Yoshihara Flour Mill and udon noodle making - day four

Today's blog is written by grower Chris Syme from Cunderdin.

We started the day with an early breakfast before heading to the Kyoto train station at 7.43 am.

We travelled by Bullet train to Okayama to visit the Yoshihara Flour Mills.

We met the President of the mill, who was the fourth generation in his family to run the mill, which has been in operation since 1902 and using Japanese grown wheat until the 1960s. However, growing wheat in Japan became less economic when they started to import Australian wheat.

The mill now uses noodle blend ASW and processes 16,000 mt a year. With the ASW the mill produces hard and soft types of flour, mainly for the Udon noodles. The flour is blended and milled into 55 grades used for various products.

The President said the Australian ASW was good for Udon making because it had a nice creamy colour and had good hardness and bounce in the texture, which gives it a long life, up to 30minutes in the boiling/cooking process.

The younger Japanese generations like Udon noodles and the staff from the mill told us they believe that sales will increase in the future, thus creating a higher demand for Australian grown ASW.

We were taken on a tour of the mill facilities to see first hand the complex process the grain goes through to become flour for the Udon noodles.

To make the experience even better, we then visited an Udon resturaunt to learn the method of making Udon noodles by the number one noodle maker in Japan.

What an experience!!!

It was a hands on experience and very entertaining to all. The noodles were served for lunch with accompanying tempura and rice dumpling (Inarizushi).

We then visited the wharf in Kobe and saw the Zennoh Silo Co LTD unloading facility which handles up to 900,000 MT of feed for livestock per year.

The unloading equipment has the capacity to unload 500 tonne/ hour with either pneumatic or mechanical continuous unloaders. The grain is then unloaded to silos, transfers to coasters or direct transport and containers.

After visiting the silo we checked into our hotel here in Kobe before walking to dinner at a Chinese resturaunt with a magnificent view of the city - another delicious meal to add to the list!