Butter Soba with Garlic Mushroom

I have always thought of replacing pasta with soba for one of my own recipes, and it is on one weekend afternoon when I decided to try this out.

Pauline has always been an advocate of healthy choices, and of late, she has been making a lot of soba for our meals, using the tried and tested way of having cold soba with Japanese soya sauce.
But I always thought of doing soba in a more Italian fashion, where you will make a sauce and coat it on the soba instead of just using soya sauce. Hence, this dish.

To begin, bring to boil a pot of water for you to cook the soba in. Soba is shorter than the usual linguine or spaghetti, so put more sticks in to compensate.

It cooks for about 5 minutes and once it gets soft, remove from the boiling water and strain quickly. Run it through cold water to stop the cooking process.

To make the sauce, take a knob of butter and brown it in a pan or pot. Chop lots of garlic and add it to the pan.

Make sure the garlic is well cooked and starts to get soft before you add some white wine to flavor the garlic further.

Add some chopped button mushrooms into the mixture, though you can substitute other types of mushrooms of your choice.

Keep stirring and cooking the mushrooms until the flavors are well extracted from the mushrooms. Add a little water if its too dry.

Add a knob of butter to emulsify the mixture and add in the soba and toss thoroughly until the soba is well coated with garlic mushroom mixture.

To serve, plate the soba and add some Japanese seaweed or tiny red caviar for some additional garnishing and color.

And there you have it, soba cooked pasta styled.