Washoku Warriors – Challenge 3 – Miso Month

This month’s todo list for the Washoku Warriors, hosted by La Fuji Mama, reads like this:

(1) Miso Sauces: Choose one (or more!) of these sauces to make. These sauces could be used as a dip for crudite, or to dress briefly blanched veggies, etc. (whatever your household likes).
– Creamy Tofu Sauce
– Creamy Sesame-Miso Sauce
– Pungent Red Miso Sauce
– Herb Miso –made with whatever herbs you might have in your garden/windowsill planter if you have any growing (in place of the shiso leaves called for)

(2) Main Dish: OPTIONAL–for those of you who want to give this a go as well–Miso-Marinated Broiled Fish

(3) Dessert: Choose one (or more!) of these fruit-and-miso combos to make.
– Fall Fruits With Flavored Miso Sauce
– Compote of Early Summer Fruits With Citrusy Miso Sauce
– Poached Peaches in Lemon-Ginger Miso Sauce

Frankly, a dessert with miso was a project I was kind of… not self-confident about. So my first stop was something quite familiar – the Creamy Sesame-Miso Sauce to go with green beans.

I used this for Ingen no goma miso aé – with shiro miso and white sesame paste from the organic food store.

I did not make the required dashi, though – for the amount I needed (1 tbsp) making a liter (4 cups) of dashi seemed wrong, and since dashi doesn’t freeze well, I opted for a little homemade chicken stock, reheated and with a few wakame flakes added, to achieve a smoky seaweed flavor. It worked like a charm.

We loved the beans, but in contrast to Elizabeth Andoh’s method of not cooling them in ice water, I will put them in ice water next time to preserve the pretty green color. A winner, undoubtedly – tasty, easy, special.

Onto the second part of the challenge…

I decided to skip the fish, but go for the peaches (as peaches were in full season) with pungent red miso sauce. Little did I know that the miso wasn’t the dominating flavor at all – it was the ginger, and it made a nice, zingy addition to the peaches.

Anway, this was way too much work for something to be summed up as poached peaches / peach compote. I thought the gingery note was quite nice, and even the miso sauce added a lot to the flavor, but I still have to wait for a Japanese dessert (other than sesame or green tea ice) to wow me.

What I loved about the challenge was doing something which was, for me, miles from the standards of cooking – as exotic as it gets. I wouldn’t have expected the peaches with miso to be that good. Still, I feel that nothing beats a simple peach cobbler or compote with vanilla, but that’s a totally different story…

Tags: beans, Japanese, Miso, Washoku