.

- Now I want you to do it.

- So I'm supposed to do pull out and push in?

- Yeah, pull out and push.

Start from the center... - I see.

I see, okay.

- And you work your way out.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Ooh, I like this.

- You like it?

- Yeah.

♪ ♪ - We're going to try cutting the noodles with a more serious knife called men bocho, or...

It's, hocho is a word for knife and men is something dedicated to cutting noodles.

- So is that heavy?

- It's pretty heavy, yeah.

- Oof.

- If you work with professional noodle knives, they're about this big.

- Really?

- And carbon steel and really heavy, but this one is for home cooks.

♪ ♪ That's about one-eighth.

Yeah.

Now you could take it apart and see.

And you know, you could hang this on a hanger on or a pasta hanger.

- Like you would with regular pasta, right.

- Yeah, and you could dry it, which is great, and use it later.

So these have a nice shelf life.

Just find a way to roll it up.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ We're going to start the dan dan sauce, and dan dan sauce is, uh, in English, it's "peddler's sauce."

It's a Chinese street food, but it has been in Japan for so long that it's kind of become our own.

And what makes it less Chinese is maybe my miso that you tasted earlier.

- Mm.

- So we'll add some miso.

That gives it another layer of umami.

Okay, so we're going to start with the sesame oil.

All right.

(sizzles) So we're gonna fry a few things, including the meat, and we could start with the garlic.

Ginger.

Okay.

(sizzling) - If you want to get the heat down fast, you just take it off the heat.

- Yeah, I... - Lift it up.

- Yeah, I just lift it or set it to the side.

Go ahead with the mushrooms, get a chance to...

So the order of this is not that critical.

I could have done the beef first because there's fat in it, but...

So we'll go ahead and add these things.

It's a lot of meat.

It's a lot of sauce.

This is the equivalent of an Italian meat sauce Bolognese.

This is a, my Bolognese, I think.

The Asian Bolognese, and I think it's just wonderful.

This-- if you didn't have udon, you could just serve this on pasta, or you could have it with rice.

You know, a Bolognese sauce will take a long time to cook, right?

It takes hours, I guess, of cooking, but this one is...

In just, like, ten, 15 minutes.

But you know the meat has cooked, right?

I mean, it has turned color.

So what you could do is, you could put all your sauces together.

So maybe I could ask you to do that.

- Sure.

- I'm going to give you...

I'm going to give you the miso.

These are the, and the liquids, which is sake, mirin... ...and soy sauce.

And don't put all of it, because it's really hot.

Let's start with a teaspoon, yeah.

And I am going to go ahead and add, this is a... Just chopped bamboo shoots.

This is probably the only canned food I use.

You can, if you have time, blanch it.

We Japanese people love to blanch everything.

Blanching really helps remove the odorous.

All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and add the...

This is about two cups of the chicken broth, and this can be adjusted, because it's gonna cook down and you might want to have a thick sauce or you want a thin sauce.

It's up to you.

Okay.

I'm gonna go ahead and add this sauce.

So we will taste and adjust.

And at the very end, we're going to be adding... Can you dissolve these two... - The corn starch?

- The corn starch-- it's a potato starch.

So now I'm going to add the potato starch, and we'll just let it cook and thicken.

♪ ♪ Finish it with sake.

I just buy regular sake.

Okay, so I'm just...

I just add this for color.

In Japanese cooking, we're always thinking about five colors.

- Right.

- The primary colors.

Yellow, red...

These increase appetite, and there's...

The red is fire, and it's, gives you energy.

And we have these browns and blacks that kind of balances everything out.

So I'm gonna go ahead and turn this to a simmer.

And see what happens here.

Okay.

Now, the other way to serve this is, you just serve the cooked noodles on a plate and pour the, pour the dan dan sauce over it.

But I think that this way, it heats up the noodles.

- No, I think that's great.

- And I think it gives it more flavors.

Okay, this is ready.

Let's serve it.

So I'm going to take a, a nice chunk, and I'm gonna fold it.

Right.

And then I'll put some sauce on it.

And if it, the sauce...

If the sauce cooks down too much, you could always add more broth, which is what's happening right now.

Yes.

It's cooking down because we've been cooking it for a while.

Here's your sauce.

- Mm.

- And then, um, we'll put some nice lime, a little bit of sesame.

And then cucumber.

Okay.

And there's people who put cooked vegetables, like, you could do bok choy or spinach.

You can do that if you want more vegetables on the side, but...

So here, we are ready to eat this.

You want to squeeze that lime, if you like.

Just for a little acidity.

And mix it up.

Ooh, it's hot.

- I'm getting this close to my face, because... - Be careful... - It's gonna go on my shirt.

I know.

- Yeah.

Do you want a bib or anything?

Or... (laughs) - Can I get a high chair, please?

And a bib?

- (laughing): You probably have a few of those at home, right?

- Mm-hmm, I do.

Mm.

- Is it good?

- Mm-hmm.

- How is the udon?

- Excellent.

Good texture.

- Mm-hmm.

Mm.

- Sonoko, I have to say, coming here, I didn't know you were this much fun-- I didn't know we were gonna dance together.

- You want to always have fun when we're in the kitchen, right, so... - We had fun when we were in the kitchen.

- You are a wonderful student.

(chuckling): And dancer.

- It's perfect.

Thank you.

- Thank you, thank you.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So when I was out in Highland Park in East L.A. with Sonoko Sakai, we made a mushroom, a spicy meat and mushroom sauce for the udon noodles, but you can do something a lot simpler.

It's a combination of a broth and a three-ingredient sauce you really should know.

It's one of those sort of master recipes you should keep in the back of your mind, because you can use it a lot of times in lots of different recipes.

It has soy sauce, it has mirin, which is a rice wine-- a pretty strong wine, it's about 14% alcohol.

You could use rice wine vinegar, though, that's another possibility-- unseasoned.

And sugar.

Now, another way to think about this is, you could use fish sauce instead of soy sauce.

You could use, instead of a vinegar or a rice wine, you could use lime juice.

You could use brown sugar instead of white sugar.

So, that's a three-part sauce that's used a lot in this style of cooking, so just keep that in mind.

So we're gonna make dashi, which is a stock, a Japanese stock.

It has two main ingredients: of course, a seaweed called kombu.

If you're familiar with, it's a particular kind of seaweed that has a lot of umami.

It's not the stuff you find off the coast of New England.

And actually, I was in Tokyo two years ago.

We went to a store front where there was a gentleman actually shaving it.

They shave it, he held it, actually, in his feet and stretched it out and shaved it nice and thin.

There are lots of different kinds of kombu that have slightly different flavors.

I did a taste test when I was in Tokyo.

The point about kombu is, it's not the flavor itself, it's a flavor enhancer.

It enhances the flavor of what else is in the recipe.

So that's the basis for this stock.

So we have one piece of kombu.

We had six cups of water, we put the kombu in the cold water, brought it up to a simmer, and just now as it comes up to a simmer, we'll take that out.

So next, we're gonna take this stock and we're going to bring it up to a simmer and we'll add the bonito flakes.

Bonito flakes is really just a dried fermented smoked fish, skipjack tuna, so... (sniffs) The smell, it, it is...

It smells like smoked salmon, essentially, and we're going to use an ounce, which is a whopping three-and-a-half to four cups.

And it's classic, these two ingredients.

So, kombu and bonito flakes end up as the basis for a Japanese stock.

♪ ♪ So we're up to simmer, take it off heat, and I'll add the ounce, one ounce of bonito flakes.

And we'll just let that steep for a couple of minutes, strain it out, and that'll be the basis for the broth for udon noodles.

♪ ♪ So it's been a couple of minutes.

We'll just strain it out.

So that's the basis for the broth, the kombu and the bonito flakes.

Soy sauce goes in.

The mirin, the rice wine, and a little sugar, as well.

Now we'll just stir that up.

So now we'll cook the noodles.

This is a half recipe.

They've been coated in corn starch so that they don't stick.

Now, what's really curious is, you'd think that fresh noodles, let's say in Italian cooking, cook in just two or three minutes, they're very fast.

But these cook in about 15 minutes.

And one of the reasons is, they're very thick noodles, right?

And they take a long time to cook.

If you have dried udon noodles, I just made some last night, and they were pretty thin, they cooked in just a couple of minutes, so this will take a little bit of time.

♪ ♪ - So, we've cooked the noodles.

We've also rinsed them in warm water.

Now, that's kind of odd, because all these years, I've been telling everyone not to rinse their pasta with Italian pasta.

That's because, usually, with Italian pasta, you finish cooking the pasta in the sauce and you want the sauce and the pasta to marry.

In this case, A, you have a very starchy noodle that's gonna clump up as it sits, and secondly, you're serving this in a broth.

So it's not a question of marrying, you know, a sauce, like a cream sauce, to the pasta.

So, the noodles are ready.

We're gonna bring this up, back up to just a simmer.

So, while the broth is reheating, I'll just prep the scallions.

We're also gonna finish-- it's optional-- with shichimi togarashi.

It's essentially the Japanese seven-spice mix.

Many places in the world have their different special spice mixes.

Red chili flakes, of course, sesame seeds, ginger.

Orange peel is sort of an unusual ingredient.

Sichuan peppercorns you might add, as well.

I'm just going to trim off some of the ends of the scallion, and I'll just cut them on the bias like that.

And we're going to take just enough noodles for one serving.

Now, if we hadn't rinsed these, these would be just one massive clump.

That's why you do have to rinse them.

♪ ♪ And we'll add the scallions.

And the spice mix, the shichimi togarashi.

Sometimes they also put nori in this, as well, which adds really a nice touch to it.

So homemade udon noodles, recipe courtesy of Sonoko Sakai, with our homemade broth, with soy sauce, mirin, and sugar.

A really simple recipe, but the texture of the noodles, a little spice with the spice mix, the depth of the broth, it says a lot about Japanese cooking and says a lot about really good home cooking.

You can get this recipe, udon noodles with soy broth, and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following: - That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

♪ ♪ (man speaking Hebrew) - Je présente Chris.

- Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

♪ ♪ - Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

♪ ♪ - So this is the Eduardo García blender.

- This is the no electricity.

♪ ♪ - Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

♪ ♪ I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

♪ ♪ - Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

♪ ♪ - This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

♪ ♪ - Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪