Make really good Miso Soup from scratch

Recently I visited a friend who learned to cook in Japan. He’s an excellent cook, and we would always cook dinner together whenever I visited. One night we made miso soup, and as we were making it, I wrote down the recipe. It turned out to be the best miso soup I’d ever had, so I’ll share the recipe with you.

As for where to get the ingredients, you’ll have to find a store catering to asian foods. The smaller and lesser known the better.

Ingredients (When in doubt, buy the more expensive):

Water
Konbu dashi
Katsuo bushi
Stitake mushrooms
Green onions
Carrots
Tofu
Miso

It’s good to use an aluminum pot, so you can gauge the color of the miso soup as you put in the miso.

Put in a couple of strips of konbu dashi into water. You want the water to be warm-hot, but do not let it boil. If you do it will smell of seaweed, and this is undesirable.

While letting the konbu dashi sit in water, cut an amount of tofu into squares as desired. Skin and cut carrots at an angle, slice some shitake mushrooms, and cut several green onions into pieces.

After this is done, take the konbu dashi from the water and bring to a boil. Once the broth has reached a boil, take off heat and add a handful of katsuo bushi. Allow the broth to sit without heat until all of the katsuo has fallen to the bottom of the pot. Once this has happened, strain out katsuo.

Bring water to a boil and add the hard vegetables, and allow them to cook until soft. In this case, these are the carrots and mushrooms. Once finished, add any soft vegetables and allow to cook. Lastly, add the tofu. The tofu always is added last.

Take the broth/vegetables off the heat and stir in the miso paste. The way this is done is by taking a wire mesh cup held by a long handle (imagine a ladle, but made of wire mesh instead) and putting an amount of miso into the mesh cup. Submerge bottom of wire mesh cup and use chopsticks to stir miso against the wire mesh. Add miso until the entire broth is a golden brown color.

Throw out the dregs left in the wire mesh cup. You must wait until the last minute before serving to add the miso. Add the green onions to the broth and serve.