Miso shiru: a Japanese staple (みそ汁)

here is no going about it: the base ingredient for this soup, miso paste, looks dodgy. Real dodgy. It is made from fermented beans and ground rice and it only takes a tablespoonful for a bowl of delicately aromatic broth.

A Japanese staple on par with European toasted bread, miso shiru is soup that can be served with any meal.

It is hard to call this cooking but here is the recipe anyway:

1. Put a 5-6 cm piece of kombu into a pot with cold water and put the pot on medium fire.
   
2. When the water is close to boiling take out the kombu. Let the water boil and reduce the heat.
3. You can also skip steps 1 and 2 by simply adding katsuobushi extract to boiling water. Alternatively, use water wherein dried shiitake mushrooms were soaking overnight.
4. Scoop miso paste (about 1 tbsp per cup of water) and mix it with a cup of hot stock. Make sure there are no clumps left.
5. Pour the mix back into the pot. Turn off the heat.
   
6. When you add make sure there is not more one strong-tasting (negi) and one mild-tasting (tofu, daikon, wakame) ingredient. Also one should be sinking and the other should be floating. Cluttering your miso soup with too many is against Japanese aesthetics.