I have many soups on my channel, and if you think they are all too much work, you are
right.
You can’t make bouillabaisse or borscht in 10 minutes, but you know what you can make
in 10 minutes?
Miso soup.
And as the weather is turning colder, I thought it’s good to add an emergency soup to our
repertoire that can be made in snap whenever you need something warm and cozy.
Dashi is not only the base for the miso soup, it’s the base for many Japanese dishes.
It’s a very light stock that is mildly oceanic and smoky.
Dashi has only two ingredients and both of them are pantry items.
The first ingredient is kombu or kelp in English.
It’s a very thick seaweed that is sold in big sheets.
And the second ingredient is smoked bonito flakes.
Bonito is a fish that is tuna’s little cousin.
It is smoked and dried until absolutely all the moisture is removed from it and it feels
like a hard piece of wood.
Then it’s shaved into these tissue thin slices.
In case you don’t like fish, let me assure you, it’s not fishy.
The primary aroma is that of smoke.
In Japan it’s also sold in thicker pieces, which are fantastic for making dashi, but
I’ve never seen them sold in the US.
Here, the only variety we get are the tissue thin flakes.
Both of these are available in pretty much any Asian store and on Amazon.
I’ll give you the links below.
Once you get your hands on some kombu and bonito flakes, you can keep them indefinitely
as long as you store them in a cool, dry place, in an airtight container or bag.
Ok, let’s make some dashi.
Put a quart of cold water into a pot.
Add a square of kombu that’s about 5 x 4 inches.
Accurate measurements aren’t important here.
If you have time, let it sit overnight or for at least 30 minutes, but that’s not
absolutely necessary.
During this time kombu will get a lot bigger and softer.
Set the pot over high heat and bring it close to a boil, but not quite.
If you are a qualitative person, you want to see little bubbles barely starting to break
the surface of the water; if you are a quantitative person, you want to get to 180F.
Take the pot off heat, remove the kombu.
Put a handful of bonito flakes into a fine mesh strainer and submerge them into the pot.
Wait for 5 minutes, lift the strainer, and press hard on the bonito flakes to remove
as much stock as you can.
You can either discard kombu and bonito flakes or look up some recipes for using them.
Elizabeth Andoh has some wonderful ideas in her Washoku cookbook (linked below) and I
am sure there are a ton of ideas on-line too.
That’s it.
We’ve got dashi.
To turn it into miso soup, just add 2 tablespoons of miso paste.
I like white miso for this, but you can experiment with many different varieties.
Blitz it with a blender and season with salt to taste.
Pushing the miso through a fine mesh strainer into the dashi is a more traditional way of
dissolving it, but an immersion blender seems faster and easier to me.
The most typical additions to miso soup are wakame, tofu, and scallions.
Wakame is a delicate seaweed that looks like black tea when it’s sold dry.
To reconstitute it, just put it into cold water and wait about 5 minutes.
You can also add it directly to the soup and wait for it to hydrate.
Wakame is also excellent in salads.
This soup has infinite variations.
You can add all sorts of vegetables, but here is the version you’ll typically see in the
Japanese restaurants in the US.
Since I am not a big fan of tofu, my favorite way to consume this soup is to sip it from
a cup with no additions at all -- just dashi, miso, salt, and a little strip of lemon zest.
If you are wondering what else you can make with kombu and bonito flakes, check out my
video on the soy reduction.
It’s a real crowd pleaser.
Here are more culinary tutorials for you to check out and if you are ever in the Boston
area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.