The February 2011 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by Lisa of Blueberry Girl. She challenged Daring Cooks to make Hiyashi Soba and Tempura. She has various sources for her challenge including japanesefood.about.com, pinkbites.com, and itsybitsyfoodies.com
I am late posting this but trying to do the challenges. I am not posting recipes for this because I had to turn the recipes into gluten free, and although all were ok, they were not great, so you dont really want to have these recipes unless I try to perfect them.
I used fresh ground buckwheat flour for 75% of the noodle mix. Next time I would skip the whole grain buckwheat because it looks nasty and does not really add to the taste. I made lasagna noodles a few days later with just ground hulled buckwheat and I was a lot happier with them. I used a peanut satay recipe on the noodles, and it was quite good. Overall, I don’t really love cold noodles.
I absolutely love tempura at our local Wabura restaurant. I have made it at home several times, but again my conclusion is that this can be made better in a restaurant where they have a good fryer and can serve everyone at once. Having said that, the restaurant version has wheat in it, so I will continue to make it once in a while for poor Greg. Instead of wheat flour I substituted a ration of two parts rice flour to 1 part tapioca flour. The batter came out really good for the first few, crispy and delicious, but then seemed to grow soggy. Maybe it was that the oil was getting a little water in it, who knows.
This was another good Daring Cooks adventure, but I am going back to Wabura for my next tempura fix, and cold noodles….well, just not my favourite dish. Thanks to Lisa for the clallenge. Blueberry Girl blog
