Japanese Dried Noodles: The Ones That Improve with Age

1. Do not salt the water

Somen and udon dough is flour, salt and water. The salt is worked into the noodle itself, which is the opposite of Italian pasta — where the dough is unsalted and the seasoning goes into the pan.

Salting the water on top of that gives you noodles that taste of salt and nothing else, and it will not be obvious what went wrong.

2. Time it properly, because the window is tiny

Somen cooks in one to two minutes. Inaniwa udon in three to five. Soba in roughly the same range. Thirty seconds too long is the difference between a noodle with a bite and one that has gone soft.

Use plenty of water and do not walk away. There is no equivalent of the forgiving eight-to-twelve-minute window a dried pasta gives you.

3. ⚠ Rinse them in cold water, and rub them

This is the step nobody outside Japan performs, and it is the most important one. Drain the noodles, put them under cold running water, and work them between your hands as you rinse.

It does two things. It stops the cooking dead, so the noodles do not keep softening in their own heat. And it washes off the surface starch — which is what otherwise makes them slippery in an unpleasant way and turns your dipping sauce cloudy after two dips.

Everything you know about never rinsing pasta is correct, and does not apply here. Italian sauces need that starch to cling. A Japanese dipping sauce needs the noodle clean.

"Tenobe" is not a marketing word — it is a defined term. Japan's Agricultural Standards set out what a noodle must be to be sold as hand-stretched, and a machine-made noodle may not use the label.

So the word on the packet is a claim with a rule behind it, which makes it the single most useful thing to look for when you cannot taste before buying.

Aged somen has its own vocabulary. Noodles held for a year are hinemono; two years makes them ōhinemono. Both are dearer than the current season's.

The result is chewier, not staler — which is a genuinely counterintuitive sentence about a dried product, and the reason this category is worth paying attention to at all.

Hegi soba — buckwheat bound with seaweed, for a reason

Buckwheat has no gluten, so soba needs something to hold it together — usually wheat flour. In the Uonuma area of Niigata they use funori, a seaweed, instead.

The reason is textiles. Niigata is a weaving region, and funori was what they used to size the weft threads on the loom. Somebody looked at the material already sitting in the workshop and wondered whether it would bind buckwheat. It did.

The result is unusually smooth and elastic, and it is served in a flat wooden tray called a hegi, which is where the name comes from. Hegi soba is a fusion of two local industries, which is not a claim many noodles can make.

What to look for on the packet

• "Tenobe" or "hand-stretched" — a regulated term, not a slogan.
• A stated aging period if you are buying somen. One year or two, and it will be priced accordingly.
• A named region — Miwa, Ibonoito, Inaniwa, Uonuma. Unlabelled "Japanese noodles" tells you nothing.
• Dipping sauce included if you have not bought mentsuyu before. It saves a second order and the concentrate keeps.

Inaniwa udon and hegi soba are harder to find outside Japan, and we have not verified a specific English-language seller for either.

Both do turn up in Japanese grocers and specialist importers — so rather than pointing you at a search that may return something else, look for the region on the packet: Inaniwa for the udon, Uonuma or the word hegi for the soba. Those names are the whole specification.

These make a genuinely good gift for anyone abroad who cooks — they are light, unbreakable, keep for years, need no refrigeration and cost almost nothing to post.

Include a bottle of concentrated dipping sauce, or the recipient will boil them, look at them, and put ordinary soy sauce on them. Which does not work at all.