Miso Soup recipe
Here's your chance to have fun in the kitchen!
Hello lovelies,
A few posts back I shared about my experience of making miso (a fermented soy bean paste). One of the comments I received on this post was a request for how to use the miso, specifically, how to make miso soup.
So, as promised, I’ve put together some instructions for making miso soup.
After rice, I’d say miso soup is the second most important food for a Japanese. Miso soup is so popular in Japan, it can be paired with nearly every meal! We have miso soup usually twice a day, at breakfast and dinner (since we eat “dinner” for breakfast!).
A basic miso soup looks like this (serves 4):
Ingredients
3½C Water
1 tspn Stock powder (we used chicken or vegetable in Australia, but in Japan we use seaweed or fish)
2 Tbspn Wakame (dried seaweed)1
100g Silken tofu, 1cm cubed
4 Tbspn Miso paste (white is more mild than red, if your local supplier has options)
1 Spring onion
Method
Place the water, stock and wakame in a medium saucepan and bring to the boil.
Reduce to a simmer and add the tofu. Simmer for about 1min, just long enough for the tofu to get hot.
Turn off the heat. This is very important in order to maintain a good flavour and not kill off the beneficial bacteria in the miso.
Put the miso paste into a soup ladle and lower into the soup. Let it sit and start to dissolve while you finely slice the spring onion.
Dissolve the miso paste by gently mixing it in the soup ladle with a spoon (or chopsticks work well too!). Once dissolved, gently mix it through the soup so that the miso is evenly distributed, being careful not to break the tofu.
Add the sliced spring onion.
Your miso soup is done and ready to serve!
If the soup is too strong, just add some water. If it’s too weak, add more stock and/or miso to suit your taste.
Miso soup is very versatile so you can add many different types of vegetables. Put the vegetables in the pot from the start, only adding the tofu when the vegetables are cooked.
I personally prefer to use vegetables that are common in Japanese cuisine (rather than say, broccoli). Here’s some suggestions:
Potato
Onion
Carrot
Cabbage
Wombok/Chinese cabbage
Asian greens
Mushrooms
Taro
Daikon radish
Kabu raddish
Happy Cooking!!
Please let me know how your miso soup turns out, and what vegetable combinations are your favourite!
Thank you to
for your request which prompted this post! A fellow writer on Substack, Barb is an Italian living in Melbourne, Australia, with a fantastic sense of humour and great skill for writing down her stories which can be found here:wakame may be hard to source if you don’t have an asian grocery store near by. You can still make the miso soup without it.
Thanks, Debbie! Now I'm hungry.
<3 thank you!! !! omg I am so embarrassed for all the atrocious miso I've forced my mum to eat when I was living at home in Italy and had limited access to Japanese food and cooking tutorials. I'll just say, I didn't know you needed stock. Thanks for sharing the recipe and your cooking suggestions! I appreciate you a lot