try toasting your buckwheat and letting it cool completely before you mill it. That will intensify the flavor. In addition, you could season the dough with shoyu or a little miso. Alternatively, you could experiment with flavored alternatives to plain water, e.g. strong green tea, dashi (kombu seaweed stock, high in iodine), chlorophyll (briefly parboil dark leafy vegetables such as kale or spinach, shock in ice water, blend and strain through two sheets of cheese cloth), broth from reconstituted dried mushrooms (salty, check for grit) or even the juice from pureed roasted beets. For obvious reasons, whatever liquid you choose for making the dough must be at room temperature and should not contain any fat.

Another way to add flavor and color is to use a different cooking liquid. In Italy, Tuscan style pasta is cooked in red wine.

Adding some arrowroot flour might be useful if you’re having trouble with dough elasticity during rolling, just don’t overcook it. Tapioca flour might also work, I’ve seen it listed in a recipe for wheat-free pizza dough based on brown rice flour.

Any and all of this would probably make soba purists shudder, but they’re your homemade noodles, so have at it.

Even with 20% wheat flour, producing true fresh soba approx 1.6mm (1/16″) square requires a large work surface, long thin and dead straight rolling pins plus a deft touch. For details, see the following photos a Swiss blogger called François-Xavier took during a soba-making class he attended in Japan.

http://fxcuisine.com/default.asp?language=2&Display=38&resolution=high

With no gluten at all, the dough will be even less ductile so don’t be discouraged if you don’t succeed right away. Meanwhile, there’s always buckwheat crepes…

It does sound like it was much too dry of a dough for you. Do this. Start with one cup of water, add the rest of the ingredients and then just stir and knead in enough flour to make a firm, but still soft dough.

When you roll it out, just be aware that it is a fragile dough and a light touch is a must.

Also, I have been experimenting with using arrowroot powder to make a dough stay together better. It seems to have helped other recipes. You could try using 1/4-1/2 cup of arrowroot powder for some of the buckwheat flour.

Hope that helps!

Thanks so much for the recipe. We follow the Westin Price principles here at home, and we also have a situation where our little doggie has to eat very specific stuff or her guts don’t work right. One of two “starches” is buckwheat noodles. As you know, buying 100% buckwheat soba noodles is very expensive, especially if you are using a couple of 8oz. packets per week. So your recipe was a welcome sight, and we are very grateful!

I tried making it yesterday, and it didn’t turn out too well… The dough ball was too dry to stay together with only 1/2 cup of flour, so I had to sprinkle some water to make it stick together. It really fell apart the next day when I tried to roll it out. It cracked and clumped a bit, but I managed to roll out a few sheets that I sliced and cooked. While some of the pieces were okay, there was a lot of mush and clumps because of it falling apart.

Could you help me troubleshoot my problem? Is it possible to use twice as much water and would that still work? Any other suggestions? I really need to make my own 100% buckwheat noodles, so any help is much appreciated!

Thanks.

It’s always such a let down when a recipe doesn’t behave for you! It’s hard for me to know why it wasn’t holding together since I can’t touch/see/and knead your dough. (the real problem with blogging!). But here are a few things I thought of (by the way, when I make this, it is more fragile than my whole wheat pasta because of the lack of gluten, but as you can tell from the pictures, it holds together well enough to cut noodles from etc. If you can have gluten, adding some whole wheat flour in for part of the flour would help).

1-The night before, did it form into a firm ball? Depending on the weather and where you live, you may need to play around with the ratio of flour to water. You don’t want your ball to be dry (it will definitely fall apart then!), or too wet. It should be firm, but moist and at this stage should form into a ball easily.

2-When rolling out, use plenty of flour as needed and roll with gentle, smooth motions. At this stage, how did the dough seem? If it was falling apart a lot, I suspect that it may have been too dry. You could remedy that by adding a little more moisture when you are making the dough, if that’s the case.

3-When cutting out, lifting to the pot, be very gentle. It is, after all gluten free!

Finally, if you wanted to really play it safe and but didn’t want to add wheat flour to the dough, you could add some strengtheners to the dough. I’ve never used them before, as I try to keep things simple, but I believe that guar gum is one option.

Hope that helps a little!