Recipe of the Month: Soba Salad

Before I get into the main course of this Recipe of the Month post, let's start out with a quick appetizer: I was recently interviewed for the Easy Prey podcast, which is about scams, marketing gimmicks, and other ways consumers get manipulated. The host, Chris Parker, got in touch with Money Crashers looking for writers who would like to be on the show, and eventually he set up an interview with me based on my pieces about utility scams and home security scams. If you're interested, you can check it out here.

Now, let's move on to my Recipe of the Month for February. I had to scrabble a bit to
come up with this one, as it was coming up on the end of the month and I had only a few days left to try a new vegan recipe for the blog. On our last trip to Stop & Shop, I had grabbed the latest issue of their-in store magazine, Savory, so I started flipping through it in search of vegan dishes. Near the front of the magazine was a "Vegan Mac and 'Cheese'" recipe made with cashew cheese sauce, but it didn't look all that interesting, so I skipped ahead to the "Take 5" section (five-ingredient recipes), where I found an easy-looking Soba Salad with Edamame and Peppers. The five ingredients were soba noodles, frozen edamame (cooked soy beans), frozen mixed pepper strips, scallions, and Taste of Inspirations Sesame-Ginger Dressing.

We already had three of these ingredients on hand: the soba and edamame (both left over from other recipes) and the scallions. We didn't have frozen pepper strips, but we had fresh red and green bell peppers, so Brian figured we could just use those. As for the sesame-ginger dressing, we could have just gone out and bought a bottle, but then we'd have to figure out what to do with the rest of it after using half a cup for this dish. So Brian dug through our recipe archives until he found a couple of recipes for sesame ginger dressing that he could scale down to make a half-cup batch. I checked them against the ingredient list for the Taste of Inspirations dressing and determined that the best match was this one from Budget Bytes. It calls for honey, so the resulting recipe would be not quite vegan, but it would be easy to replace with agave nectar or simple syrup for someone who wanted a 100 percent vegan version.

Because of the substitutions we made, our salad was probably a bit different from the one in the magazine. For one thing, it has a total of 13 ingredients rather than five (nine in the dressing, plus the two types of peppers, plus the edamame and soba). And the added step of mixing up the dressing added about ten minutes to the preparation time. But the biggest difference was most likely the texture. Based on the picture in Savory, it looks like the bottled sesame-ginger dressing is fairly thin and light, while our homemade dressing was quite thick. Also, we used raw, fresh pepper strips rather than cooked, frozen ones, so their texture was no doubt firmer and crisper — all to the good, as far as we're concerned. But the flavor was probably pretty close to the original version.

So how was it? Not bad, but not extraordinary. The dressing seemed a bit unbalanced in flavor to me, with the ginger kind of drowning out the other flavors. If we make it again I'd probably cut the ginger down a bit and boost the sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice vinegar for a slightly thinner dressing with more sour, salty, and umami flavor. But with a little added salt, this version was okay. The recipe as written made enough for a full meal for the two of us, with about two cups left over that provided lunch for both of us the next day.

All in all, I'd say the dish was fine, but I doubt it will make it into our regular rotation. Neither soba nor edamame is something we buy on a regular basis, and neither of us liked this salad enough to go out and buy them specifically for that purpose. If we ever did get a hankering for something with soba and edamame together, we'd probably make this Winter Soba Noodle Salad, which was one of my first Recipes of the Month, and which has a more interesting blend of flavors and textures. Or, as Brian points out, we could just cook the soba and the edamame and toss them with whatever veggies we happened to have on hand, and it would probably taste fine.