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Dattan Soba Flour 40% (Anson Mills Organic Heirloom)

Hitachi Aki Soba Flour 40% (Ibaraki prefecture)

All Purpose Wheat Flour 20%

Water 47.5% of the weight of the flour

Humidity 60%

The rainy weather is conducive for making soba.  The higher humidity helps.  I have been hooked on Anson Mills Dattan sobako flour lately.  It has a beautiful mustard-yellow color. The flavor is bitter-sweet.  It contains a much higher content (100 times more than regular sobako) of rutin.  So if I can make this flour work for soba noodles, I want to use it regularly.  I am blending Dattan with Japanese sobako variety. Dattan alone is not easy to bind.  But it does have more moisture than any other domestic sobako I have tried so ar.  I feel like I am making progress with my search for good sobako in the US, thanks to Anson Mills and Glenn Roberts. They keep offering me different types of buckwheat flour to try.  

I served the soba with ginger duck and served it hot.  I threw in a baby carrot and cilantro from my garden, and garnished the top with scallions.  

I am offering a workshop in Venice this weekend. I am also trying to move out of our house in Santa Monica and find a rental - everything has to be cleared out of the house by April 15. It's nerve racking

to say the least.  We still find little problems with the house that we need to deal with, but hopefully we will get through this in one piece.  My son, Sakae, got engaged to his girlfriend Bina, last week in Vancouver. They came down to see us for the spring holidays and they are helping us out. Their engagement is a sweet surprise, and a positive thing in the midst of selling the house, moving, and everyone in Japan recovering fro the big earthquake and tsunami, and the nuclear accident.