Miso Soup

Miso Soup  is a traditional Japanese soup consisting of seafood based stock
calleddashi and miso paste. Most Japanese meals are served with a bowl of miso soup and steamed rice. Although there are many different kinds of ingredients that can be added to miso soup, today I will share the most basic miso soup recipe which include just tofu, wakame(seaweed), and green onion.

Author: Namiko Chen

Serves: 3-4

Ingredients

• 3 cups homemade dashi or see how to make quick dashi below (use Kombu Dashi for vegetarian)
• 3 Tbsp. miso (I use awase miso (red+ white miso))
• 6 oz silken tofu or soft tofu
• 2 tsp. dried ready-to-use wakame (seaweed)
• 1 green onion/scallion

For quick dashi (instead of homemade dashi)

• 3 cups water
• 1 dashi packet or 1¼ tsp. dashi powder
  

Instructions

1. In a medium saucepan, add water and dashi packet (some brand of dashi packet may ask you to add the packet after boiling). If you are using dashi powder, bring water to a boil and stir in the dashi powder and it's ready to use.
   
2. Bring it to a boil over medium high heat. After boiling, reduce the heat to medium low and simmer for 5 minutes.
   
3. Discard the packet and dashi is ready to use.
   
4. Put 1 Tbsp. of miso in a ladle (or strainer) and blend it with dashi until it is thoroughly mixed. Continue this process until miso is all used. Usually each cup of dashi, you will need about 1 Tbsp. of miso. If you add tofu in your miso soup, tofu dilutes the soup a little bit so you might want to add ½ Tbsp. more miso.
   
5. Cut tofu into ½" (1 cm) cubes and add to the soup. Stir gently without breaking the tofu.
   
6. Soak dried wakame in water to rehydrate for 10 minutes and drain well.
   
7. Finely slice the green onion and put the wakame and green onion in each bowl.
   
8. Return the miso soup to a slight simmer until heated through and pour into the bowls. Be careful not to boil the miso soup because miso will lose flavor.

Notes

For vegetarian miso soup, use kombu dashi.

If you don't have dashi packet or powder, see how to make homemade dashi stock.

Each brand or kind of miso has different level of saltiness; therefore, add miso 1 Tbsp. at a time and taste the soup before you add more miso.

Use gluten-free miso to make this recipe gluten-free.

http://www.justonecookbook.com/basic-tofu-miso-soup/