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15 June , 2002
NOODLING
AROUND
It's summer time, which means I can order my favorite kind of noodles: hiyashi chuka soba.
| Noodles have always been part of my diet, but in recent years they've become a mainstay because they're so commonplace in all Asian cuisines. |
Let me explain why hiyashi chuka soba is a seasonal dish: It's made with chewy yellow ramen noodles, but it's served icy cold, and on a dish instead of in a bowl. It's as refreshing as a cold watermelon or a crisp chilled salad on a steamy day.
The noodles are accompanied by bean sprouts, thin-sliced egg omelet, skinny strips of cool cucumber, bright red pickled ginger and sliced ham, drizzled with a refreshing vinegary sauce. Oshima's has no ginger on top, and substitutes classier chunks of charshu (roasted pork loin) for the sandwich ham. But the sweetish tang of the sauce and the texture of the fresh-made noodles slated my jones for the first hiyashi chuka of the year.
I should also explain that hiyashi chuka soba is not actually soba. Technically, it's ramen noodles, the yellow egg noodles made famous in a bastardized version as the ubiquitous cheap and instant food of college students everywhere. And ramen is actually not even Japanese - it's a Japanized version of lo mein, Chinese noodles. Like so much that is thought of as "Japanese," ramen has its roots in the much older culture of the Asian mainland.
Soba is the gray-brown buckwheat noodle of Japan - at least, I think it's indigenous to Japan - and it can also be eaten cold. I have fond memories of being a kid in Japan, using chopsticks to lift the soba noodles off a bamboo tray and dipping them in a cup of cold, slightly sweet soup and then slurping them up. Udon is the more familiar fat Japanese noodles - again, I think it's originally from Japan - and it's usually served in hot soups, though I suppose you can eat it cold.
Noodles have always been part of my diet, but in recent years they've become a mainstay because they're so commonplace in all Asian cuisines.
I've enjoyed noodle dishes in Chinese restaurants, and since discovering other Asian cultures, Phad Thai has been a favorite with its rice stick noodles curling around chunks of shrimp, chicken vegetables seasoned with chiles, garlic and peanuts. I've had a spicy Singaporean fried noodle dish that was to die for, and at one of my favorite Vietnamese restaurants, the disingenuously-named "Peking-Tokyo Express," I've come to love to bun dac biet, a combination bowl of white rice noodles topped with every kind of meat imaginable, including a wondrous stuffed chicken wing that I can't figure out how it's made, with a thick sweet sauce drizzled over it all.
There's even a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant that serves only noodles dishes cleverly named Richard Lee Noodles House, which serves a handful of styles of soups all served with either fat noodles, skinny noodles, egg noodles or rice. The only problem with Richard Lee's is they use MSG in everything, and we can feel the aftereffects.
I've also recently become addicted to another type of Vietnamese noodle dish: Pho. Pho, which is pronounced "fuh," is a rice noodle dish that's served in a hearty broth, and topped with various kinds of meat, and served with a side dish of fresh basil, hot peppers, bean sprouts and Asian greens to mix in with the soup.
I first had Pho when some Vietnamese friend of mine took me to Pho 99, a spacious Vietnamese restaurant in a rundown strip mall in the Asian part of town. The dish was delicious, topped with beef brisket.
The next time I tried it, I got adventurous and tried the "Special Saigon Style Spicy Pho." Unfortunately, along with the chunks of beef came cubes of a brown jell-o-like substance that I determined was coagulated blood. The soup was fine, but I just couldn't make myself swallow more than a piece of the blood. The next several times I tried pho I forgot about this experience and ordered the inviting-sounding spicy special Saigon pho, only to remember when I was served. I finally learned my lesson.
My stepson Jared introduced me to my new favorite source for pho, Pho 79 (I have no idea why many pho restaurants use numbers in their names, whether they connote years or something else), which has two locations - one within Denver's Asian strip in the southwest side of town, and one closer to our home in the north side of town. Jared's cousin first took him there over a year ago, and he has made Pho 79 a regular stop at least once a week. It's his new comfort food.
Erin and I are regular visitors now too, because we love the broth that the rice noodles and meat toppings float atop. The steamy soup at Pho 79 tastes of fresh chicken broth, and the soup alone is satisfying. My favorite style ("medium number 2 with extra meat") is served with lots of thin slices of rare flank steak, a tangle of chewy white rice noodles and the usual side platter of fresh basil, greens, bean sprouts, peppers and lime slices, all for barely over $5. The large size, which only costs a little bit more, comes in a bowl the size of your head.
The experience of eating a steaming bowl of pho is just like the experience of having real ramen (not the college-student kind) in Japan, or at Oshima's Ramen here in Denver. And it reminds me that some cultural experiences are consistent across Asia.
Now, I wonder if there's a Vietnamese summertime version of hiyashi chuka soba?