miso impressed

Sometimes you just need to toot your own horn, you know? Like when you make something really really good.

I don’t like miso soup. When I go to a sushi restaurant I have a taste and push it away, underwhelmed. It’s insipid, nothing more than cloudy salty water with a bit of umami (not to be confused with “ooh, mummy”, which a lady at the market recently did, umami is a taste). I sometimes eat the tofu and wakame from it before nudging it away and waiting for my salad and sushi. Something like this lacks appeal to me:

 

However, a couple of years ago I saw a post on Serious Eats about easy miso soup. It contained a recipe was based on one from the South River Miso website. I decided to give it a try and had great results when I made it my way, which is to say, modified to my heart’s content. Turns out I like miso soup, just not at restaurants (so yes, I kind of opened this post with a lie). I made the soup often that winter, doing my own modifications. Since then I’ve always had miso in my fridge. Refrigerated, it keeps indefinitely (source).

This evening I left a hot yoga class and went out into the cold. The windchill, or “feels like” temperature, was around -15°C (5°F). I craved soup. Then I craved miso soup. I hadn’t made it in a long time. I went into my Google Bookmarks* and found the South River soup Miso Soup 101 again. Again, I modified. It had been awhile so I could only remember two of my usual modifications: Sesame oil and tofu. I was out of tofu.

Here’s South River’s version:

Miso Soup 101
Serves 4

1 medium onion, sliced in half moons
1 cup chopped kale, collards, watercress, or other seasonal greens
1 carrot cut into thin rounds
1 three-inch piece wakame sea vegetable for additional flavor and trace
minerals (optional)
1 quart water
3-4 tablespoons of light or dark miso
Chopped scallion or parsley for garnish

Place water, carrot, onion, and wakame in 2-quart saucepan and bring to boil over high flame. Reduce flame to medium and simmer for 10 minutes with lid on. Add greens and simmer with lid off until tender. In a small bowl blend miso with 3-4 tablespoons of liquid from pot. Reduce flame to low, add diluted miso, and simmer briefly. Garnish and serve.

For today’s version I followed the directions but altered the ingredients:

• Filled my medium-sized pot with water (I didn’t measure)
• Sliced an onion the mandolin, then stacked them and sliced through with a knife to make half moons
• Added a couple pieces of kombu and a handful of dulse. (I’ve used wakame in the past, but couldn’t find any in my mess.)

…Boiled, reduced heat and simmered as per directions….

• Added chopped kale, a chunk of frozen spinach and chopped portobello mushrooms
• Added beaten egg
• Diluted the miso (white miso in this case) as directed but blended it in the small cup of my Magic Bullet blender as I usually do.

When I served it I added sesame oil, mirin, Bragg all-purpose liquid soy (any soy sauce or tamari would work), black sesame seeds, a bit of chili oil and a small bit of chili garlic sauce (was too spicy).

This is GOOD STUFF. I wish you could smell and taste it. After I’d put my empty bowl in the sink and poured the leftover soup into the jar I removed  bowl from sink and ladled in a third portion. They were half bowls.

I forgot to add ginger, easily remedied by taking a rasp to ginger and grating it into the mason jar of leftovers. Another thing: After the soup was made and a couple of bowls consumed I remembered a bag of dried wild forest mushroom mix that I bought from smiley Seth of Forbes Wild Foods at the farmer’s market a few weeks ago. I keep forgetting to use those. These must make their way into a miso soup.

The South River website also has a recipe for “Autumn Sunset Soup”, calling for squash. While I was making this batch I prepped an acorn squash – left from one of the final weeks of my CSA – for a future batch.

I’m going to make this again and again. While searching my Google bookmarks for “miso soup” after this batch was underway, I noticed that I’d recently bookmarked a similar recipe from the Feed the Yogi website. They call it Superhero Immune Boosting Miso Soup, adding a lot of garlic (5 cloves) and a cup of cabbage and suggesting more vegetables. They also suggest beans, which I hadn’t thought of. Immune boosting? Awesome! I’m all about that this season. Warm, tasty, immune boosting, easy, what more can you ask for?

Call it “Miso soup for the soul”.

Stay warm.

Eat well, be well.

*It’s a system which has in the past year replaced a constantly growing big, fat binder of recipe print outs. Now everything is labeled, sometimes with multiple categories, and easy searchable. I don’t like putting footnotes in blog posts but some things don’t seem adequate in parentheses.