Soup · Japan
Miso soup
Miso stirred into hot broth with soft tofu and scallions.
About the dish
Miso soup is eaten across Japan at breakfast and alongside rice at most meals. It starts with dashi, a quick stock made by steeping kombu, a dried kelp, and then katsuobushi, flakes of dried, smoked skipjack tuna. Kombu is rich in glutamate and the flakes in inosinate, and the two together taste far more savory than either alone, which is why such a light broth tastes so deep.
Miso is a paste of soybeans fermented with salt and koji, often with rice or barley. It is whisked into the hot dashi at the end, usually through a small strainer, and the soup is kept just below a boil from then on, because boiling dulls the miso’s aroma. White miso is milder and sweeter; red miso is saltier and deeper, and many households blend the two.
Common additions are small cubes of soft or silken tofu, wakame seaweed and sliced scallions, and some versions add clams or mushrooms. The result is mostly salt and savory, with very little fat, which makes it a gentle start to a meal.
Written from general cooking knowledge, as background on a dish from the game’s recipe book. It is not a tested recipe.
The flavors it leans on
Miso soup in Night Kitchen
In the game, Miso soup is a soup in the recipe book. A plate is named Miso soup when it holds these cards and is cooked with exactly this technique, with at most one extra ingredient.
Ingredients
- Miso
- Tofu
- Scallions
Technique
- Simmer
How those cards taste
Cooked from just these cards for an average ticket, before tonight’s mood and quirks, it would please Gus (3 stars), Odile (2 stars) and Mr. Vane (2 stars) most.
“There is a soup with miso and soft tofu that the night porter brings in a jar. I would trade my shoes for it.”
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