Easy Vegan Recipes: How to make Yaki Soba by Meera Sodha

Hi my name's Mira Soda and I'm really excited to have teamed up with Ocado to bring you a brand new recipe for my root vegetable yakisoba. It is vegan, it's low waste, it's crunchy noodles, fresh crunchy vegetables, a really big bold flavoured sauce. So this dish was born out of my love of all things fresh and crunchy, which are two wildly underrated things when it comes to thinking about what to cook and eat for dinner. Yakisoba means fried noodles and that's what I've done in this recipe, I've fried them really hard until they become really crunchy and then for freshness I've added raw root vegetables. So if you've got odds and ends of any of those lying around at the bottom of your fridge then throw them in this recipe and not in the bin. The thing about noodle dishes is they come together really quickly, right at the end and so you've got to do all your prep up front and so I'm going to tackle my vegetables first. I just want to cut them into nice long strips. I'm going to use this and it's a julienne peeler. These guys are not expensive tools, it's one of my favourite things to use in the kitchen because it turns vegetables into long gorgeous noodley strips. It's really just a peeler with teeth. So I'm using Ocado organic carrots. Pull up a chair, I'm just going to julienne the rest of this carrot. Genuinely satisfying, bit of a wiggly bit which I'm just going to chop off. I'm also using this What's Farm Swede and that's from a family farm in Kent. Swedes to me look like something that the Vikings would have bowled with back in the day. So I'm just going to julienne a bit of that. I love swede, I mean I think it's a really underused vegetable, it tastes really buttery when it's cooked but raw tastes like a carrot meets a radish meets a turnip. Into the bowl. Now I'm going to add ginger and I just want to show you how I peel ginger. Basically I'm just going to run my teaspoon down the ginger. I'm using ginger because the deep heat of ginger goes really well with the sweetness of the raw root vegetables. I'm also using some candied beetroot. Now we've got all of our vegetables I'm just going to hit this with some flavour. So first up some coriander in with some toasted sesame seed oil and some soy to season it. I'm going to add some brown rice syrup and that is a great substitute for honey in vegan cooking and now we're going to brighten everything up with some lime juice. Just squeeze all of that juice in there. Now this is an amazing salad in its own right but it's also brilliant with noodles. I'm going to leave this to one side so all those flavours can get to know one another. Now it's noodle time. I'm just going to cook them according to packet instructions which in my case is four minutes. Whilst those noodles are cooking I'm just going to slice up some spring onions and garlic. So I'm not going to prod these too much I'm just going to try and just encourage them out of their little nests. I don't want to break them up so I'm using a spaghetti spoon just in a bath of hot water. Looks very relaxing. You know the thing about noodles if you're using them in a stir fry that you cook them for a minute less than it says on the packet instructions and that's because they finish off cooking in the pan. When I was growing up I thought there was only one type of noodle and that was like Shalwood's medium egg. Turns out there's a whole world of noodles out there and these are whole wheat noodles. They taste delicious, they've got like a nice square cut on them. These are my favourite ones to use. I'm going to drain these now. Whilst those drain off I'm just going to get a pan nice and hot. Because I'm frying these noodles I want to make sure that they're going to get really nice and crispy so I want a nice high heat. A little bit of rapeseed oil. I'm just letting those dry in their own steam and just making sure that all the water's come off them because when they go into that hot oil I want them to crisp up straight away. I just want to hear them sizzle. I'm just putting my hand over it so I can feel the heat and when it's almost too much I know my pan is hot enough. Come on pan, I'm letting the side down. Okay here we go. Oh yes, there we go. I've just spread the noodles out and that's because I want them to have enough leg room to crisp up and now I just need to be patient and leave them to do their thing. So you spend that time thinking about where you might go on holiday or why Pluto was delisted from the planet list in 2006. Texture and contrast is so important and I really want these noodles to get really nice and crisp and crunchy. It's just starting to crisp up really nicely on the bottom there so I'm just going to move them around a little bit. See that bottom bit's pretty wiggly but the top bit is nice and crisp and now I'm going to add that garlic and those spring onions that I chopped. Now I'm not too worried that these guys are not mixing up just yet because it just gives all the ingredients enough room to just cook and do their thing. Now that my spring onions are just colouring up nicely and that garlic has got some proper colour on it so I'm just going to add the liquid from the vegetables. It's going to sizzle away and make a really, really nice glaze. I'm also going to add some pre-marinated tofu which I love so it's just been pre-marinated in a bit of soy sauce. So now that that tofu is nice and warm I'm going in with the vegetables and the first thing that I'm going to do is just switch off the heat now because I want to keep that crunch. Right we're ready to plate up. Nice bit of crisp on the top there so I'm going to add some more crispy, crunchy goodness. I've got some fried onions here, these are pre-fried and then I'm going to add some black sesame seeds and then I'm going to give this a really good squeeze of lime. Look at that and that's my root vegetable yakisoba. It is crispy, it's fresh, it's crunchy, it's delicious. Enjoy!