Udon Noodle Soup

When is a noodle more than just a noodle? When it's a canvas for a gestalt assembly of fragrant and complex flavors. Today, we'll raise your expectations and show you how the humble noodle can stand triumphant, greater than the sum of its parts. 

Our vegetable base for this soup is primarily well-cleaned leeks and Baby Bella mushrooms, but we recommend adding some shiitake mushrooms if you can find them. Everything about this dish is sweet and gentle; we sweat our mild vegetables in a little bit of oil so they start to soften, but we don't need to see a whole lot of color to know that their flavors are developing. Once the vegetables begin to sweat, we add fresh minced ginger and garlic to get the aromatics started and add in another layer of flavor to our base.

For the liquid, we use a combination of chicken stock and dashi broth. You can make your own dashi broth with kombu seaweed and bonito fish flakes. If you don't want anything fishy, you can just use chicken stock, but we like the balance that using half dashi/half chicken stock strikes. We let the chicken poach in the combination stock with the rest of the ingredients so everything can harmonize together.

Our soup is inspired by Japanese cuisine, and Asian foods search for balance in their flavor profiles and in their final presentation. Japanese food is often elegant and refined. While noodle soup may run the risk of being messy, we should still strive for an elegant interplay between ingredients. The base vegetables, richly aromatic thanks to their initial saute and their time mingling in the broth, celebrate the depth of the stock and the heft of the chicken. At this time, we like to add rice vinegar for its acidic brightness, soy sauce for its salty, fermented funk, and the sweet embrace of mirin. 

We've selected Shichimi Togarashi (shee-CHEE-mee toh-gah-RAH-she) as the final garnish for our udon noodle soup, so we can make the flavors pop. Also called "Japanese 7 Spice," Shichimi Togarashi has a surprising amount of spiciness from the cayenne and pepper in it, and this punch contrasts with the symphonic harmony of the soup.

Last word of advice? Even our most chopstick-adept taste testers were hilariously challenged by the task of fishing slippery udon noodles out of a bath of broth. Don't be a hero. Get a spoon--or a fork, or both--and find your Zen space. Then dig in, and let the happy ensemble of noodles, chicken, broth, and vegetables, with the right seasonings added at the right time, show you how to create magic in a simple bowl of noodle soup.