How To Make Easy & Delicious Miso Soup at Home

Say hello to your newest cold-weather best friend: Miso soup is a salty, savory broth (called dashi), enhanced with miso, a fermented paste made from soybeans or grains. It’s often dotted with green scallions and silky tofu, served at most Japanese restaurants before the sushi trays arrive. Making it at home is one of the simplest and most satisfying ways to treat yourself during the frigid winter months.

At home you can also customize the soup to your liking, explains Sonoko Sakai, author of the cookbook Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors. She recommends branching out from the traditional wakame, tofu, and scallion trio often found in restaurants. You can try variations like pumpkin miso soup.

“My husband loves broccoli in his miso soup, and I love kabocha squash and onions,” says Sakai. “If you’re vegan, kombu shiitake and dried shiitake mushrooms make a flavorful dashi. You can make a cold brew dashi by just soaking the two ingredients overnight.”

Here’s how to make miso soup in just a few easy steps.

That elusive flavor that you can’t quite name? The one that makes you crave sip after sip? It’s dashi. Japanese dashi is a very simple broth made from kombu, a dried seaweed, and dried bonito fish flakes. The kombu and the bonito are rich with umami and give this simple soup an extra layer of savory flavor. To make a vegetarian dashi, use the kombu, but skip the bonito flakes.

Making dashi takes just a few minutes — a bit of extra time that’s totally worth it for the trade off in flavor. When making it, be sure to remove the kombu before the water comes to a boil; boiling the kombu can give the broth a bitter flavor and slimy texture. You can also make the dashi ahead of time and keep it in the fridge for up to a week or so. (It also freezes beautifully.)

Miso is obviously the central ingredient to making miso soup. It is a fermented paste that’s usually made from soybeans, but can also be made from brown rice, barley, and many other grains and legumes. It has a deeply savory, salty flavor — very intense on its own, but perfect when mixed into a little hot dashi.

You can find white, yellow, and red miso variations. For restaurant-style miso soup, use red miso made from soybeans. If you like that flavor, try branching out into white miso (milder and sweeter), yellow miso (earthy-flavored), or any other kind of miso you find and feel like trying!

Happily, in the past few years, ingredients like miso, kombu, and bonito flakes have become much more available. An Asian grocery store is always your best bet for the freshest and best variety of ingredients. Whole Foods stores also carry a few varieties of miso and usually stock kombu and bonito flakes.

Also look in the “international” section of your local grocery store — you might be surprised what they carry! If you’re having trouble finding ingredients, you can always find them online.

• Hikari Organic Red Miso Paste, $14 from Amazon.com
• Kombu Dried Seaweed, $3 from Amazon.com
• Eden Bonito Flakes, $10 from Amazon.com