Recipe: Summer Soba Salad

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I've made this tasty cold noodle bowl quite a few times recently. It's too simple to warrant calling this a "recipe"1, but I wanted to jot it down anyway for posterity and sharing.

soba noodles and salad in a bowl

the recipe

Ingredients

Vegetable Mix

  • tomato (in season)
  • cucumber
  • red onion
  • jalapeno

The Rest

  • salad greens mix
  • soba noodles
  • soy sauce
  • toasted sesame oil
  • sesame seeds
  • [optional] soft-boiled egg (or hard-boiled)

Equipment

  • wide noodle bowl2
  • strainer / colander

Instructions

  • Dice up all of the vegetable mix into small pieces.3 No need to over worry about uniformity. Just try to get everything in the same ballpark of size.
  • Rough chop your salad greens into smaller pieces, as well. Again, no hard rules but the closer in size to your diced vegetable mix the better.
  • Set your salad greens in your bowl as a base. I like to push them to one side of the bowl to make room for the noodles later.
  • Top the greens with the vegetable mix
  • Prepare your soba according to package instructions. The kind I buy from Safeway are just "boil in water for 5 minutes."
  • Once soba is done, rinse under cold water in strainer until cold to the touch. Shake off as much excess water as is convenient. They'll never not be wet, but you don't want to soba salad to get a secondary tap-water dressing.
  • Add noodles to bowl. For me, I put them in the reserved half of the bowl besides the salad greens (not on top of them.)
  • Dress the noodles and salad with soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and sesame seeds
  • Top with optional egg sliced to your preferences
  • Enjoy ♡ ☼

  1. It's basically just pasta salad or mazemen. Use the rough shape and experiment with other variations of vegetable mixes, toppings, and pasta types! What about subbing the sesame oil + soba for linguine + olive oil + lemon + garlic? Sounds pretty tasty to me... Embrace your inner gourmand. ↩

  2. Of course, any bowl will work. But I'm becoming more opinionated that wide noodle bowls are infinitely better for most things which work best with a bowl. The big win for this recipe is the ease with which you can stir and mix the dish as you eat it. More narrow bowls that you (at least, I) would use for cereal are just too cramped and the second you try to dig in a bunch of pieces are going to end up outside of your bowl. ↩

  3. Anna Ladd's "how to make a very good salad" is a "must watch" and taught me two things:
    1. Prepping a big batch of salad mix (all the non-green salad toppings), makes salads so much less annoying to make.
    2. Salads built from small, roughly equal sized pieces are just better. They are easier to eat, they make less mess, they mix better with dressing ↩