Marvellous Miso Marinades
08 July 2008
A few weeks ago we were invited to a Kobe beef barbecue. (If this doesn’t ring a bell, those are the happy cows that are fed with beer and sake and get massages all the time – must be a wonderful life!)
As the choice of meat had already suggested, the food was absolutely delicious! Aside from different kinds of extremely tasty and tender beef, very thinly sliced in the typical Japanese manner, there were various types of seafood and vegetables, too – all of first rate quality, of course. The highlight of the barbecue though was the so-called miso beef, which was a real culinary delight. Having been marinated in miso paste for a week or so, these thick chunks of Kobe beef were so tender they would almost melt on my tongue. The meat had an incredibly powerful taste, reinforced - but not dwarfed - by the distinctive aroma of the miso.
You can of course marinate all kind of different things in miso paste, not just beef. It should just have strong enough an aroma to keep up with the miso. With all the delicious seafood on offer here, I decided to marinate some fresh scallops (unlike the scallops I have had in other places, the ones I buy here are always quite intensive in taste). Of course I did not leave them in the marinade for a week as the beef, but rather just for a few hours while resting in the fridge!
As for the cream soup I prepared to go with the scallops, carrots and ginger are of course a very popular couple in the "Western" world, too. I added a little "Japanese-fusion" twist to it, not only by adding udon (Japanese thick, wheat based noodles), but also by using Japanese dashi (quite a strong one) as a stock base.
Creamy Carrot Soup with Miso Scallops
| serves 4 |
for the cream soup |
| 4 fairly large carrots |
| 1 mid-sized onion |
| 2 dents of garlic |
| 1l dashi (Japanese soup stock; take other fish stock as an alternative) |
| 200ml white wine |
| 3-4 teaspoons of freshly grated ginger |
| 1/2 tablespoon of café de paris spice mixture (take a mild curry mixture as an alternative) |
| 2 tablespoons of sour cream |
| soy sauce to taste |
| a little dash of dark sesame oil |
| some fresh dill |
| some neutral oil for frying |
for the miso scallops |
| 400g sashimi quality scallops |
| 2 tablespoons of red miso paste |
| 30-40ml mirin |
| approx. 150g white sesame seeds |
| some lime juice |
| some neutral oil for frying |
to go with |
| 400-500g udon noodles |
Dissolve about 2 big tablespoons of miso in a little bit of mirin. Stir until you get an easy-to-spread paste. Cover the scallops with the paste from all sides and let them rest in the fridge.
Coarsely slice the onion, the garlic and the carrots. Heat a little bit of oil in a sauce pan and briefly sauté the onions; once they are slightly browned, shift them to the side of the pan and use the free spot to fry the garlic. Before the latter gets brown, add the carrots, stir everything and sauté for another few minutes.
Add about 300ml of the dashi to the vegetables. Cover with a lid and simmer for about 20 minutes or so. Once the carrots are very soft, blend them in a food processor until very smooth.
Fill the carrot cream back into a stock pot and add the remaining dashi as well as the white wine. Let the soup simmer for a few more minutes while seasoning it to taste with freshly grated ginger, a little bit of café de paris spice mixture and soy sauce. Finally stir in the sour cream and add a very little dash of sesame oil – the latter should give a slight special touch, but should not dominate.
Boil the udon in water according to the instructions on the package; the ones I use take about 6 minutes and are already slightly salted, so I add no more salt to the noodle water. After the indicated cooking time is over, drain the noodles and rinse them with warm water (so they don’t cool out) until the water gets clear (it is important to wash the starch off the surface of the noodles to keep them from getting sticky).
Take the miso scallops out of the fridge. Coat them with sesame seeds, which should easily stick to the miso spread. Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the scallops at medium heat for about 1 1/2 minutes on each side. Do not fry them too hot to prevent the sesame seeds from getting too dark before the heat even gets through to the scallops. Don’t worry if some of the sesame seeds come off in the pan; you can just crumble them over the finished scallops in the end.
The scallops should ideally be browned around their sesame crust, but should still be somewhat raw inside. Once they are done, stick them on skewers and sprinkle a few drops of lime juice on top. To serve, fill the soup into little bowls, garnish with some fresh dill, and place a scallop skewer across each bowl. Serve the udon either in extra bowls aside (to be dipped into the soup bit by bit) or directly in the soup.