Looking for the rest of the Superabundant newsletter?
Subscribe now to get original recipes, PNW food news, and ideas for the kitchen and garden!
If you’re looking for new ways to eat through a glut of fresh tomatoes, look no further. This brothy bowl of noodles is refreshing, cheap and dead-simple to prepare, even without cooking — it’s also easily veganized (just use mushroom bouillon instead of dashi granules), and you can use rice vermicelli to make it gluten-free.
Use any kind of tomatoes you have on hand, as long as they’re really ripe. Pureeing the tomatoes by running them across a grater will conveniently remove the skins while providing a slightly coarser texture, but for more umami glutamic punch, you can blitz them in a blender instead — a tomato’s natural MSG is most concentrated in the seeds and skins. Serves 4
Ingredients
2 bundles dry somen, somyeon, or other thin noodles
1 pound large, ripe tomatoes
1 tablespoon finely grated ginger
1 tablespoon light (usukuchi) soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon mirin
1 teaspoon dashi granules or mushroom bouillon
1 tablespoon fine sea salt
A couple of pinches sugar and MSG
1 cup water
Crushed ice
4 large shiso or perilla leaves
1 pint dry cherry tomatoes, halved
Thinly sliced chives or scallions
Instructions
- Cook the noodles according to the instructions on the package, rinse under cold water to remove the starch, then set aside in a bowl of ice water.
- Grate the large tomatoes into a large mixing bowl, reserving the skins for another use (dehydrate and powder them or save them for vegetable broth). Stir in the ginger, soy sauce, sake, mirin, dashi, salt, sugar and water.
- Stack the shiso leaves and then roll them tightly into a cylinder. Thinly slice into fine shreds (chiffonade).
- Add about a cup of ice to each bowl, then divide the cold tomato broth between them. Add a wad of noodles and a small pile of the shiso chiffonade, then top with the halved cherry tomatoes and a sprinkle of chives.