My seemingly never-ending quest for a Chicago-area source for
Sau Tao Brand Trolley Noodles, which come with seasoning packets in various flavors, continues with little hope in sight. I am thinking of driving back to Pittsburgh to see if I can find them again in that little Asian grocery store in the Little Italy neighborhood.
In the meantime, I have hunted in local grocery stores and the big Asian markets (Mitsuwa, HMart, Assi, etc.) for bottles labelled udon soup broth or Japanese noodle soup broth, concentrated or not. I have asked for some such thing at each place and no one seems to know what I am talking about. There are dozens of different types of dry straight noodles at these stores, but not the broth. Given how many restaurants in the Chicago area serve udon soup, it seems odd to me you can't buy the concentrated soup base anywhere. Every single one of those shops is making their udon soup from scratch?
The only thing I've found so far, online, is
Kikkoman Memmi noodle soup base, which I bought from Amazon. It's okay, but not exactly what I had in mind. I think maybe I should be diluting it with dashi rather than water.
Only today, years after I started searching, did Amazon see fit to suggest to me that perhaps what I'm looking for is called mentsuyu. Or maybe hontsuyu.
So I'm wondering if anyone knows:
(1) Mentsuyu/hontsuyu/memmi concentrate: are these all basically the same thing? If they're different, is one of them best suited as a base for udon soup?
(2) Does Mitsuwa or HMart or Assi or, frankly, any Asian or non-Asian market between Milwaukee and Michigan City carry mentsuyu or hontsuyu concentrate? I have scoured the bottle-and-jar aisles of them all and not found them, but until today I didn't know to look for the words mentsuyu or hontsuyu. All three are available from Amazon but for upwards of $8 a bottle. At that price, I'd at least like to know whether or not they're all the same thing. My next move will, of course, be to go back to some stores and explicitly ask for mentsuyu or hontsuyu base. Just wondering if someone already knows where to find it.
Follow-up: looking at the current Mitsuwa flyer, I see a small bottle called Yamiki white dashi soup base and a large bottle called daisho nabe (brand name or product, I don't know) soup base. A little progress...
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