Importer uses his noodle
The Japanese like their soba noodles santate. San means three and tate means fresh. So the flour should be freshly milled, the noodles should be freshly made and then they should eaten as soon as they are cooked.
Soba is the Japanese word for buckwheat, and Rick Shiratori has been importing Tasmanian buckwheat to Japan for 30 years. For the first Tasmanian Soba Festival he bought from Japan “10 chefs, a Tasmania enthusiast and one opera singer” to what he hopes will become the “symbolic site for Tasmanian soba” , Callington Mill at Oatlands.
For many Japanese who had been missing fresh soba noodles (one of them Fumiko Plaister, a former mayoress of Hobart) and for locals having their first taste of the real thing, the festival absolutely delivered on santate.
The buckwheat was milled that morning and by the time visitors started arriving at noon, the chefs had been working for three hours, first mixing the soba flour with 20 per cent wheat flour for binding and then pounding and kneading the dough.
Visitors could watch as the chefs continued working through the afternoon, rolling the dough with pins of the length and look of billiard cues. The square of dough was rolled, folded and rolled again, folded the other way, and so on.
Finally they had a rectangle of laminated dough. A board was placed on top of it and moved along the dough in noodle-width increments as they cut through the dough with a cleaver-like knife.
The noodles were boiled for less than a minute, then cooled. Five hundred people were then served a bowl of noodles with a broth poured over them, topped with finely chopped leeks and a tempura prawn.
The noodles had a bounce and a freshness. It is what makes them so appreciated in the hot humid summers in Japan. But as the buckwheat is harvested in autumn, the peak of quality is well passed by time summer arrives.
Rick Shiratori’s father always wanted to source a fresh supply of good soba in the Japanese off-season, and thought Australia might be the place for it.
Rick came to South Australia in 1970 as a high school exchange student. He spoke no English when he arrived was the only Japanese speaker in Victor Harbour. He says he had a good time riding horses and playing sport while performing poorly as a scholar.
He said: “After father passed away I wanted to realise his dream of growing buckwheat in Australia and came to Tasmania because where good apples grow good buckwheat grows.”
He visited Tasmania in 1985 and trials that showed that buckwheat would grow here. No surprise really because the best area for growing buckwheat in Japan is 40 degrees north to our 40 degrees south. The first Tasmanian buckwheat went to Japan in 1988.
Brenton Heazlewood of Heazlewood Seeds at Whitemore, contracts six growers in the north and northwest, an area that is mostly frost-free. He purchases the crop back on behalf of Shiratori and sends most of it to Japan where it is milled into soba flour or dehulled and sold in kernel form, known as groats.
Some of the groats go to soba restaurants in Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore that mill it daily and make fresh soba noodles.
And some go to Callington Mill where miller Peter Schulz makes finer product than the grind used for noodles. His buckwheat flour is more suitable for pancakes and bread. At the mill shop you also can buy buckwheat groats, which can be used the same way as cous cous or rice.
Buckwheat is very soft, unlike wheat, which is a hard grain. The stones of the winddriven 1837 mill are more suited to a hard grain, and Peter said some had suggested he would never be able to grind buckwheat successfully, but he worked out a technique himself and “proved them wrong, I get a beautiful grind actually”.
Rick said to the crowd at the mill that Tasmania was the most reliable and stable source of premium buckwheat in the world.
Buckwheat is not a cereal, but a member of the same family as rhubarb and sorrel. It has remarkable health properties that sets soba noodles above wheat-based noodles ramen and udon.
I came to Tasmania because where good apples grow good buckwheat grows BUCKWHEAT IMPORTER RICK SHIRATORI