STAR INGREDIENT Diana Henry embraces the umami hit of miso paste
This month, Diana’s recipes pack an umami punch with a little help from a hero Japanese ingredient photographs MAJA SMEND
There’s a passage in Dinner with Persephone by US writer Patricia Storace – a memoir of her time in Greece – which has never left me, even though I read the book many years ago. Storace writes about eating baklava and other Greek pastries, and that through eating these – sweet things so un-american and un-british – you get under the skin of Greece. Particular ingredients and dishes do take you to the heart of a country, helping you to unlock it. With Japan, that ingredient is miso. You can get it in supermarkets now – you no longer have to track it down online – but it took me a while to get a handle on it, partly because there are so many versions, partly because it is so outside of the flavours we are used to. Only if you are the kind of person who craves Marmite (and I used to eat all the Marmite crusts my children didn’t eat) will you get miso at all, because miso is strong stuff (even the lighter, sweeter ones aren’t exactly wallflowers). Basically, miso is a paste made from fermented soya beans, rice, barley or other grains. The base ingredient used obviously affects the flavour, but so too does the length of fermentation. In the end this means many different kinds of miso and it can be quite hard to navigate them. There are – roughly – three groups. White (shiro) miso is creamy or pale yellow in colour, just a little softer in texture than set honey, and sweet-salty. It’s made with a high proportion of white rice and is the miso I use most often (as I love sweet-salty flavours). Mixed with other Japanese ingredients – a little soy, some ginger, mirin – it makes an excellent glaze for chicken and fish and you can create some great dressings with it, too.
Red (aka) miso is a much darker group of pastes as the base ingredient is darker in colour (brown rice or red beans, for example). These misos have also been aged for longer. The flavours are complex – think, again, of Marmite, but also chocolate, toast, dried mushrooms and beef. Hatcho miso, a really dark, meaty paste, falls into this group. Finally, there are misos that are somewhere between white and red, the mixed (or awase) misos. They have the fruitiness of white and the beefy umami flavour of red.
For the British cook, discovering miso opens a whole range of complex flavours that are beyond most of our imaginations. I generally keep white and dark misos in the fridge and am still learning how to use them. It might seem sacrilegious to add dark miso to a good sirloin steak, but it enhances and deepens the steak’s meatiness in a way that makes you shiver.
So, play around with them and consider using them in dishes that aren’t Japanese (I’ve been known to put a bit of hatcho miso in my cottage pie). Miso, whether white or dark, means intense flavours – and who doesn’t love that?