Miso soup with shimeji.

Two rules make miso soup good rather than adequate. Never boil the miso — it kills the aroma and the live cultures and turns the broth flat. And always cook beech mushrooms, which are genuinely bitter raw and turn nutty and buttery after four or five minutes of heat.

Everything else takes ten minutes, and a homemade dashi puts it in a different category from the instant version.

What you need

Broth

• 3 cups dashi (shiitake dashi is ideal)
• 3 tbsp miso — white for mild, red for deeper

To add

• 6 oz beech mushrooms, bases trimmed, bouquet separated
• 5 oz silken or firm tofu, cubed
• 2 scallions, thinly sliced
• 1 sheet wakame, soaked (optional)

To finish

• Toasted sesame seeds
• A few drops of sesame oil
• Shichimi togarashi

Method

1. Trim the base off the beech bouquet in one slice and separate the mushrooms, keeping the stems full length.
2. Heat the dashi to a bare simmer — not a boil.
3. Add the mushrooms and cook 4–5 minutes. This is the step that removes the raw bitterness; do not shorten it.
4. Add the tofu and wakame and warm through for 2 minutes.
5. Take the pot off the heat. Put the miso in a ladle, add a little hot broth, and whisk it smooth before stirring it back into the pot. Never add miso to boiling liquid.
6. Serve immediately with scallions, sesame and a few drops of sesame oil.

Why the miso goes in last, off the heat

Miso is a fermented paste with volatile aromatics and live cultures. Boiling drives off the aroma and leaves a flat, salty broth. Slaking it in a ladle first also stops it sitting in lumps at the bottom of the pot.

Beech mushrooms raw are properly bitter — this is the one species where a raw taste will put you off it entirely. Four minutes of simmering removes it completely.

Other mushrooms here

Shiitake sliced thin, which deepens the whole bowl. Oyster torn small, added in the last two minutes. Maitake torn into small fronds is excellent. Enoki, if you can get it, needs only a minute.

Making it a meal

Add cooked udon or soba to the bowl before ladling. Or a soft-boiled egg, some wilted greens and a spoonful of XO sauce — at which point it stops being a side soup and becomes dinner.

Common questions