Jun 02, 2002 03:36 PM
3162 Views
(Updated Jun 02, 2002 03:59 PM)
Perhaps you have dined in a Japanese restaurant, and was offered miso soup, but don’t have the foggiest idea what it is, or what it is made of. Is it vegetarian? Meat? Or is it one of those weird scientific creations you only find in sci-fi movies, such as “Soylent Green”?
Well, not to worry, miso is a vegetarian product. Miso is a concentrated soybean paste made from fermented soybeans. Cooked soybeans are mixed with rice (or other grains), salt, and Aspergillus fungi. The mixture is allowed to ferment for a long period of time so the mold can digest and convert the various carbohydrates, proteins, and fats into simpler compounds, amino acids, and sugars. Sometimes a little alcohol is added into miso as a preservative.
Miso is highly versatile. Think of it as concentrated soup stock. It can be made into a soup, added to dishes, or eaten straight from the package. There are many varieties of miso paste, each with its own flavor, and uses. Dark miso is generally more flavorful, than white miso. So how does it taste? Well, that is hard to describe, it tastes a little like meat broth actually.
Miso can also help in cleansing the body from pollution, and radiation. Should the unthinkable happen between India and Pakistan, just remember the jingle “Miso soup a day keeps the radiation away.” Just think of miso soup as “chicken soup” that you eat if you are sick during a nuclear winter :). When atomic weapons were used against Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of World War II, researchers discovered that those who ate a strict diet of miso soup, sea vegetables, seaweed, and brown rice, survived radiation sickness than those who did not.
When the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl melted in 1986, and spewed radiation into the environment, Europeans, fearing the fallout would sicken them, ordered tons of miso, just in case.
So how does miso work in cleansing the body? Unfortunately, noone knows for sure. There are certain compounds, called isoflavones, in soy, that have been shown to be beneficial. In the case of radiation sickness, the iodine contained in sea vegetables (in the miso soup, and sea vegetable/seafood diet) would help in protecting the thyroid gland from absorbing radioactive iodine. The alginate, contained in seaweed, would help in reducing the uptake of strontium-90 into the bones.
A Simple Recipe for Miso Soup:
3 tablespoons of miso paste
3-4 cups of water
Vegetables, tofu, noodles, or whatever you want in the soup.
If you have dashi broth, and/or instant bonito powder, use it instead of water. Dashi broth is made from bonito (a type of dried fish), and seaweed.
Boil the water, after it boils, add the miso paste, simmer but do not boil. Add the other ingredients. If the other ingredients are hard to cook, you may want to simmer them before adding in the miso paste.
