Tachi Soba

A 100%-buckwheat noodle with no binder at all — just flour and water. Without wheat flour's stickiness to fall back on, the dough is rolled thin and layered, and the cutting itself becomes the step that decides how the noodle turns out. With nothing else in it, the color and aroma of the buckwheat itself come through directly, which puts extra weight on the quality of the flour, and the water used to make it also has to be clean mountain water.

The rolled dough is stacked sheet upon sheet and cut into thin strips with a knife, the way one might cut cloth — hence the name tachi-soba, 'tailored soba.' With no binder to hold it together, the dough breaks easily, so cutting the stack into even, straight strands is valued as much as flavor. Some growers use only village-grown buckwheat and have moved to organic cultivation, still working to improve the quality further; a single cut of the knife decides whether the strands come out even.

Hinoemata sits in mountainous, lean-soiled, cold terrain said to have favored neither rice nor wheat. Without wheat to spare for a binder, the technique of shaping noodles from buckwheat flour alone is said to have been honed over generations by a village with no other option. That history of working within limited means still shows in every strand of noodle cut thin and even — buckwheat may have been the only crop equal to the harshness of the place.