Yamato Soba

The noodles are pale, almost translucent, with a springy, firm bite. The whiteness has a reason: Yamato limits its milling yield to 70 percent, grinding only the inner part of the buckwheat grain into a pale flour. That inner flour has little natural stickiness — elsewhere it would need wheat flour or yam as a binder, but here nothing is added. Buckwheat and water alone are the local standard.

Binding this low-gluten white flour without any helper is considered difficult even for soba artisans, yet in Yamato it is done as a matter of course, kneading with a combination of hot and cold water. Freshly milled, freshly cut, freshly boiled is the rule. The grain itself is stored in snow-cooled cellars at about 5°C and 70 percent humidity, said to keep the harvest-season aroma through the humid summer.

At the foot of the Iide mountains, some 400 meters up, sharp swings between hot days and cold nights make conditions buckwheat loves. In land that answered to buckwheat better than to rice or wheat, a noodle that stakes everything on the quality of the flour itself was refined. In the coldest weeks of winter, grain is soaked in a mountain stream and then dried in the freezing wind for twenty days — kanzarashi soba, said to have been presented to the shogun's house in the Edo period, one of this village's ways of turning cold into flavor.