Inaniwa Udon

Inaniwa udon comes from a single village in southern Akita, and for most of its history you could not have made it at home if you tried. The technique — a hand-stretched, air-dried, ribbon-thin noodle — took hold in the mid-1600s, and the Satake lords who ruled the Akita domain treated it as a guarded specialty, its method held within one family and its production kept deliberately small. That secrecy held, more or less, until the Meiji era opened the craft up. What survived is a noodle unlike any other udon in Japan: flat rather than round, pale and slightly glassy, with a smoothness that comes from being pulled thin by hand over days rather than cut by machine.

Because the artistry is already in the strand, the cooking is almost nothing. Boil it briefly — it is far thinner than ordinary udon and will overcook if you treat it like the fat stuff — then shock it in ice water and rub off the surface starch until it gleams. Akita serves it cold with two dipping sauces: a clean soy tsuyu built on awase dashi, and a nutty sesame dare, alternating between them mouthful to mouthful. It is a rare dish where the honest move is to buy the best version of the ingredient and do almost nothing to it. Respect the noodle; it took a domain three centuries to let it out.