
Yakisoba is Japanese for fried noodles. Yaki = fry; soba = soba noodles. This was one of my favorite meals when I lived in Japan but no matter how many times I've tried to replicate it myself, I am never very successful. It's the sauce. It seems simple, but I can never achieve quite the right taste for my liking. Bottles of pre-made yakisoba sauce and packets of yakisoba seasoning have never tasted quiet right either. I'm convinced the best sauce will be from scratch, I just need to find the right combination of ingredients.
One of my friends was lucky enough to have a host mother who made amazing yakisoba. In Japan, it's sold at festivals along with other goodies like takoyaki (fried octopus in a meatball shape) and strawberries coated in a sugary red lollipop-like candy but it's easily crunched and I don't even remember other festival foods. I ate a lot of yakisoba!
I think SP being away for a week gave me too much free time to think - always a dangerous thing! I've also been scanning a lot of old photos, so my time in Japan was fresh in my mind. And the yakisoba bug bit me. So I hunted around and located my mini Japanese food cookbook and I searched online and finally settled on a yakisoba recipe from food.com.




SP did an excellent job cooking the shrimp. They were just cooked through and wonderfully tasty and moist. Sometimes it's tough to cook shrimp just right, especially in a stir fry like dish, and not have them get too tough and over-cooked and shrivel a bit. The sauce was pretty tasty, too. Definitely pretty close to what I remember and what I like. I'm looking forward to re-heating the yakisoba and seeing if it has more of a fried noodle 'texture' because while the first meal was tasty, it was too moist and not quite yakisoba like.
You can use wheat noodles, udon noodles (fatter than soba), or ramen noodles. We used ramen noodles but we have some wheat soba so next time we might try those.
For as tasty as this was, I think I still have a long journey ahead of me to find the perfect yakisoba recipe much like I am still searching for an Irish coffee as good as the one at Buena Vista in San Francisco.
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