Here’s a tasty dish to help us emerge from winter. This pretty miso soup contains the simplest of ingredients and cooks quickly. Its base is an umami-rich vegetarian dashi broth made from a cold brew of kombu (edible kelp) and dried shiitake mushrooms, in lieu of traditional dried bonito or tuna. You can slice the radish and carrot in disks, but using small cookie/vegetable cutters to punch out floral shapes adds whimsy. Loaded with fortifying nutrients, this soup is surprisingly filling with few calories.
Early Spring Miso Soup
Prep Time
6 hrs 25 min
Total Time
6 hrs 45 min
Cathy Katin-Grazzini, Food Editor at VEGWORLD Magazine, is a plant-based personal chef, nutritional coach, cooking instructor, and owner of Cathy’s Kitchen Prescription LLC. Certified in Plant-Based Nutrition from the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies at Cornell, Cathy is also a graduate of Rouxbe Cooking School’s Professional Plant-Based Program. She has a B.A. from the University of Chicago, attended graduate school at Harvard University and received a M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Cathy lives with her husband Giordano in Ridgefield, Connecticut. When she’s not inventing and fermenting, she loves to run, hike, and adventure travel atop their trusty Ducati. Keep an eye out for Cathy’s upcoming cookbook, Love the Foods that Love You Back, to be published by Rizzoli International Press in April 2022.
Ingredients
- Strip of dried kombu seaweed, approximately 5 by 7 inches
- 10 to 12 small dried shiitake mushrooms, preferably organic
- 14 cups water
- 2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
- 3 carrots, sliced 3⁄₈ inch thick and shaped with a floral cutter
- 4 medium watermelon or purple daikon, or 8 large red radish, sliced 3⁄₈ inch thick and shaped with a floral cutter
- 31⁄₂ ounces (1 package) shimeji mushrooms
- Bunch Asian spinach, washed well, leave stems intact
- Bunch scallions, sliced on the bias
- 6 tablespoons shiro (white)miso paste, or to taste
- 1 pound block silken or soft tofu, sliced into 1⁄₂-inch cubes
GARNISHES
- 1⁄₄ cup sesame seeds, freshly toasted
- Sprinkle of shichimi
Directions
- Place the kombu and dried shiitakes in two separate bowls and add 7 cups of the water to each. Cover with plastic wrap and let steep in the fridge for 6 to 8 hours.
- Discard the kombu and reserve its soaking liquid. Remove the shiitakes, discarding their tough stems, and reserve their soaking liquid. Slice the shitake caps thinly.
- To make the soup, pour the kombu and shiitake broths into a soup pot and bring to a gentle simmer (this is the dashi broth). Stir in the garlic, ginger, and sliced shiitake caps. Cook for 10 minutes.
- Add the radishes, carrots, and fresh mushrooms, grouping each variety in its own section of the pot. Do not stir. Simmer for 5 minutes, and test a carrot slice with a fork or knife to assess its doneness. When it is just tender, turn off the heat. Add the spinach and scallions, cover, and let them steep for 5 minutes.
- Preheat the individual soup bowls with very hot water for 3 minutes. To serve, ladle several cups of broth in each individual bowl, and add miso to taste, stirring it until it dissolves completely. Presentation counts in cooking, and especially in Japanese cuisine. For this soup, we group each vegetable by type in the bowl, arranging the spinach, carrots, radishes, mushrooms, and scallions artfully. Lastly, gently spoon in the tofu cubes which require no cooking and will warm quickly in the hot broth. Garnish with sesame seeds and a sprinkle of shichimi tōgarashi. Serve immediately.
Recipe Note
Early Spring Miso is excerpted from Love the Foods that Love You Back by Cathy Katin-Grazzini, published by Rizzoli International Press, April 2022
Photographs by Giordano Katin-Grazzini
