The Tastiest Miso Soup
This is one of the continuing articles to explain how to make miso soup in 3 ways. The 3 ways include the quickest miso soup, the everyday miso soup, and the tastiest miso soup.
I've prepared a video to share the recipes so please have a look; https://youtu.be/v_gRMRqX2C8.
In the first article, I shared a recipe for the quickest miso soup where you use dashi powder to make the instant soup base.
In the second article, I shared a recipe for the everyday miso soup where you use dashi packets to make the dashi soup base.
In this article, I’ll be teaching you how to make the tastiest miso soup. You’ll make dashi from scratch by extracting umami from bonito and kelp.
It’s simple work yet a little time consuming. Having said that, the golden coloured rich soup base is so flavourful and it’s worth trying! It’s so good that I can just drink it as it is sometimes.
In the next 2 separate articles that I’m planning to upload, I’m going to show you how not to waste bonito and kelp that you’ve extracted dashi out of.
The used bonito will turn into bonito furikake and the used kelp will turn into konbu no tsukudani. They will make great accompaniments for rice, so please look forward to it:)
The Tastiest Miso Soup
Ingredients
1200ml Homemade dashi (recipe is down below)
A half of deep fried tofu skin (Aburaage)
A half leeks
Miso to taste (about 2~3 tablespoons)
Homemade dashi:
1200ml water
20g dried kelp for dashi making (I personally like Ma konbu best, but I used Hidaka konbu this time.)
20g Hana Katsuo (Dried bonito flakes for dashi making)
Procedure
-Make homemade dashi-
Put kelp and water into a pot. Make sure that you don’t wipe off the surface of kelp although some recipes say to do it, I don’t like doing that.
Turn the heat to the lowest. Heat it until tiny bubbles appear from the edges of the kelp. It should be so tiny that you need to have a close look.
When you see the tiny bubbles, close the lid and keep heating up for a minute. Turn off the heat, and leave it for one hour.
(*What you are trying to do here is to turn the water temperature up to 65℃(149 °F) and to keep it for one hour to bring out the best of kelp’s potential without being too precise and feeling drained. )
After an hour, take out the kelp. Use this kelp to make konbu no tsukudani (Sweet cooked kelp to eat with rice. You often find it inside of konbu rice balls.) I’ll write another article on how to make it!
Turn the heat back up to high. Once the water is vigorously boiled, turn the heat off, and add hana katsuo (dried bonito flakes for dashi making), put a lid on, and leave it for 3 minutes. Take out bonito. (You may want to use a strainer.)
-Make miso soup-
Slice leeks and deep fried tofu skin (aburaage).
Bring the dashi stock to a boil, and add leeks and deep fried tofu skin. Simmer it for a few minutes.
Turn off the heat, dissolve miso into the soup. You can do this by multiple methods. I have a special strainer to make miso soup, but if you don’t have it, get a ladle and place miso on it. Soak the ladle into the pot, and add dashi broth into the ladle to dissolve miso little by little to avoid creating lumps, and dissolve it completely.
