Shishito peppers and miso soup

A soup for every mood

It’s bizarre to me that barely a month ago I was subsisting on piles of ice in Nara. New York is firmly in soup weather season. After months of ice cream cone dinners, this seems like a good time to really put that CSA to use and start cooking.

This cooking is happening in two minimally stocked New York kitchens which means I forget which fridge has what. Miso soup is the easiest thing to make under these circumstances as I’ve ensured that both kitchens are stocked with a tub of miso (I use this Yamajirushi brand). As long as you have miso, you don’t really need much else for soup. A bowl of something warm as well as something green can really anchor any collection of foods into something resembling a meal.

Miso soup in a mug with a spoon on a rainy day

Miso soup

While miso soup is much improved with homemade dashi (via kombu, bonito, or a combination), it is delicious with one of these cheats and even (if you run out) with just vegetables and miso.

1. Instant dashi - at this point, this is hardly a cheat. I try to seek out one with the simplest of ingredient lists, but Ajinomoto dashi granules are extremely popular in Japan. An entire country cannot be wrong.

2. Add a snip of kombu (or my preference: a pinch of ready-shredded kombu) to your water as you add the rest of your ingredients.

3. For a more smoky soup, finish with a handful of bonito flakes. Do not do this if you do not want to consume the shreds of bonito flakes. I do not mind them.

Below are some vegetable combinations to fit your mood and to demonstrate that any vegetable can go into a miso soup. Off the top of my head, the only vegetable that I would never add to a miso soup is peppers.

Sweet root vegetable soup

The first weekend in October was marked by incessant rain and the kind of wind that renders umbrellas useless. After wrestling myself to the gym, I trudged down Ashland Place to Whole Foods for a Japanese sweet potato, an onion, and some carrots. This is a golden combination a soup to round out the edges of a rainy day. I roughly sliced the onion, chunked the sweet potato, and sliced the carrots into a saucepan and barely covered with water. Having simmered the lot with a small pinch of kombu until everything was soft (15 minutes?), I dissolved roughly two tablespoons of awase miso (a mix of red and white miso - but any kind will do).

Savory scallion soup

On a weeknight later that week, I rushed to produce something edible to placate my blood sugar before an evening of climbing. I dropped by Tenichi Mart on the way back from the office to pick up some scallions. I roughly chopped these scallions into a pot of water that I seasoned with a packet of instant bonito dashi. I would have added wakame for its slippery texture and its saline hit, but the cupboards were lacking. The scallions soften in the time that it takes for the water to hit a simmer and all that is left to do is to dissolve the miso of your choice. After several hours of failing spectacularly at a bouldering problem that killed my fingers, I added silken tofu and an egg to the leftovers for second dinner.

The CSA box soup

Having somehow spent $60 on chocolate bars at the Meadow¹, I decided that perhaps a more frugal dinner is in order. I relied again on instant bonito dashi to which I added a chopped blue potato and the smallest (5-inch?) daikon from my CSA. As ever, season with miso to taste.

Shishito peppers

Shishito peppers have been ever present in my CSA box, but even more present on every single restaurant menu in New York (not at all an exaggeration). It seems that everyone loves shishito peppers because an order of them always ends up on my table. Shishito peppers are oil slicked and often topped with something, like hard cheese crumbles.

As an accompaniment to fried chicken at Karazishi Botan

Shishito peppers are delicious as tempura, but I don’t have many opportunities to order tempura and would never deep fry at home. As such, I usually toast my shishito peppers in my Balmuda oven toaster or saute them with salt until blistered. If you have grown a little tired of the standard shishito preparation, know that you can pour a 1:1 sauce of soy sauce and mirin on the cooked shishito peppers and shower with bonito flakes.

1. My favorite was the SOMA Old School bar, crunchy with cocoa nibs and cane sugar.