Somen: The Japanese Summer Noodle that Never Changes

Somen: The Japanese Summer Noodle that Never Changes

A simple 1,200-year-old dish that Japanese have come to love

It is a little past eleven in Osaka, and I already know what I want for lunch. I want it most days this time of year, once the heat settles in: a bowl of thin cold noodles over ice, a small cup of chilled sauce, and a few slices of tomato beside it. Nothing else. This is sōmen (素麺) , and by late morning every August it is something I look forward to it.

I have wanted it, off and on, every summer for as long as I can remember. Despite it is seeming like the least interesting food imaginable, I never tire of it. the fact that it is so loved while being so simple is the first of many interesting things about sōmen.

What is sōmen?

For those of you who don’t know, sōmen is a wheat noodle drawn out by hand until it is nearly a thread — finer than spaghetti, pale and almost translucent. its made from just Flour, salt, water, a little oil.

You boil it for under a minute, rinse it, and eat it dipped in mentsuyu, a chilled broth of dashi, soy, and mirin. It is usually served over ice as is, called hiyashi sōmen.

It is Japanese summer food in its plainest form.

Plain is exactly the right word because sōmen offers you no choice. Just think of pasta with its dozens of shapes, whole-wheat and egg and semolina, and a whole shelf of sauces resulting in a different combination for every night of the week. Variety is half its pleasure. You could eat it for a month without repeating yourself.

Sōmen is the opposite. It has one shape, because a thread has only one shape. It has essentially one preparation, dipped in that cool sauce. No ragù, no cream, no herbs. Sōmen is only ever sōmen.

I used to think of this as a limitation. However, I have come to feel it as a benifit.

There is nothing to get bored of, because nothing was ever put there to entertain you. What looks like poverty becomes, after a while, a kind of rest.

A Battle for Less, not More

If sōmen bends at all, it bends in a single direction: how fine the thread is pulled. In Miwa — the noodle’s birthplace, which I’ll come to shortly — the makers grade their sōmen with real precision, and every grade measures the same quality — Thinness. Since a hand-pulled noodle changes thickness along its own length, they don’t bother with millimeters; they count strands. The standard grade, Homare (誉), runs seventy to eighty strands to ten grams. The finest, Kamisugi (神杉), packs more than a hundred and twenty into the same ten grams — drawn so thin that only a handful of makers attempt it, and only in the coldest weeks of the year.

Even its one axis of difference runs toward less. The highest grade of sōmen is simply the one that has come nearest to nothing at all.

A Famine, a Prayer, and a Sacred Mountain

Miwa is a small district in Sakurai, Nara, less than two hours from Osaka, and it is where hand-stretched sōmen began — around the year 827, in famine and plague.

By tradition, a man named Tanenushi, the second son of the chief priest of Ōmiwa Shrine, prayed for the starving people around him and received an answer: sow wheat in the hills, grind it with a stone mill, knead the flour with the mountain’s spring water, and draw it into fine threads. That food is remembered as carrying people through the famine, and as the root of every hand-pulled sōmen since.

The mountain is not a background detail. Ōmiwa Shrine is among the oldest in Japan, and it is known for what it lacks: no main hall. Worshippers stand at the prayer hall and bow toward Mt. Miwa itself, which is the object of worship.

Years ago I climbed it and had to register, wear a white sash, and go up in silence, without eating, drinking, or taking a single photograph. I remember the quiet more than the trail. I won’t insist anything divine dwells in that mountain, but I came down sure that something does. I had a new appreciation for the mountain’s water and soil from which the noodles in my bowl first came.

A Dish Born of Cold

Another interesting fact about Somen is that the noodles are eaten in the fiercest heat of summer but are made in the deepest cold of winter. True Miwa sōmen is stretched only in winter in a two-day process in freezing air. The cold is not endured; it is the reason the noodles are any good. Worked slowly at low temperature, the wheat’s gluten grows dense, and that gives fine sōmen its koshi — the firm, springy bite that survives boiling water. Its strength is drawn out of the season least kind to it.

Which brings me back to the bowl, and to the thing I find quietly remarkable about eating it. The noodles sit in ice, and as I eat, the ice melts. Little by little the meltwater slips into the mentsuyu and thins it. The sauce I began with — dark, salted, insistent — turns paler and softer with every dip.

Most food declines as it sits, but not sōmen. As the seasoning weakens, the noodle steps forward: first a clean sweetness, then the faint scent of wheat, flavors the strong sauce had been standing in front of the entire time. By the last few bites I am tasting the sōmen almost bare, and it is just as good as the first bite.

I never manage to taste the noodle by trying to. I taste it when the sauce quietly gets out of the way.

What Noodles Taught Me About Summer

I have started to think a food like this shapes more than a lunch hour. Our appetites now are trained on variety — new flavors, new products, some fresh thing to try before we’ve finished the last. Sōmen trains the opposite muscle. It asks you to eat one plain thing, over and over, and to discover that the reward is not novelty but attention: the longer you stay with the same small bowl, the more it hands back.

This is a summer discipline as much as a meal. It is the same instinct that meets the heat by taking away rather than piling on — less in the bowl, less on the body, relief found in yielding to the season instead of trying to beat it. A thin, unchanging noodle taught that to a great many people, one hot afternoon at a time.

I ate cold sōmen every summer because I wanted to, not because it is tradition. In fact, nobody even mentions the tradition. I learned only much later — reading, as an adult, about that famine and that mountain — that the plain thing I reached for by eleven each August morning had been reached for, in more or less the same way, for over a thousand years. It turned out to be sitting underneath it the whole time, like the wheat dissolved in the water.

I don’t eat sōmen to honor twelve centuries. I eat it because by late morning, when the heat presses in and nothing else appeals, I find that I want it — the same thin cold noodle, the same fading sauce, the same few slices of tomato. That it happens to be ancient only makes it that much more enjoyable.

Takeshi Kitagawa heads the SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT, which aims to introduce Japanese culture. Rooted in his years of Kendo, Zen, and Shinto practice, the project explores whether these traditions have anything real to offer modern life―without pretending they have all the answers.