How to Make the Best Miso Soup of Your Life
Seiji Ando never had to learn how to make miso soup. In Japan, this was taught in elementary school. But as far as he can remember, he never really had to learn because he just always knew. His father and grandfather were chefs who owned a sushi restaurant in Osaka, so he was often around miso soup. At home it was breakfast every morning; It was an after-school snack at his father’s restaurant.
The standard version of miso soup might be little more than soft tofu, rehydrated seaweed, and a lily pad suspension made with scallions, but there are no rules at home, Ando said. You can add thinly sliced shiitake mushrooms at the end; Fried agedashi tofu, clams, and even chicken are all fair game when making miso soup at home. Anchored in miso, the Japanese paste made from fermented soybeans and grains, the everyday dish is flavorful, fortifying, and easy on the stomach. It’s the perfect soup.
Ando, now 66, has lived in the United States since 1979 and runs his own restaurant, Benkay, in Portland, Maine. I had the best miso soup of my life there. Last December, when his wife Hyon, who worked as a waitress, asked why I was eating alone, I said I was visiting from New York – and that I loved the soup. “This guy from New York likes the soup!” she called into the kitchen, then turned to me and told me she had a daughter my age.
She sneaked me a second bowl. It tasted even better than the first. What she didn’t know was that I hadn’t eaten in almost 24 hours, following a grueling airport drama that I won’t get into here. I almost floated away until that miso soup pulled me back into my seat. Hot sake washed my day away (or was it her kindness?) and I could lean into my evening.
The increased smokiness in the base is a major draw for this single malt Scotch lover.
The point of miso soup for me used to be eating tofu, seaweed, and scallions, but Ando’s version taught me just how much work a superior dashi can do. In Japanese cooking, dashi is the broth that starts it all, and Ando’s trick is to use more katsuobushi, those flavorful bonito flakes, than you think. The increased smokiness in the broth is a big draw for this single-malt Scotch lover, although nothing beats a carafe of hot sake with a bowl of miso soup to complete the liquid appetizer course before sushi.
In fact, as Ando recommended, a drizzle of sake and mirin to the soup itself can add just the right amount of sweetness to round out all of the dashi’s salty, smoky umami flavors. If you only let the kombu steep and fish it out before it turns bitter, you may not need the extra sweetness. Again, there are no rules at home. Many Japanese home cooks use an instant dashi powder like hondashi, or you can replace the katsuobushi entirely with dried shiitake or just kombu for a vegan version. It is important not to overcook the dashi ingredients. It is a gentle extraction, the milk tooth of the stocks.
I asked Ando what he does with the spent kombu, a question I often get in my own recipes. “Just throw it away,” he said. It could be re-simmered with sake and soy sauce to make kombu tsukudani, a wonderful Japanese side dish, but there’s no demand for it at his Benkay restaurant. Most of his customers are American, he said. There aren’t many Japanese people in town, but what he gets are visitors from Japan. They always stop by his restaurant, where a huge vat of fragrant dashi awaits. If you’re worried about sourcing good miso, then don’t. “We don’t have a lot of choices in this area,” Ando told me, so he had to adjust his recipe to enrich what he could find.
In the end, as with any comfort food, the choice is yours: white or shiro miso is made with a higher percentage of rice, which imparts a milder, sweeter flavor, while red, or aka miso, is made with more soybeans. resulting in a stronger, umami-rich flavor and darker color. You can’t beat a decent bowl of soup with an excellent, complex-flavored miso, but that’s where the added bonito flakes, sake, and mirin come in to complement any miso you can find. Immigrant cooks cook to adapt to their surroundings. Ando’s miso soup demonstrates this agility.
While I doubt sipping on a plastic bottle of to-go miso soup will ever lose its charm, there’s something magical about making it yourself at home. And if you’re like me and have eaten miso soup in Japanese-American restaurants your whole life, then learning the ingredients of the dish will open a window into your past — lots of windows, actually. When I first made dashi with bonito flakes, their grilled smokiness almost screamed at me, “That’s why miso soup tastes this way!” I love ingredients that create such portals of understanding (dried oregano, for example, always reminds me of pizza, while almond extract is reminiscent of cherries). This dashi was a flashback moment to all the miso soups I’ve had before, but this one was perfect because it was mine.
Recipe: Miso soup