Miso Soup – Hangover Cure

We’re coming up to the weekend, so in case you happen to accidently imbibe too much this weekend and wake with a head that feels as though a thousand elephants are stampeding through it, try this for a great hangover cure…

Miso soup is a cracking cure for a hangover…although this isn’t of course the only reason to drink it, after all you should never need a reason for a good bowl of miso soup coz its so delicious, but…

…it does work as a cure if you had one too many, in fact in Japan some companies even market special “hangover cure miso soup” like Nagatani-en whose packaging specifically shows a beer glass with the words “For people who like their drink”…

So there’s two ways to basically make miso soup, firstly using miso paste, and secondly using instant miso soup which reconstitute rapidly in hot water.  Now I’m not a huge fan of instant food for the most part, but you can buy some absolutely fabulous instant miso soup – often coming in a huge variety of flavours.  Giri-no-haha’s (mother-in-law) care packages often include boxes of very good quality instant soup.  Here’s one I had last night (just with dinner, don’t worry I wasn’t hungover…)

It may not looking appetising yet, and I won’t tell you what my seven-year thought it looked like, but add boiling water and hey presto…

Your other option is to use miso paste which is dissolved into dashi stock then put in your additional ingredients like tofu, chopped spring onions, clams, wakame (seaweed) etc etc.  Its really easy to make you just need to get hold of some good miso paste.  Now don’t be put off my the large tubs this often comes in and wonder how you will use it all…

…it has a great shelf-life, but as well as using it to make gallons of miso soup, you can use it in a myriad of other recipes.  One of my favourites which I’ll blog on one day is Miso Pork – smother pork in a miso sauce, ideally overnight, then scrape off the excess marinade and cook the meat (great on a BBQ).  The great think about this dish is that you can reuse the excess miso you scrape off the meat a couple more times as a marinade (just keep it seperate from the rest of the paste), and even then rather than throwing it out if you finally use it to make soup you get a nice rich flavour which just gives it that little bit of something different.

Enjoy!