Today I am making miso soup. Authentic, from scratch, miso soup. And I’m making my own dashi, or soup stock, as well. No mean feat, you’d think, since 67% of Japanese use instant dashi granules.
I spent the morning reading recipe after recipe after recipe, with their similar ingredients lists but wildly differing proportions and cooking times, and now I’m more confused than ever. Many have no measurements at all, or say things like “three strips” or “one square” for an ingredient that may come in sheets, in twisted strips ropes like licorice, or any number of other arrangements. I’m going to wing it, and keep careful notes so that I can revise and tweak the recipe in the future.
I’ll write later this week about my relative success or failure at the project, but since today is Poetry Sunday, I thought I’d post something I found in my research. It wasn’t a poem when I found it, but simply a discussion of one of the soup ingredients.
Kombu/Konbu by Issendai
A kind of kelp which is used to flavor broths and sauces. It starts off looking like a grungy dried banana leaf, and turns into a massive, pulsating tentacle which hangs out both sides of the pot, writhing and thinking dirty thoughts about your Rei figurines. Japanese porn is instantly comprehensible when you use kombu for the first time and see what every Japanese child grows up seeing in Kaachan’s kitchen.
If you’re still willing to use kombu after that introduction, wipe both sides of the dry kombu gently with a damp cloth, taking care not to wipe all of the white powder off— it’s the powder which provides much of the flavor. (The kombu is safe to go near at this point, since it has no power in its dry state.) Place the kombu in the cooking water or broth to soak, and witness its mighty expansion. Two minutes before the recipe tells you to remove the kombu from the water, pick up your weapons and psyche yourself for battle. You will need both minutes. At the appointed time, enter the melee. When you have wrestled the kombu from the water and it hangs, limp and flopping, from your knife, nail it above the kitchen lintel and mock it while you bandage your wounds.
Buy it at a Japanese grocery. Groceries of other nationalities are sometimes foolhardy enough to stock this menace to life and virtue, and American supermarkets occasionally indulge in fatal innocence concerning this ravage, but you’ll have the best luck at a Japanese store. Kombu is usually near the nori and wakame, where it terrifies the delicate and sensitive wakame into fits.