Miso Soup | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji uh i'm at home and i'm about to make some miso soup so the keto miso soup keto good miso soup is good dashi which is the sort of basic japanese stock um two basic ingredients for dashi although you know there's many different types of dashi but the two the most basic one is made from two ingredients um kombu which is this dried sea kelp so i'm going to take a little bit of that say a chunk i'm gonna make a pretty large portion of dashi it's about this much these two squares i'm gonna put them in a pot cover them with cold water and now when you're making dashi you can um if you want to get more flavor out of it you can take that kelp and let it kind of steep in cold brew kind of overnight you let it sit uh in the cold water overnight or even you know even for 10-15 minutes but if you're in a hurry it doesn't really matter um you know it won't make quite as much flavor if you just bring it straight up to a simmer but that's what i'm going to do here because uh well lunch is going to be in about 10 minutes all right so i'm going to let the sea kelp come up to a bare simmer and meanwhile i'm going to get my other ingredient which is this katsuobushi so katsuobushi is shaved dried bonito so it's bonito tuna that's cured fermented smoked dried and shaved so traditionally you would have a box that has a blade on it um sort of similar to like um you know like a um a wood plane um and then you take the hard block of katsuobushi and you'd shave it fresh um these days you just buy it um pre-shaved it'll come in a few different grades so this stuff is made for stock so it has these kind of larger flakes you'll also find really sort of fine flakes that are used as a as a garnish you could sort of sprinkle it on your tofu or sprinkle it on your okonomiyaki or whatever oh so if you notice this so this sea kelp um this dry sort of powdery stuff um those are crystals of salts various types of sea salts um so including you know including including sodium chloride um but also um things like msg so msg is actually derived from sea kelp initially these days it's synthetically made but initially it was derived from sea kelp um so miso soup very simple all you do is make dashi and then add some miso paste and that's it so when you're making dashi there's a lot of schools of thought on this but there's two sort of basic basic rules well actually really only one basic rule which is that you don't want to simmer the katsuobushi um the kombu you know a lot of people say that um if you simmer the kombu for too long it'll become bitter or impart some bitter flavors to the dashi um i've never really found that to be the case um so typically when i make dashi i'll either let it steep cold for about half an hour bring it up to a simmer and then shut it off or i'll just do what i'm going to do now which is let it come to a simmer and just simmer for like a minute or so um i never find that you get any bitter flavor but if you do then don't simmer if you don't want to um the the one place where you really don't want to simmer is the katsuobushi so if you pour the katsuobashi into hot broth it will have a very sort of nice clean not too fishy but very savory slightly smoky aroma if you let it simmer for too long it'll start to get a little bit fishy and if you've simmered for like you know long any longer than like a few minutes it's going to get a really sort of sour off flavor to it so you don't want to do that so i'm just going to let this come to simmer meanwhile i'm going to get my other ingredients ready miso paste you can use any type of miso paste you want um i'm using this yellow miso i find the easiest way to incorporate miso is to just get a whisk like this and dig it straight into the miso like that and that's ready to go into the soup i'll set that aside i'm going to cut some tofu this is a silken tofu you don't have to use silken tofu you can also use sort of fried tofu is very common in miso soup any kind of tofu you'd like and of course you don't have to use tofu at all if you don't want to um i like tofu though so i'm gonna i'm gonna use it i'm gonna cut into pretty fine cubes it's okay if it falls apart a little bit normally i would use a firm silken sofa tofu this is a soft silken tofu so it's a little bit sort of milder more more prone to breaking than something i would use but it's all i had so i'm using it and then the other ingredients i'm going to use are seaweed so i have two types of seaweed here one of them is guacame and this is sort of the classic seaweed that you'll find in miso soup it's uh you'll see it you'll see when it um when it rehydrates um and then the other one is this one called hijiki which is um so my mom thinks it's funny that i put this in miso soup because hijiki is sort of used as a um well it's used for like a food of convalescence you know it's like for you give it to sick people or old people um says my mom but i really like the way it tastes um so i'm gonna add both of these to my miso soup all right now this is almost at a simmer so you know what i'm gonna do i'm just going to actually basically add a simmer uh what i'll do is i'll just snap my fingers and it'll be ready to go okay and we're at a simmer so um oh the ratio of this i'm using about two quarts of water to about one ounce of kombu and about one ounce of katsuobashi um you don't need to use that exact ratio you can go a little higher if you like it more concentrated or less if you like it less but that's about the ratio i use i just kind of eyeball it so now that it's come to a simmer i'm going to shut it off i'm going to add my katsuobashi and then i'm just going to let it basically steep like tea for about oh about let's say five minutes so steeped and ready to go now i'm just gonna strain it i'm gonna take a quick picture sorry i'm still taking photos from my book okay so i'm gonna strain this out now you can also for dashi um you can also use things like um dried sardine a little dried fish they're called uh niboshi um you could use mushrooms there's a bunch of different ways to make um dashi but this is just sort of the most basic and the one that i use the most um now what we have here is called ichibandashi which means first dashi you can also now take these spent katsuobushi and sea kelp bits and make what's called nibandashi which is where you take this add fresh water and simmer it again um and niban dashi is great for um say dishes where you're gonna simmer so dishes like simmered pumpkin um in dashi is great simmered chicken breast and niban dash is great um for [Music] for a clear soup like this um i'm gonna use the ichiban dashi because it has sort of the cleanest best flavor um you can also by the way um take all this leftover katsuboshi and sea kelp and cook it into something called furikake which is like a a seasoning mix that's sort of a sweet and savory seasoning mix that you put on your rice um i don't have a printed recipe for i'm gonna have a recipe in my new book coming out um next year but um uh go to justonecookbook.com i'll link it in the um i'll link it in the comments below but there's a great site just one cookbook um nami um she has a recipe for furikake made out of spent katsuobushi and kombu from your dashi that's excellent all right so now we got this we put the strainer right back in we take our whisk filled with um miso paste which i'm gonna take a quick picture of because as i said i'm still taking pictures from my book not quite right hold on a second let me all right [Applause] all right and now miso can sometimes be a little bit grainy so if you want your miso soup nice and smooth you take a fine mesh strainer like this take your whisk full of miso and just whisk it just like that well and i'm also gonna take a picture of this one action shot all right you just whisk it in like this with the strainer set in the soup almost there all right and that is our miso soup so to this i'm going to just add a little bit of that hijiki a little bit of that wakame and you really only need a little bit need a little bit of it because it's going to obviously expand this is dried seaweeds you can get these ones at any japanese market or online okay taste that soup and you'll see the soup the hijiki and the um wakame they'll basically reconstitute in the water basically in the time that it takes you to serve this um that's how long it's going to take the seaweed to come back to life just a couple minutes yum um miso soup is excellent when you're feeling nauseous or sick or hungover very easy to drink got a lot of salt and good stuff in it there we have it very simple miso soup with tofu and seaweed okay let me get a bowl of this because i want to take a picture over in the other room some more floaties in there all right i'm gonna grab my hundred millimeter lens here you're gonna notice in quite a few of my videos coming up i'm gonna be taking pictures of stuff just because that's the stage i'm at in my book all the recipes are tested but the photos aren't all taken i got my nice little fake backdrop here nice indirect sunlight by the window which is exactly what you want for good food photos let's try not to spill everything okay so we're going to go with plenty of negative space get our focus set i always like to take a few photos um using different um apertures on my camera so the aperture in your camera by the way um here's another quick tip for you when you're taking photos the aperture in your camera is the um the size of the um that the iris opens to um so it's measured in what's called an f-stop number um so a f-stop the lower the number the wider the um aperture is open because it's a it's an inverse so an f of 2.8 means that it's um 1 over 2.8 is the ratio of the full size of the lens to how much is open um and most line most lenses will max out at a certain amount there's very few one-to-one lenses this one maxes out at 2.8 um the rule of thumb is that the wider the lens is open the shallower the depth of field um so if i set this up to like 1 over say 114 that's 1 14th of the lens is open you get a very deep depth of field which means that a lot of the picture is in focus whereas at a very low depth of field i'm sorry at a very low f-stop number that means much the lens is much more wide open you get a shallower depth of field so that's how you get that sort of blurred background effect on some food photos anyhow that's it miso soup super super simple um extremely delicious and um yeah guys gals non-binary non-binary pals i will see you next time bye-bye hey everyone it's kenji there are 22 million kids in this country that rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever organizations like no kid hungry can use their support so i'm asking you to join me click the link in the description below to donate some money no amount is too small or too big thank you very much and stay safe bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 513,075

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Id: U_Y9BUP3VVI

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021