Miso Soup is a wonderful, healthy accompaniment to a Japanese meal but make it a meal in itself and fill it with mushrooms, greens, tofu and noodles. This wonderful, warming soup is perfect for warming you up during winter and can be made vegetarian and vegan too and is ready and on the table within 10 minutes!
Miso is so good for you as it is a fermented paste and eating fermented foods is very good for your gut health to maintain a healthy gut microbiome through the probiotics and to lower LDL cholesterol, blood pressure and total cholesterol. But it also tastes delicious too! Mr NQN absolutely loves this soup on a really cold day. The first time he had it he gulped down two big bowls of it! If you love clean tasting but flavoursome soups that are more clear broths than creamy, thick soups, then you will love this miso soup.
Tips For Making Miso Soup
1 - A basic miso soup is very easy to make especially if you use dashi powder sachets to make the basic stock. All you need is: dashi (or your favourite type of stock), miso paste, tofu and green onions.
2 - You can use different types of miso for miso soup. I always have white miso paste in the fridge but you can also use red miso paste.
3 - It's important to whisk the miso paste with some of the stock from the pot in a separate bowl as it can clump up if you add it to the main pot of stock. Once the stock and vegetables are cooked then take the pan off the heat and add in the tofu and miso paste slurry. And that's it!
4 - To make this more of a meal, I added some quartered turnips, some Tuscan kale as well as a medley of exotic mushrooms (shiitake, enoki and king brown). Use any sort of greens that you like be it chard, spinach or silverbeet. Noodles also make this more of a meal.
5 - I sometimes make miso soup using chicken stock and it's really tasty. TBH once you add the miso paste you don't really taste the stock to any discernible degree. You can also buy vegetarian dashi stock sachets at Asian grocery stores that are pretty good.
6 - The tofu that I use is regular tofu. You can also use firm or silken tofu, it just depends on the texture that you like. I love silken tofu but it breaks up easily in soup but regular is a nice in between texture that doesn't break up too easily.
My conversations with friends always seem to revolve around memes and food. I was talking to my friend about a pastry shop and she said that she’d been there but she didn’t rate it as highly as another one in an adjoining suburb. I had been to the other one and I didn’t like that one so I quizzed her further.
She explained that she found the pastries "small and expensive". I am a quality over quantity person while I know other people are definitely more quantity over quality and that's just a personal choice (and nobody really wants expensive). But then came the final criticism that the pastries were very buttery. "Yum!" I said before realising that she didn’t see it as a compliment. Which of course made me want to try the bakery even more!
So tell me Dear Reader, do you prefer buttery foods or clean tasting foods? Do you like miso soup?
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