LAMB SOBA

In a recent facebook chat I had with Karen she told me that there are now quite a few New Zealanders reading her blog. Neither of us have ever been there, so most of our brief discussion on the issue was about what your typical Kiwi is like, and decided that it must be something a bit like an Aussie, only not so tan. Trevor is allegedly a Kiwi, but I'll believe that when he teaches us how to make a proper meat pie.

So anyways, this post is kind of a shout out to New Zealanders, who have the world's highest per capita consumption of lamb (57 lb. per year, compared to 8 lb. per year in France and 0.8 lb. per year in the U.S.) and may encounter this culinary challenge more frequently than anyone else: after making leg of lamb, I'm left with pan drippings that are just too easily converted into a dark jus (or broth, if you prefer) deep with roast lamb flavor. What can I do with it? Gravy? I suppose, but who uses gravy with lamb? It's a bit too flavorful to use as a liquid for risotto or minestrone—anything made with this stuff will taste like roast lamb. After making a pot this singularly lamb-y liquid the other day I had the idea of "lamb soba"—which is kind of weird, considering that the Japanese are not generally big fans of lamb and make Americans look like lamb-oholics.

But why not? Soba are noodles made from buckwheat flour. They are dark and tasty and chewy—just the thing to stand up to the lamb broth. I made a run to a Japanese supermarket and picked up a packet of fresh soba, some enoki mushrooms, green onions, and a packet of mentaiko (spicy cod roe). I also added slices from the rarest part of the leftover lamb leg—close to the bone. The result, shown below, was a successful experiment.



Ramen noodles might have been an even better choice, or maybe I think this because I just like ramen over soba as a personal preference. But given that I was building a noodle dish around the robust lamb jus, I figured that if there were a "right time" for soba this was it.

The broth in its natural state tasted adequately salty, but paired with the soba its salt content would seem insufficient. Soba noodles require more intense flavoring, which is why they're usually slurped after dipping into a soy sauce-type of liquid. I added some soy sauce to this broth before plating, but even this would not be enough. Simply eaten from any broth these noodles would taste underseasoned, and this is why I incorporated the mentaiko, which is quite salty. What I didn't anticipate was that it's kind of difficult to separate the eggs from the skein of the salted ovaries so that they could be distributed throughout the bowl. It required a bit of conscious effort to have some cod roe in with every bite of soba, but doing this was the key to having adequate salt in each mouthful of noodles. Had I used ramen, the addition of mentaiko would not have been as necessary, though I think salted fish eggs are a worthy addition to any food!

If anyone has suggestions of other uses of the lamb jus (besides French dip sandwiches--hey do you even have them in France? what do you call it, "le dip sandwich"?), please let me know.