I’ve been seeing a lot of okras and corn at farmers markets. They remind me of a dish I used to eat. When I was going to college here (in San Francisco, California), I didn’t have much money to spend on food. I was making most of my meals at home, and I had several inexpensive quick go-to dishes. One of them was udon salad with okra, corns and tuna. I used a cheap packaged udon noodles, frozen okra and corns and canned tuna at the time. I didn’t go to a farmers market to get fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables like I do now. I didn’t even know getting fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables at a farmers market was affordable.
Today, I am making “upgraded” version of udon noodles with fresh okras and corns that I just picked up from a farmers market. I think it’s almost at the end of their season so I needed to make this dish before they run out. Udon are noodles made of wheat flour. I am also upgraded the quality of udon noodles with frozen samuki style udon that I bought at a Japanese supermarket.
Since I don’t eat tuna anymore, I am using canned young green jackfruit today. Young green jackfruit itself doesn’t taste like fish but the texture is close and it could taste like it with a lot of seasonings. It needs to be young green jackfruit in water, not mature sweet jackfruit and not young green jackfruit in brine.
I’ll show the step-by-step instructions but the shorter version of the recipe and the listing of the ingredients are available at the bottom of this post.
- Drain water in a canned young green jackfruit and rise well. I usually soak jackfruit in fresh water for several hours to remove the smell and any remaining salt.
2. Cut off the stem of jackfruit and discard the stem.
3. Break jackfruit with fingers and remove pods (seeds). Now it looks like canned tuna.
3. Squeeze water out.
4. Transfer jackfruit in a jar and soak it in basic vegan Japanese dashi (broth). You just need little bit of dashi to just cover jackfruit. This step is optional but it gives more “fishy” taste.
5. After soaking jackfruit in dashi for 10 to 15 minutes, squeeze dashi out and mix in dulse flake. If you can’t find dulse, you may use nori sheet.
6. Boil corns for four to five minutes and remove corns from the cob. I use a skinny fruit knife for this.
Just insert a knife and gently peel off corns from the cob.
7. Boil okras with a pinch of salt for two to three minutes. After boiling okras, run them under cold water to stop cooking. Okras turn bright green color after blanching.
Cut them into about 1/3 inch (8 mm) length.
8. Boil frozen udon noodles (without defrosting ahead of time) for one minutes. Frozen udon noodles are already cooked so they don’t need to be cooked for a long time. After boiling the noodles, run them under cold water to stop cooking.
9. To make sauce, mix basic vegan Japanese noodle sauce, soy sauce and lemon juice.
10. Put udon noodles in a bowl and topped them with jackfruit “tuna”, corn and okra. Pour noodles and drizzle vegan mayonnaise.
I also made zucchini noodles and made a salad bowl. You can kind of see zucchini noodles in the above picture. Zucchini noodles also work fine with this dish. They are missing silkiness of udon noodles but it’s a good gluten-free option.
After you pour the sauce and drizzle vegan mayonnaise, you want to mix everything well. You actually want to use a lot of mayonnaise. I made non-oil vegan mayonnaise to use for this dish. I’ll post the recipe in the next blog post.
After you mix sauce and mayonnaise, the dish becomes noodles with creamy and little bit salty sauce. Udon noodles are smooth and silky. With these summer vegetables and mock “tuna,” these noodles are surprisingly refreshing. All you need to do now is enjoy them!
- 2 packages of frozen udon noodles
- ½ can young green jackfruit
- 1 ear corn
- 10 to 12 small okras
- ¼ cut basic vegan Japanese dashi (broth)
- 1 tablespoon dulse flake
- *Sauce
- 1 cup basic vegan Japanese noodle sauce
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- 2 tablespoon lemon juice
- *Other Condiments
- Vegan mayonnaise
- Drain water in a canned young green jackfruit and rise well. I usually soak jackfruit in fresh water for several hours to remove the smell and any remaining salt.
- Cut off the stem of jackfruit and discard the stem.
- Break jackfruit with fingers.
- Transfer jackfruit in a jar and soak it in basic Japanese dashi (broth). You just need little bit of dashi to just cover jackfruit. This step is optional but it gives more "fishy" taste.
- After soaking jackfruit in dashi for 10 to 15 minutes, squeeze dashi out and mix dulse flake. If you can't find dulse, you may use nori sheet.
- Boil corns for four to five minutes and remove corns from the cob. I use a skinny fruit knife for this. Just insert a knife and gently peel off corns from the cob.
- Boil okras with a pinch of salt for two to three minutes. After boiling okras, run them under cold water to stop cooking. Cut them into about ⅓ inch (8 mm) length.
- Boil frozen udon noodles (without defrosting ahead of time) for one minutes. After boiling the noodles, run them under cold water to stop cooking.
- To make sauce, mix basic vegan Japanese noodle sauce, soy sauce and lemon juice.
- Put udon noodles in a bowl and topped them with jackfruit "tuna", corn and okra. Pour noodles and drizzle vegan mayonnaise.
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