Noodles ── Soba
Kate Soba
Kate Soba — soba stretched with daikon or garlic chives
From around Kanuma, Tochigi: soba boiled together with daikon or garlic chives. Kate means a bulking agent, and the dish is said to have spread as a way to stretch soba further in leaner times.
- Origin: Tochigi
- About 100 km north of Tokyo
Lineage
What it's made of
The core is buckwheat flour, wheat flour, and either garlic chives or daikon. Daikon goes in during winter, chives in early spring, said to add flavor as well as bulk. Tochigi ranks among Japan's leading buckwheat producers, and the dish is said to be indispensable both day to day and at local events.
How it's made
For the daikon version, daikon is cut into strips and boiled first, then the soba goes in to cook alongside it before both are rinsed in cold water and drained. For the chive version, soba and chives are boiled together, or boiled separately with the chives laid on top. Kanuma is said to favor the chive version, Sano the daikon one.
Why it took this shape
Kate means a bulking agent, and adding daikon or chives to stretch the noodle in lean times is said to be where the dish began. Kanuma was once a hemp-growing area too, and a tradition survives of sowing buckwheat after the hemp harvest to restore the soil, called asaato-soba. The area's own chive production is said to have helped chive soba take hold there.
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Dishes in the same style
- Baniku SobaFrom the Aso area of Kumamoto: hot soba topped with horse meat simmered sweet and salty. It's said to carry the history of a region where horse meat took root as a restorative food for the injured and ill.
- Cha SobaA kawari-soba made by kneading powdered green tea, often matcha, into the buckwheat dough. It takes on a faint green tint along with tea's own aroma. It is said to be one of the playful noodle variations devised during the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–30), alongside yuzu-flavored soba.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Tochigi
- Agemaki Yuba no NimonoFresh yuba sheets are layered, rolled into a log, sliced into rounds, and deep-fried before a slow simmer in a light broth — a Nikko dish built on the region's rippled yuba-making craft, served at New Year's and celebrations.
- Aiso no KanroniDace that gather to spawn each spring in the Naka and Kinu rivers, known locally as aiso, are slow-simmered in a sweet glaze until soft to the bone — food from a landlocked prefecture where river fish once meant protein.
- Ayu MeshiAlong the Naka River and other ayu-fishing streams, unseasoned grilled ayu is cooked into the rice — made for festivals and farm rest days, with any leftover fish skewered and hung by the hearth to keep.
- Bandai MochiIn the Kuriyama district of Nikko, firm-cooked non-glutinous rice is pounded on a wooden board — hence 'itadai-mochi,' board-mochi — and eaten with miso glaze, sweet bean paste, or a perilla-seed sauce depending on the hamlet.
- Battou JiruWheat dough is torn by hand into a miso soup simmered with seasonal vegetables — known by different names, hattou-jiru or dango-jiru, across the region, and long relied on when rice ran short.
- Chitake to Nasu no Abura ItameChitake mushrooms, which weep a milky sap when torn, are stir-fried with eggplant — a summer-only find tied to managed satoyama woodland, and also prized as a broth base for udon and soba.