Miso Soup

Basic miso soup is a template, a canvass painted with two fundamentals — dashi and miso. What you add to it is up to you.

I’ve gone on four overseas trips for the past nine months and if there is one thing I’ve learned, and learned well, it’s how little I actually knew compared to what I thought I knew. Take miso soup, for instance.

Although I have cooked miso soup in so many ways before I set foot on Japan, at the back of my mind, I had this feeling that, perhaps, I was being disrespectful to Japanese culinary traditions. Could I have been bastardizing Japanese miso soup by cooking it with anything other than the traditional wakame, tofu and scallions? Is it authentic Japanese miso soup if it had mushrooms, vegetables, seafood or meat?

And that’s the thing about travel. You learn. And I learned that the basic miso soup is a template, a canvass painted with two fundamentals — dashi and miso. What you add to it is up to you.

We love miso soup. It has been comfort food for my family for over a decade. We have cooked it in so many ways and we are still adding to our collection of miso soup recipes. So I thought I should put all that miso soup love in a special place. Here. Side by side with stories from Japan. I’m calling it my Miso Soup Project.

Miso Soup

Connie Veneracion

The basic miso soup that the world is familiar with — cooked with dashi, miso, wakame and soft tofu.

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Prep Time 5 mins

Cook Time 5 mins

Course Soup

Cuisine Japanese

Servings 6 people

Ingredients

  

1x2x3x

• 6 cups dashi (or dissolve 2 to 3 tablespoons dashi granules in 6 cups of water)
• 3 tablespoons miso paste
• 1 300-gram block soft tofu (silken or momen tofu are recommended), cut into half-inch cubes
• 2 generous pinches dried wakame soaked in hot water, drained and finely sliced
• 6 tablespoons finely sliced scallions

Instructions

 

• In a pot, heat the dashi until barely simmering.
• Ladle about half a cup of hot dashi into a bowl and stir in the miso paste until free from lumps.
• Drop the tofu cubes into the pot of dashi. As soon as the broth comes to a simmer, turn off the heat.
• Stir in the diluted miso paste, wakame and scallions.

Notes

Originally published in CASA Veneracion on March 1, 2008.

If you cooked this dish (or made this drink) and you want to share your masterpiece, please use your own photos and write the cooking steps in your own words.

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