Improvising: yakisoba

This is the yakisoba we ate in Japan, with red pickled ginger on the side. It was divine, if a bit greasy. I tried to make my own yesterday.

So it turns out that it is bloody hard to find out what goes into yakisoba apart from the obvious things - most recipes state that you should use shop-bought 'yakisoba sauce' in this or that brand, but the contents of which remain mysterious. Upon looking up home-made recipes for this sauce, I turned up a load of very different opinions and was all confused and annoyed. There are some funny recipes out there - this one annoyed me in particular, even though it didn't seem bad. So I ignored most of them, took what I had in the kitchen and improvised.

This is my very inauthentic and imperfect version of yakisoba sauce (enough for 2 servings):
1tbsp soy sauce
2tbsp worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp rice vinegar
1 scant tsp light soft brown sugar
1 tsp tomato ketchup

Mix them together in a small bowl until the sugar has dissolved. When you taste it neat, it nearly blows your head off, but it's fine in the noodles. It was very good, but not great. It didn't have the depth I wanted, and even with all those sauces, it wasn't quite salty enough (at least not enough to taste quite right. I think I would up the soy sauce content, knock back the worcestershire sauce, add a tiny bit of ginger, and add a tbsp or two of mirin and/or sake if I had either. Maybe this would be sacrilegious, but to add colour and depth some dark soy sauce might have been a welcome addition. I'll work on it. I was obsessing over it last night after dinner to the husband's bemusement. When something isn't quite right but I know I can make it better, I can get a bit funny about things!

As for the rest of this dish, there are plenty of recipes out there. I used soba noodles (they MUST be soba, not anything else!), onion, carrot, pointed cabbage, garlic. These are essential. I also added beansprouts and a little turnip because I felt like it :-) The turnip was great. Meat (thinly sliced pork or chicken) might have been a good addition, but wasn't essential. Sorry there are no pictures, they weren't great. Next time, eh?