Miso Soup from Scratch (kind of)

This isn’t a recipe; it’s the story of a minor obsession—and a pretty typical one as far as my cooking obsessions go. I start with something that fascinates me and then go down a rabbit hole with it until I realize it’s dark and cold, and then I backtrack a bit and settle in somewhere comfy. Except this time around, I’m all the way down the hole and blinking ahead into the darkness wondering…could I fit my head through there?

It started with restaurant miso soup. Honestly I couldn’t tell you the first time I had it, nor did I have some kind of epiphany where I ate it at a ryokan in Japan and the heavens opened… (though I’m pretty sure I had it for breakfast almost every day in Japan). But at some point I started buying the instant packages with the little freeze-dried cubes of tofu and green onion circles. They’re fine! Just like instant ramen, they do their thing, and it’s a good thing. Tastes pretty much exactly like restaurant miso soup.

Then, I graduated to concocting my own miso soup out of miso, tofu, wakame (dried thin-ish sturdy kelp used for soups and stews) and hondashi (dehydrated dashi broth powder you just add boiling water to). I credit Mari Uyehara’s great article on Serious Eats for this step down the rabbit hole. And honestly, this is where the whole boondoggle should have stopped because it’s probably where you get the highest ROI. After all, the whole point of miso soup is something comforting and nutritious you can throw together in minutes using processed and preserved ingredients. Naturally, I kept going….

Why? Who can say? My cooking obsessions rarely have a logic to them. Sometimes I just want to see if I can do something. Sometimes, I have an early failure and then stubbornly forge ahead to victory regardless of the time spent or the payoff (see: a couple months from now when I report back on my Japanese soufflé pancake obsession). All I know with the miso soup is that I looked at a bowl of it one day and asked myself: Huh, could I make all the parts of this from scratch?

Where did this question come from? Well, it could be Hank Shaw’s fault: I get his newsletter, in which he’s constantly making sausage from wild feral pig he shot himself, or elderberry liqueur from elderberries…you get the idea. But it’s not like he ever ran an article on miso soup.

I think it more likely spiraled out of another pointless obsession of mine: homemade tofu. This one is truly stupid because I can tell you with authority that if you were to put my homemade tofu up against any good organic tofu from the store, you couldn’t tell the difference (and you could buy several blocks with the money (time) you saved not making it). But I stuck with the homemade tofu thing for an embarrassingly circular reason: I kept failing. I had to try 4 times before I got an actual block of tofu. And then my dog ate it. Off the counter. She’s a lot taller when she stands on her hind legs than you would think, and she will eat absolutely anything that has calories. She was 15 pounds overweight when I got her, and she has never stopped resenting me for putting her on a diet.

Anyhoo, another possible scapegoat for my miso soup obsession is Nancy Singleton Hachisu’s Japanese Farmhouse Food, which is gorgeous and plump and ultimately unusable because every recipe starts like, “Procure 1/2 pound of the freshest mustard flowers you can from your local organic mustard farmer….” I’m kidding (sort of): her simple recipes are straightforward and delicious, but I find anything more complex leans a bit too heavily, for your average home cook at least, on her expertise as the wife of a Japanese organic farmer. Hers is the tofu recipe I tried first, and while I don’t totally blame her for the 3 failed attempts, things immediately started looking up when I switched to Andrea Nguyen’s Killer Tofu recipe.

Nevertheless, Nancy might have still been the one to inspire me to try to take miso soup as far back toward its roots as I could. Because after I made the tofu, I started making my own dashi from konbu seaweed and katsuobushi (dried smoked bonito) flakes. That in itself was not the culprit: making dashi this way takes literally as long as boiling water, and it’s good in all kinds of stuff—highly recommended. But I think I was sitting there with my bowl of miso soup with the homemade tofu and the homemade dashi and feeling self-satisfied when a little voice in my head whispered, “What about the rest? You didn’t make that.”

Okay, inner René Redzepi, let’s go: what about the rest? It’s seaweed and miso. Seaweed could be foraged, I knew that from reading Hank’s blog. Miso…seemed complicated, but I’ve kept a sourdough starter alive for years and have successfully made cider and kimchi, and Rene put a recipe for miso in the Noma fermentation cookbook my friend Vicky gave me, so…maybe? What about the katsuobushi? Hank fished for bonito. Maybe I could forage the seaweed, make the miso, catch the bonito….

This is the point at the rabbit hole where I came to a skidding halt. Because I looked up the process by which katsuobushi is made, and (a) it takes 6 months and (b) you can poison yourself in the process with toxic bacteria if you’re not careful. Nope. Possible death is generally the stop at which I get off the “from scratch” bus.

But…I did forage seaweed at the coast when I was there a couple of weekends ago and dried it up. And I made a fresh batch of dashi and a fresh brick of tofu, and today I had the best miso soup of my life. Honestly. The seaweed is what did it: I simmered it with the tofu and dashi a little longer than usual, and it tenderized to the consistency of an al dente lasagne noodle and made the broth unctuous. Oishii. Nancy and Hank would be proud of me. And as I slurped it down, I wondered…. How hard is it really to make miso? And do people really kill themselves trying to make katsuobushi? I found myself twisting my head this way and that to try to get a look further down the rabbit hole. Maybe the end’s just around the corner. Maybe it’s not that hard to grow your own soybeans….