Miso Dengaku is cooked vegetables anTofu (usually baked or boiled) and topped with a sweet and salty Miso sauce. Miso Dengaku can be a dish for dinner, but also a great appetizer for drinks.
Miso is a paste made from fermented soy beans. It is one of the crucial seasonings in Japanese cuisine to make various foods like soups, sauces and other dishes. Miso is quite salty by itself, but dense in Umami (savory) flavor from long fermentation. Japanese food using Miso such as Miso Soup is loved and well known to not only Japanese people but also to people in the whole world today.
Miso Dressing is a tasty Miso based dressing great for salads, simple boiled vegetables (as in the recipe), and even cooked meat. This salty sweet dressing tastes quite different from western dressings, but you’ll like it if you like the flavor of Miso.
You can use either white or Awase (between red and white) Miso for the dressing. Red Miso may have too strong of a flavor for this dressing. A key flavor of the dressing other than Miso is sugar. We think a bit on the sweet side tastes better, but you can decide how much sugar you would like to use. Depending on what kind of Miso you choose, you may have to adjust the amount of sugar. White Miso is much sweeter, so beware.
Tonjiru (or Butajiru) is a kind of Miso Soup with pork and a lot of root vegetables such as Gobo (burdock root) and carrot. Even though it is a Miso soup, Tonjiru tastes very different from ordinary Miso Soup. Tonjiru has a distinct pork flavor and strong taste from Gobo. Don’t get alarmed because of Gobo, it actually tastes very good. All the flavor of the pork and vegetables mix very well, and you will like it if you like Miso Soup.
You bought Miso paste, but don’t know what to do with it other than Miso Soup? Here is an idea for a meat dish using Miso. Marinading with Miso makes chicken tender and flavorful. And as usual, it is very easy to make! Just start earlier in the day or the night before to have enough time to marinade the chicken.
If you’d like more detailed instructions, please watch our Miso Grilled Salmon video. It has almost the same steps as this chicken recipe except the grilling time.
You may think that you must have tofu and/or wakame seaweed to make miso soup, but you can make it with just about anything you have at home. If you have made miso soup before, the chances are that you still have plenty of dried bonito flakes to make dashi broth and some miso paste left in the fridge. All you need is some onion and potato to make another authentic Japanese dish!
Onion and potato are pretty common ingredients for everyday miso soup in Japan, simply because everyone has them at home and it’s quite tasty. You don’t need to make a trip to the Japanese market this time!
If you have never made miso soup before, please watch our video first. For quick recap of making simple and delicious dashi broth, watch this video.
You might not have had Miso marinaded Salmon before. Yes, we use Miso paste for something other than Miso soup. Ordinary Japanese restaurants in the US don’t often seem to have this kind of dish on the menu. But it is quite popular dish in Japan because it’s tasty and very simple to make.
When fish or meat is marinaded in Miso paste, Miso gives it flavor, and also makes it tender. A famous kind of grilled fish marinaded in Miso is Saikyoyaki. Saikyoyaki uses Saikyo Miso, a kind of white Miso made in Kyoto. Saikyo Miso has a very nice, sophisticated sweetness that is perfect for a marinade. However, it is hard to get Saikyo Miso in the US, so we substituted with white Miso which is easily found at many American supermarkets.