Miso Soup

I think I have discovered my new sick soup.

I wanted to say something about my memories of Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup from childhood sick days, but I cannot. I begin to rant. This blog is not [supposed to be] about what is wrong with the world, it is about what is right with food, and cooking, and experiments in the kitchen.

Grilled Cheesus, how I love experiments in the kitchen!

Anyway, I did have miso soup once or twice when I was in third grade, and a girl in my class brought in miso soup for show-and-tell. It sure drove my carriage. (What does that even mean?) The umami of it all. That sweetly salty pungent miso flavor. That broth. The little seaweed bits.

For whatever reason, it is only now that I embark on the quest to find the perfect miso soup. Or at least, make the perfect miso soup. OK, just make some miso soup. I took ideas from all over the Internet, ingredients carefully imported via care package from Seattle's finest Japanese market (Uwajimaya), and my obsession with fat Udon noodles. I definitely took a good look at this recipe for miso soup with udon noodles, which featured an egg poached into the soup. Hey, when you don't eat land-flesh, you might as well get your B-12 where you can, right?

I must preface this with saying that I am not Japanese. I still don't know anything about Japanese cooking. It is also my understanding that green onions (scallions) are commonly used in miso soup. Alas, Whole Foods was not carrying green onions this week. (Really, Whole Foods?) So I used red. Very different. Still an onion. And I don't know if it's really all that common to use noodles in a miso soup - I always thought of it as tofu and seaweed and green onions in a delicious broth, but I finally found Udon noodles I like and I couldn't pass it up. As for the egg, I'd never seen that before, but I love poached eggs, and I love taking in all that good egg nutrition.

That said, this is my miso soup.


MISO SOUP
some udon noodles - however much you want to put in 4 cups of soup
couple of 3-6 inch pieces of kombu (dried kelp)
4 cups water
1/4 cup bonito flakes (these are dried flakes from a block of specially aged tuna. Mine came in little packets of about that 1/4 cup, so I used one packet)
3 tbsp miso (whatever kind you like - I used shiromiso/yellow miso)
6 oz tofu, cut into cubes
1/2 cup sliced green onions (or other onions, if you have no green)
few crumbles of wakame (a type of dried seaweed)
an egg or two



1. Cook your udon noodles according to the instructions on the package they came in. Mine took 11 minutes at a rapid boil, no salt. The brand I like is made in Australia by Hakubaku, but I cannot find it anywhere on the web. It is in a plastic-lined white paper package with a lot of Japanese characters on it, and in tiny letters at the top it says "The Kokumotsu Company" and underneath that in larger letters it says "Organic UDON" and has a drawing of a stalk of wheat. It is not the same product as this. Anyway, it's delicious, look for it in your local Asian market, in your grocery store, wherever. They get all fat and slippery when they cook. Just as they should. After they've cooked an appropriate amount of time, drain them and set them aside.



2. You can now make what's called "dashi," a kind of broth. Google it. There's a lot of info from people a lot more knowledgeable than I am. Start with some pieces of kombu. Another Asian market find. They are wide and flat and dry and brittle.



Wipe them clean with a damp cloth (I don't know why, but everyone says to do it, so I did) and put them in a pan with 4 cups of fresh, clean water. After 5-10 minutes they should rehydrate and become larger.



Put the pan on medium-high heat and sit tight nearby. It will take several minutes, but when the steam starts rising from the pan, you can take out the kombu. Set it aside, use it in something later, snack on it while you cook, make second dashi from it, whatever you feel like. But don't boil it.

3. You can now add the bonito flakes to the pan.



Give it a swirl to make sure they're all touching the water. Keep the pan on the heat and wait for it to come to a boil, and then take the pan off the heat. Let it sit tight for 10 minutes or so to allow the bonito to calm down and sink to the bottom.



Once that happens, strain the liquid through a sieve lined with paper towel (or a paper napkin) into a bowl. You can save the bonito flakes for second dashi, or discard them.

That liquid you have? See that? Smell it?



That's your dashi. I don't know how it smells to most people, but to me it smells like Maine. I could've held my face over that bowl of dashi for a long time and been quite happy. But then I'd never eat dinner, so I decided to soldier on.

4. Return the dashi to a clean pan, on the stove, over medium-high heat. Take out a few spoonfuls - doesn't really matter how much - of the dashi and mix it in a separate bowl with your miso, until the miso is all dissolved-looking and it's pretty thick and uniform, but liquid. Keep that handy. When the dashi simmers, add however much already-cooked udon you want in your soup. Stir it to break it up if it clumped together while sitting, and let it simmer for 5 minutes. The udon and the dashi will exchange flavors, and the udon will get even fatter and slipperier.

5. While the dashi simmers, you can chop your tofu. It can be firm or soft, silken or not. I used firm. It was good. I just cut it in pieces that were large enough to provide some kind of feeling on the tongue, but not so big that you'd not taste anything else.



You can also hydrate your wakame. And believe me, you don't need very much. You see these crumbles?



After a few minutes in water they became this.



I think that's plenty for 4 cups of soup.

6. After the udon has simmered enough in the soup, stir in the miso-dashi thick liquid, the tofu, and the onions.



Simmer all that together, over medium heat, for 3 minutes or so.

7. If you want to use an egg, now is the time to slip it in. The trick to poaching an egg without it getting messy is this. First crack it into a small bowl, make sure the yolk is intact. Check your cooking water to make sure it's not simmering too fast, or it will toss the egg around. But it does need to be simmering, or the egg will cook very slowly and just get really firm and unpleasant. Take your bowl, with your egg in it, lower it down all the way to the water, and slip it right in. Don't plunk it in, don't drop it in, don't crack it in. And once it's in, don't mess with it for a minute.

8. Cover the pan, turn down the heat to medium-low, and wait a minute to a minute and a half. Then you can peek. Lift up the egg, wherever it's hiding, with a spoon and see if the white is cooked. If not, cook it longer. If so, it's ready to eat. I left mine on an extra two minutes and it cooked too much. Boo. When the egg is cooked, carefully stir in the wakame.



9. To serve it, just get some of everything in a bowl (don't be stingy with the broth!), and put the egg on top. If you had green onions, like I didn't, you wouldn't have to garnish with chives to make it look cute. Although you still could, I suppose.







I had trouble selecting a picture I liked, so there. Have a bunch.

My thoughts on this soup are this. Leave out the egg, use scallions instead of red onion. Noodles are fantastic, especially if you're ill and need noodle soup. The broth tastes amazing. Definitely good to make your own dashi. It doesn't take that long if you have in mind exactly what you need to do. Nothing about it is difficult. Miso is wonderful. Go get some.

In other news, I didn't do a video blog this time (obviously). It's a lot of work for so few readers. Maybe next time?