The smartest move in this recipe is the meatball base: strip pork sausages of their casings and you skip the labour of seasoning raw mince from scratch. The fennel seeds, five-spice, garlic, and soy are already doing structural work, and the panko and egg bind everything without making the texture dense. Rolling 16 small balls at around 20g each is the right size — they cook through in the sauce without drying out, and the golden crust from the initial fry holds up against the liquid. The plum sauce is where the recipe earns its keep. Plums cooked down with miso, chilli flakes, soy, and brown sugar hit four distinct flavour registers simultaneously — sweet, umami, sour, and hot — without any of them dominating. The 200ml of boiling water sounds like it will dilute things dangerously, but four minutes at a high simmer concentrates it back to something sticky and glossy. The key step is adding sesame seeds to the pan after the meatballs are browned, not before — they toast in the residual fat and get carried into the sauce, adding texture throughout rather than sitting on top. The udon tip is worth taking seriously. Dennison warns against dropping frozen udon directly into the sauce, which would turn it an alarming shade of pink. The correct move is a brief soak in separate boiling water for two to three minutes, then drain and plate before spooning the sauce over. It takes thirty seconds longer and saves you from a Bridget Jones moment. The cucumber garnish isn't decorative — thinly sliced raw cucumber cuts through the richness of the pork fat and miso in a way that a herb garnish wouldn't. The condiment list at the end (soy, malt vinegar, chilli oil, pepper) is generous but honest: the sauce lands differently depending on your plums' tartness, and malt vinegar in particular is an underused sharpener for noodle dishes. Use it. This is a 40-minute dinner that doesn't taste like one. The plum window is short — this recipe is best made now, before stone-fruit season closes.
