It might sound odd, but like salted caramel or the added pinch of salt in your baked goods, the saltiness of miso balances out the intense sweetness of sugar in desserts. Speaking of salad, a teaspoon of miso in a dressing makes everything pop - I’ll eat crisp wedges of iceberg with a miso dressing over fries any day (unless the fries are dipped in a vegan miso aioli, obviously). The salty-savoury miso contrasts with the sweetness of the vegetables and makes for an attention-stealing side dish or a welcome addition to a big, leafy salad. Sweet potatoes and pumpkin are moreish when coated with miso and baked until golden. It’s brilliant brushed onto any kind of vegetable before baking, like the classic Japanese eggplant dish, nasu dengaku. With vegetablesĭon’t forget to give your vegetables a little miso love. Making vegan nacho cheese sauce or anything remotely cheesy? Make sure to add white miso to the mix for extra oomph. It also makes a startlingly good replacement for the cheesy flavour in recipes - its flavour profile is quite similar to parmesan it has the saltiness, the fermented tang, and the umami.īlitz it with cashews and nutritional yeast to create your own vegan parmesan, or add a decent spoonful when veganising pasta dishes like mac and cheese or carbonara. Wherever there’s meaty flavour, miso will only make it more delicious. Mix some into your vegan shepherd’s pie “mince”, or add to a marinade to make vegan tofu bacon. Add a spoonful to a simmering lentil bolognese, or baste portobello mushrooms in a buttery miso sauce while roasting or pan-frying them. The most obvious use for miso in cooking is to enhance the savouriness of “meaty” dishes. Play around with it in different recipes and experiment. Often, I’ll only use about a tablespoon of white miso in a recipe to enhance the flavour of the dish, but if I want to really taste the miso, I’ll slowly add more until it tastes just the way I want. It packs a punch, and a little goes a long way. It’s also salty, tangy, and slightly sweet. Miso just so happens to be bursting with umami flavour. It’s a deep, rich flavour that our taste buds crave, and it can be lacking in vegan cooking. Think parmesan, seared steak, tomatoes, mushrooms, soy sauce, or nutritional yeast. The flavour can be described as savouriness. Umami, or the fifth taste, has been talked about a lot in the food world over the past few years. I eventually realised that I wasn’t missing the animal products themselves - I was just missing the flavour of those foods. When I first removed animal products from my diet, I craved some of the meaty meals I used to eat. Think of it as a natural flavour enhancer. It doesn’t overwhelm other flavours, and the taste isn’t obvious in the final dish. It’s the kind I keep in my fridge and use most often - I go through at least a packet a fortnight. It’s milder and sweeter than its miso siblings, making it more versatile and perfect for miso-beginners. White miso, also known as shiro miso, is made with rice kōji and is fermented for a shorter time than the others. but isn’t fermented for as long as the red variety. Yellow miso falls somewhere in the middle of the miso-intensity scale. It’s used in miso soup and other Japanese recipes where miso is the key flavour. Red miso is often made with barley or wheat kōji and has a long fermentation process to produce a funky, dark paste. The different kinds of kōji (rice, barley, soybean, or other grains) produce different kinds of miso. The resulting fermented product is also called kōji - just to confuse everyone. Kōji, or Aspergillus oryzae, is a kind of mould that’s sprinkled on rice, barley, or soybeans, and left to ferment. It’s made with a mixture of soybeans and kōji. Miso is a fermented soybean paste packed with probiotics. I had a housemate once who routinely asked me: “What do I do with this miso stuff again?” If you’re anything like that housemate, I’m here to tell you that miso is the flavour bomb ingredient missing from your vegan cooking. Maybe you innocently bought a bag of it for said recipe but never really knew what to do with the rest of it, so it sat languishing in the back of your fridge. Maybe you’ve seen it on the menu at a Japanese restaurant in the form of a cloudy, salty soup or found it in the recipe list of a vegan pasta recipe. Though miso has increased in popularity over the last few years, it remains a bit of a kitchen enigma. Here’s how to use it in your vegan cooking to transform your meals. Miso adds an addictive, salty savouriness to anything it touches.
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