00:11
I don't know, would your opinion change if I include pasta, or pho, or other types of noodle beyond, you know, 蕎麦、うどん、ラーメン?
Ah, that's an interesting question.
Well, first, let me say that I do feel...
I don't know if I feel convinced that one is better than the others, because I don't really like doing that with food.
But, I do.
Why not?
Because I enjoy lots of food. I don't end up ranking them against each other. I'm just like, what do I want to eat now? I'll eat this now. This is good, right?
Like, there are times, like with ramen, for instance, I've been invited to go, and so like...
I'm gonna repeat that.
So with ramen, I've been invited to go, like, three times in the past month or so with some colleagues.
And so I've had a lot recently, and the first one that I went, I was like, yeah, you know, why don't I get ramen more often, right?
Like, I was like, that was really good, right? That was nice.
And then the second time, I was like, that was also really good.
But then I realized, I'm like, I don't really know if I want to go again just yet, right?
Like, there's a, there's a time point, and it's not that, I don't know, maybe best would then have to be, are you, are you like, excited to eat it every day, no matter what the situation?
Which, for you, it sounds like soba is an absolute yes, right? Like, you would...
Yes, actually.
Yeah, so like, that's, that's a pretty impassioned position to be in for that. I don't, there are some...
I think of it as just like an alternative to rice, basically.
Okay, yeah, like that's, which I totally would not, but I do see what you're doing.
I put natto on my rice, I put natto on my soba.
Please stop saying natto. It's just making my stomach heave.
Natto is the only one out of everything we've talked about that I would put at the bottom of a list.
Which, which is just...
You have not fully lived the Japanese life.
It's okay. It's okay. I don't have to. I do respect...
I'm gonna miss natto so much when I am in a place where it's less accessible.
You can just make it your, just make it yourself. Just play.
No.
No? You're not feeling...
That's too much effort.
I need a yogurt maker. I need like a temperature bath.
Yeah, I mean you can make...
03:00
To ferment the whole thing.
You can make miso without a temperature bath. You just leave it there.
You can leave it in a fridge, right? You can leave it in a fridge.
No, you just straight up leave it out. Like it's, it's like a room temperature thing.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah. You put it in the fridge when you want to slow down the processing.
You could put it in the fridge to like have it be slow, but then like, what is it?
White miso, right? Which is the least aged.
I think that took me like six months out of the fridge.
Oh.
So like, you know, like I forget the timelines though.
Nobody quote me on that.
It's like...
I mean, I, I have thought about this seriously in my like, you know, eighth or seventh year in the States.
Like, would it be worth buying a yogurt maker to make natto on my own?
Because technically natto's bacteria, the fermenting bacteria for natto is so strong
that even a store-bought natto can be a starter on its own.
Like it doesn't matter if it's been frozen or whatever.
It can be a starter.
So what you need is like boiled soybeans and have your starter natto.
And even though it was prohibitively expensive in the U.S.,
I could just invest in that one starter natto and have endless natto in the end.
Like that sounds like a great idea.
Yeah.
But I don't know why I didn't really think about like actually making that happen.
Maybe I was deviating from my wet chemistry days and going to the dry physics optics lab.
So I was not enjoying the wet chemistry of it all that much.
But no, I never actually did it.
I was like, there are a few things I can pay people to do for me.
And natto making is probably one of those.
This would be the thing to sort of pay for somebody else to do, which I don't blame you.
Doing fermentation stuff, there's a number of reasons I would prefer to let somebody else do that.
But it is possible.
But back to the noodles.
Soba is the best is what you were going to say there.
Soba is the best.
I would also say maybe I just like buckwheat because the close second to soba is Korean buckwheat noodle.
Which if you haven't had it in Japan, go to like Shin-Okubo or go to some other any restaurant, Korean restaurant and order ramen.
06:02
Okay.
And cold noodle, literally.
And sometimes they might say Morioka ramen because Morioka is like the region that they're famous for, for some reason.
And they are perfect chewiness.
And it's usually in spicy, sour broth, like a spicy broth and you pour vinegar on it.
And it's like the single best dish of summer lunch.
And I sometimes crave that even when I'm here.
And I have actually tried recreating that with soba.
It works, but it's not the same.
Not the same. Okay. All right.
The sauce of the gochujang, miso, sesame oil and vinegar, a lot of vinegar, does the trick of emulating the ramen, but it's not the same.
It's not the same.
I think something about the Korean buckwheat noodle has like a lot more springy chewiness to it that soba doesn't have.
It's more like udon, then.
No, no, no, no. I don't know how to describe this.
It's something in that weird...
It's a lot thinner than soba.
Okay. Yeah. It's thinner than soba. Okay. Wow.
Yeah, it's thinner than soba.
And it's more chewy. Yeah.
It's not like the udon kind of chewy.
Yeah.
But you do need to chew a lot more.
That's really interesting. Okay.
I just realized while explaining this that I forgot to include somen as a part of the noodle option.
Look, you had enough.
You know, in Japan, there is somen and hiyamugi, which I still to this day don't know the differences between somen and hiyamugi.
I just know that they're like udon, but like thinner.
What?
So they're both flour noodles.
Yeah.
But they are thinner than udon.
And those are also...
Hiyamugi and somen are both very popular noodle options for summer as well.
That's... What... Yeah, what is the...
Hold on.
I'm now curious to see...
Is it just a size difference?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know.
Maybe it's a regional thing.
Well, based on...
But I think somen is thinner than hiyamugi.
You are correct.
Based on this website, nippon.com.
And it's got a table where somen is 1.3 millimeters in diameter.
09:04
And...
Oh, wow. So specific.
Hiyamugi is 1.32, 1.69 millimeters in diameter.
Where udon, it then becomes udon above that.
Yeah.
And anything that's above 4.5 millimeters in width, but less than 2 millimeters in thickness.
So the ones that are flat, I guess, is kishimen.
Kishimen?
Ah, kishimen. Hai, hai, hai, hai.
So...
Kishimen...
Kishimen mo fettuccine.
I think of, again...
Is it just like...
It's a fettuccine of udon, essentially.
But I also think it's specific to some region.
I think some parts of Japan, kishimen is their default noodle.
And when you say udon, that's what they're thinking about.
But for other regions, that's like a separate option other than udon.
Got it. Okay.
Yeah.
There's so...
But I still think soba trumps all of these options.
I can tell.
I mean, I didn't think that you were going to change your mind at any point during this.
Like, this was...
I felt, and I was prepared to be set up for a debate of which you already had the answer to.
Yeah, I wasn't going to listen to your opinion, actually.
No, no.
I just had to take it for the sake of, you know, looking polite.
Yeah.
It's completely irrelevant.
So I would have to bring in, like...
I mean, my experience with noodles is like all Italian in nature for the most part, right?
And I wouldn't necessarily go comparing them either.
We could talk about what is the correct Italian noodles and pasta choices to have in some other episode.
We could.
I think a real Italian would say it depends on a sauce.
I think...
I will try not to speak for the Italians out there, even though I have a large percentage of Italian in me.
Yes.
But the stance of the sauce absolutely matters.
And yes, they can get very particular about both the sauce and the pasta pairing.
The creation of the pasta can also be important.
And fun fact, fresh pasta sounds like it cooks faster than your soba does.
So it's just...
Fresh pasta does.
It's usually like a minute or two.
It's just the dried sort of machine stuff because you have to kind of rehydrate it, right?
At the same time, which is a challenge in all of these cases.
12:01
We can talk...
Let's talk Western pasta some other time.
And I'll tell you about how I used to stick my fingers into those noodle ones as a kid and sort of peel them open.
Okay.
You know, playing with your food.
Okay.
Right?
Sure.
We did say go play.
We did say go play.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Ego de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C.
See you next time.
