Miso Soup – Another Basic Recipe
Oh, when, you may be asking yourself, is she going to get off the Japan thing? Well, I don’t know. There are some basic dishes that I love and really want to nail down, and then maybe I will be satisfied for awhile.
Our love of Japanese culture in general has a 150 year history in western society.
Kiyonaga Bathhouse - a typical subject for 19th century woodblock prints.
Japan was a county and culture closed to the west until an English man named James Bruce, the 8th Earl of Elgin (successor of the 7th Earl, of the Elgin Marbles debacle) forced a treaty to open its port to trading with England in 1853. Within a decade, western Europe was agog with Japonica.
Toulouse Lautrec's Reine de Joie Poster, influenced by Japanese woodblock prints.
Artists, philosophers, food lovers, film makers, architects, and poets have been reaping the bounty ever since. The importance of the Japanese woodblock print on graphic style, painting and design can’t be overstated. The essential nature of the print – simple, elegant, linear, and flat – pulled the rug out from under people like Toulouse Lautrec and have influenced artists ever since.
Vincent van Gogh, The Flowering Plum Tree (after Hiroshige), 1887 photo by Michele Ahin, Creative Commons generic licence.
There. How’s that for a crash art history course?
When sushi took the US by storm in the 1980′s, miso soup came with it. That’s the de facto meal – you get your miso soup, iceberg lettuce salad with a ginger sesame dressing, maybe a tiny hijiki (seaweed) salad, and as much sushi as you dare (or can afford to) eat. The soup is a simple and charming enough affair, and really easy to prepare at home – just a few vermicelli noodles and small cubes of soft tofu in a bowl of hot water with white miso paste. In a swanky place, maybe some seaweed, either nori strips or wakame. Turning that into the star attraction isn’t at all complicated, but it helps to know a few things.
(It’s a little hard to concentrate with that Van Gogh painting up there. It is crazy beautiful.)
For each bowl of soup, you will need:
Approx. 1 1/4 cup dashi*
Approx. 2 tbsp miso paste. The lighter-colored pastes are less assertive in flavor, which is good for soup. You should experiment to see how strong you want your soup to be.
a small pinch of wakame seaweed**
6 – 8 cubes soft tofu
1 small rib bok choy, sliced
1 small carrot, peeled and sliced
2 – 3 slices shitake mushroom cap (not dried)
Heat dashi over medium heat and drop in carrots. Simmer for several minutes, then add the white ends of the bok choy, leaving the leafy green ends to be thrown in at the end. Let cook another minute or two, until carrots are tender.
Add rest of ingredients.
Put the miso in your bowl, and add a little bit of the hot broth, mix the miso and broth together with a fork until the miso is dissolved and there are no lumps. (Go easy on the miso amount at first, and taste. If you need to add more you can.)
Dissolve the miso mixture in the soup. Don’t let it boil or the flavor will dissipate and the texture will become grainy. Serve immediately.
This method can be used with many ingredients. Make miso vegetable soup for a quick lunch (as I just did!) with whatever you happen to have, taking care to not overcook anything. Keeping everything tasting fresh and simple is key. The soup below was made a little differently, with noodles and without wakemi.
*Just to de-mystify it, for our purposes here that is basically kelp tea.
**Dried wakame looks like tea, but expands into flat squares. It is very deceptive – a little goes a long way. Just a tiny pinch, three pieces or so, will do.
Date: May 7, 2010
