By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST
I have another dad joke for you, one that hits home for me in many ways. First, it appeals to the young me who loved singing songs in Sunday school at church. It also speaks to my Japanese roots and obvious affection for food.
Why did Jesus go to the Japanese restaurant? Because he loves miso.
For those who are not familiar, the Christian hymn “Jesus Loves Me” begins, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
I think what I most love about the joke, though, is that it is about miso—a Japanese soup that probably runs through my veins.
My Grandma Keiko made miso soup for breakfast almost every day. Miso is generally a breakfast food in Japan. Here, we usually have it in sushi restaurants for lunch or dinner. I could eat it for all meals, and when I’m sick, I often do. It is packed with nutrients and antioxidants.
The soup is made with a stock known as a dashi and miso, fermented soybean paste. Dashi creates a base savory umami flavor, and is usually made with kelp, dried fish or mushrooms, or some combination of the three. The flavor has obvious variation through both the dashi and choice of miso paste. The miso most of us know from Japanese restaurants is usually made with a white, or shiro, miso. The paste is also salty and savory, but follows that with a mild sweetness. The darker the miso, the saltier and earthier it is.
I would love to be able to experiment with the flavors, to work my way through the yellow, red and dark miso variations. The necessary plethora of Japanese ingredients is simply not available locally. And when I travel, I tend to go for quantity, stocking up on larger tubs of a basic shiro miso paste. Each one is two pounds of miso from the brand Yamajirushi.
Miso is a staple in my house. It is what I make when there is “nothing to eat” in the fridge—meaning everything feels like too much effort to prepare. Everything goes in one pot and “everything” is really minimal things.
Lately, I’ve been making a dashi with water and bonito flakes, which are thin slices of skipjack tuna that is dried, fermented and smoked. I let that heat a bit then add miso paste. Start with about a tablespoon of paste for each cup and a half of water if you don’t know how strong your paste is. You can always add more. Like grandma, I eyeball it. You can always add more water too. And that’s it. That is your basic miso.
You could top it with green onions and enjoy it at its purest, but why stop there? I always add chunks of tofu for the protein. If you do, make sure to give the tofu little time to simmer in the soup and really take on the flavor. I also enjoy wakame, a type of dried seaweed that is rehydrated and added. Shiitake mushrooms are always an option. However, my favorite topping—one that is also hard to access here—is something called fu. These are little balls of wheat gluten which absorb moisture and become soft or spongy, depending on the specific type. I haven’t met one I don’t like.
For me, miso soup is comfort and home. It takes me back to mornings in grandma’s kitchen where I learned to make it by watching her every move and peppering her with questions, and to later years when she was too forgetful to be trusted near a stove and I would cook Japanese food for her. I think she loved my cooking as much as I did hers, but she was never one to hold back if the dish wasn’t perfect or true to her fading memories. My miso though, made by taste honed over decades of tasting hers, was always up to spec.
Let’s just say I also love miso.
Rachel Hergett is a foodie and cook from Montana. She is arts editor emeritus at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and has written for publications such as Food Network Magazine and Montana Quarterly. Rachel is also the host of the Magic Monday Show on KGLT-FM and teaches at Montana State University.
