Healing with Food Article

Miso — A Delicious and Healing Food

Accompanying recipe: Golden Miso Soup

Today traditional soy foods correctly rank as being the healthiest of foods. (While high tech soy products--like TVP, soy isolate and soy oil--are among the shoddiest of contemporary foods.) It’s useful to discern the difference.

The undeniably most medicinal soy food is miso. Current scientific research now supports its historical health claims. This delicious food is an effective therapeutic aid in the prevention and treatment of heart disease, certain cancers, radiation sickness and hypertension.

Miso soup consumption is linked with up to a 50% reduced risk of breast cancer according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Miso making has been considered an art form for the past several centuries in Japan. Through a special double-fermentation process, soybeans and grains are transformed into a wondrous seasoning agent with potent healing properties.

Miso has a texture similar to peanut butter and is available in a vast range of delicious flavors ranging from meaty and savory to sweet and delicate. While you’ll most often find miso in soup, where it serves as a rich and flavorful bouillon, it is also used in sauces, dressings and even some desserts.

John and Jan Belleme, the country’s leading authorities on miso, have just written The Miso Book: The Art of Cooking with Miso. Some years ago, I enjoyed the good fortune of visiting the Bellemes and feasting upon their own handmade miso. They’d recently returned from a eight-month Japanese apprenticeship with miso master Takamichi Onozaki.

Thanks to their efforts, we now have available domestic miso made and aged using time-honored methods. These methods include, for example, aging miso for up to eighteen months.

Just as you can taste the difference between a fine and cheap wine, you can readily taste and appreciate the difference between a quality miso and a pasteurized, high-tech miso that uses added enzyme extracts to shorten its fermentation cycle. Look for organic miso that states on the label that it was naturally aged in wood using traditional Japanese techniques.

I also used to make my own miso from scratch but today appreciate being able to buy quality miso from the refrigerated or ethnic sections of natural food stores. The sweetest tasting misos are yellow or beige in color, sweet and light in flavor and impart an almost diary-like creamy flavor. They seem especially suited to Western-style comfort foods like mashed potatoes and cream soups, whereas the more salty, savory misos are dark red or brown, have aged longer, and impart an Asian flavor.

My current favorite is a soy-free miso made of chickpeas. But I always have on hand the most medicinal variety, hatcho, which is unusual in that it’s 100% soy. Although it’s as dark as dark chocolate, you’d never confuse the two. Whenever my energy is low, immune system is challenged, or before and after X-ray exposure, it’s hatcho that goes into my soup.

At home, refrigerate miso in an airtight container. Use the light-colored miso within nine months and dark miso within eighteen months. Packets of additive-free, freeze-dried instant miso soup are available in natural food stores and are a good convenience item. They are also great for travel.

Miso is a superior source of usable whole protein, for it contains all eight essential amino acids. Miso's protein content ranges from 12 to 20%, depending upon the variety. It is also low in fat.

Whether you and miso are old friends, or about to become new friends, I recommend The Miso Book to you. Its 140 miso-containing recipes offer some innovative and tasty dishes. Here’s a recipe I’ve adapted from it.

May you be well nourished,

Rebecca Wood