Pad Thai Soba noodles with Champignons

This sauce is so easy to make on the spot. Nothing can go wrong here, even if you decide to adapt the suggested amounts to your taste. If you don't have tamarind at hand, you could use some balsamic vinegar, pomegranate syrup or sumac. Anything a little bit sour will do. In that case, you'll need to add more arrowroot so that the sauce gets the right consistency - not too runny. It works also great with thinly shredded cabbage, bamboo shoots or with various other (wok-able) veggies, but with mushrooms, it's a real blast. 

Ingredients:

250 g soba noodles

500g champignons

2 tbsp olive oil

80ml tamari

2 tbsp tamarind paste

3 tbsp mascobado sugar* 

80ml beet juice (or prunes juice)

1 1/2 ts freshly grated ginger (or to taste)

1/3 ts ground allspice 

Chilli pepper and sea salt to taste

1 tbsp arrowroot, diluted in a few tbsp beet juice

soba noodles are perfect for this

Cut the champignons in thin slices, depending on their size. Cook them with the olive oil until thoroughly cooked (5-8 minutes). Add the tamari, ginger, allspice, mascobado, tamarind, beet juice and allow it to cook for 1 more minute. Add the arrowroot diluted in a bit of the beet juice. Stir it well while cooking further until the desired consistency (1-2 minutes). Adjust taste with chilli pepper and some salt if needed. Depending on how thick your tamarind paste is you might not even need to thicken the sauce with the arrowroot. Also if the tamarind is not so sour you might want to add less mascobado sugar.

Cook the soba noodles following the instructions on the package, drain it and serve it immediately with the champignons sauce. 

This recipes yields a very concentrated sauce, so that a bit of sauce is enough to give flavour to a lot of noodles. If you want more sauce than noodles, you might want to reduce the amounts, particularly of tamari and ginger.

Optional: garnish with fresh cilantro leaves

*Note: Where I live I buy unprocessed dehydrated cane juice under the name of mascobado (by Oxfam), but the same or similar product can be marketed under other names such as sucanat, rapadura, jaggery, etc.