Quality Miso Soup is Strained

Ate some questionable takeout manicotti for lunch, and all day I've sensed that my system is on the verge of retaliation. I'm 99% sure that any problem is entirely a manifestation of my neuroses, but I've stuck to a regimen of water and thick, vitally probiotic Greek yogurt, just to be on the safe side. If malicious entities have indeed encamped, and they're fixing for a fight, they've got it.

Peckish but still wary when dinner time rolled 'round, I opted for a preemptive strike with miso soup. Cultural conditioning dictates that chicken soup should be the most dogeared recipe in my food pharmacopoeia. But it is miso soup by which I swear. And yet, until this evening, I have never made proper miso soup, only a vegan-friendly facsimile thereof. White miso paste added to boiling water has met my simple needs for a savory broth in which to parboil delicate somen noodles. Spiked with mirin, a little sriracha, perhaps a sprinkling of scallion whites and some reconstituted wakame, it has bolstered me on many a cold or fever-wracked night.

But good miso soup is so much more, and even the sorriest sampling to be found in restaurants has greater complexity than my quick-fix approximation. The soup that arrives tableside is clouded and heady, evocative of both earth and ocean. To ignore the fish component of miso soup is to deny its soul. Fortunately, I now have a bag of katsuo-bushi, shaved "bonito," and I need no longer settle for soulless soup.

A skipjack tuna out of seawater is an unhappy fish, and so water is not fit for swimming until it has soaked up the marine character of dried konbu. In four cups of water, the umami liquor leached from the seaweed was almost imperceptibly faint. Yet I suspect that dashi prepared with salted water would be lifeless if not unpalatable. Arrested just on the verge of boiling, the spent seaweed is fished out, and a cup and an additional heaping handful of the gauzy gray and pink fish flakes are allowed to simmer, off the heat, until they surrender to the familiar oceanic echoes of the broth and sink to the bottom of the pan. Strained and still steaming, the dashi was ready to receive the miso paste, which dissipated rather than dissolved as it was stirred in with a wooden chopstick. The residual heat was enough to bend the fragile somen, and they collapsed into the broth, softening almost instantly.

After a few bowls of this elixir, I was feeling hale enough to wrestle a tuna, let alone stave off a piddling ptomaine offensive. Eastern medicine triumphs yet again.