Miso soup

Dashi is the stock used for miso soup. You need just two ingredients: kombu (dried sea kelp) and katsuobushi (dried, fermented, and smoked skipjack tuna ).



Soak the kombu for a couple of hours, make some incisions to release the flavor. Add kombu to one liter of water in a pot. Bring to a boil and take out the kombu just before the water starts to boil (don't boil the kombu!). Add 10 gram katsuobushi (also called bonito flakes) to the stock, bring to a boil and simmer for 3 minutes. Drain stock through a cheesecloth. It takes about 15 minutes to make dashi.



Ingredients miso soup:

1 full tablespoon miso paste (you can use shiro-miso or aka-miso)
Silken tofu, in small cubes
Spring onion
Dried wakame
Optional: 1 tablespoon shin mirin (Japanese cooking wine, use the type with less than 1% alcohol)



Miso paste should never be boiled. Put a tablespoon of miso paste in a bowl. In the meantime bring the dashi stock to a boil.



Add a little hot dashi and mix.



Add more dashi, silken tofu, spring onion, wakame and mirin. Wait 5 minutes until the wakame is fully reconstituted. You can soak the wakame beforehand if you wish. That way you'll wash away any 'dust' from the wakame.



This is a basic miso-shiru (literally: miso broth). Many variations are possible.

Stewed hijiki seaweed with carrots and soy beans

Preparation:
1) Soak 200 gram of soy beans overnight. Cook the soy beans until soft and rub the skins off, this can be pretty time consuming. Instead of soy beans you can also use fried tofu.

2) Reconstitute some dried hijiki sea weed

3) Cut 2 large carrots in thin strips.

Cooking:
Fry and simmer the soy beans, hijiki and carrots in sesame oil for 5 to 10 minutes.

Add: 250 ml dashi stock, 3 tbsp dark soy sauce and 3 tbsp of mirin. If you have, add 3 tbsp of sake as well. Many recipes call for sugar, I omitted the sugar (and sake).

Simmer until the liquid has reduced.

This dish is nice with Japanese rice and miso soup. The taste was a little bland, use more soy sauce for a saltier taste.