Sag has been ailing today. Well, he's fine, but his gut, which has been sensitive for weeks, revolted today. His number one comfort food is miso soup with rice. Well, I think of it as his comfort food. He'd eat it happily whenever.Miso soup is one of those foods I grew up watching my mother make...I learned how to make it without ever realizing it.
So I don't have a recipe. And, well, if you make soup, you know that precision is not key when making one. Soup is very forgiving in the making. A good base has a positive ripple effect into what comes after.
For miso soup, a good base starts with dashi. I have memories of watching my mother and my grandmother make dashi. The block of dried katsuo, from which katsuokezuri was shaved off in curls, looked very much like a piece of petrified chocolate wood. But, times have changed and I buy my dashi. I have used granules that come in serving size sealed tubes of paper, as well as, powder in bags like teabags, but a bit larger.
There's a sizable "natural" and organic movement in Japan and it is possible, thankfully, to find these dashi products without artificial or unnecessary additives. At stores like Mitsuwa, a lot of the packaging is labeled in English making it much easier to ascertain what all the ingredients in these products are, as well.
Okay. So you start by bringing clean, filtered water to a boil and simmering your dashi. While the dashi is heating through, you can reconstitute your wakame. Fueru wakame only takes five minutes to reconstitute in a bowl of water. Once it is reconstituted I chop the wakame into smaller bits.
Then cut your tofu. You're not going to need a whole block of tofu...unless you're making a huge pot of soup. The possibilities open up nicely here. Silken tofu is the nicest tofu, in my opinion. The texture is like custard. But, I will use whatever tofu I have and firm tofu works just fine. And the size and shape of the tofu that goes into your soup is completely up to you. Bite-size, teeny tiny, cubes, rectangles...
The tofu will inevitably bring the temperature of the water down so I add the wakame and tofu once the dashi is happy and hot. The reason for this is that miso doesn't like to be boiled. After the dashi, wakame and tofu have mingled and the soup is hot again, I add my miso. I prefer white, but plenty of folks prefer red/dark.
I love miso paste. It's good stuff. I use a brand that is all natural, uses organic soy and a rice koji (the barley koji would render it not gluten-free in this household though I do believe the barley koji would affect only those extremely sensitive to gluten...anyone with celiac I would recommend do their own research and make their own decision regarding barley vs. rice koji).
I eyeball the miso and add it into the soup with a fork. Start out small and keep adding. Miso is salty and should be treated accordingly. You can always add more, but once a dish is too salty it can be tricky to recalibrate and bring it back to balance. I use a fork (or cooking chopsticks) to break up the miso while it begins to dissolve in the hot soup. Wooden chopsticks do tend to be kinder to the tofu that insists on bobbing around while you're mushing the miso.
That's it. Basic miso soup. And by basic, I mean that you can add whatever you want to this soup. I like adding daikon, I love when my mom adds onion or scallion to hers.
Miso soup, like other traditional broths and soups, has potent healing qualities. The innumerable stories which accompany and echo off the memories that connect us through soup, the aroma of soup...I believe has the power to alter us chemically even before we taste the first spoonful, and the alchemy of the ingredients and emotional energy that go into the creation of soup...it will make it all better, certainly for the time that it takes to finish your bowl (but usually for longer).
Have yourself a bowl of homemade soup soon.
