When the drinks team behind Dram Bar, on Denmark Street in Soho, were getting ready to launch in 2023, they knew they needed a hot toddy. It was November after all. Head barista David Olukitibi came up with something special that, he says, “crossed the line between chai and toddy”. To a slightly peaty scotch he added star anise, cinnamon, honey, lemongrass – and white miso.
The weather turned warm and the toddy didn’t make it to the final menu. But the miso stayed. At breakfast, you’ll find it mixed with the butter served alongside Dram’s croissants. It’s on the current cocktail menu too, lending caramel notes to a Brugal rum number. And it is among the ingredients the team is testing for next winter’s warmer.
Miso, which some say has been around since 200BC, has been hailed as the taste of the summer, casually mentioned in trendy dessert offerings, TikTok food videos and supermarket test kitchens. In the 2000s, Nigel Slater would occasionally write about a bowl of miso soup, or a jar he had at the back of the fridge. But to buy any at that time, you needed to either go to a Japanese grocer’s or, as chef Emily Chia – most recently at Sargasso in Margate – recalls, the kind of health food store where you’d find kombucha and kale. “Now, these are found everywhere!”
This is what inspired Bonnie Chung to found Miso Tasty – the British brand of miso favoured by Ottolenghi. Most supermarkets in the UK now stock it; many have own brand misos too.
To get a handle on this newfound salience for something quite so ancient, I spoke with miso experts and producers, and tried out every newfangled treat I could find.
What is miso?
Technically, miso is a paste made from soya beans fermented with a kind of mould called koji (AKA aspergillus oryzae). Koji is used to make all the foundational ingredients (sake, soy sauce or shouyu, miso, rice vinegar) of washoku, Japan’s Unesco-listed cuisine. Miso was likely imported to Japan from China in the sixth century; in Japan: The Vegetarian Cookbook, Nancy Singleton Hachisu notes that the use of miso is first mentioned in an imperial guide to governance and ethics called the Taihō Code, enacted in the year 701.
Japan now counts over a thousand varieties of miso, and each region is synonymous with a local recipe: Edo sweet red miso in Tokyo (the city being previously known as Edo) and sweet white miso in Kyoto. In the Chūkyō region it’s dark brown and bitter; in Kyushu it’s made with barley (mugi). As Kazutoshi Endo, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred London sushi restaurant Endo at the Rotunda, puts it, “miso equals culture”.
When Mitsunori Sakano decided to set up a miso-soup focused cafe in Tokyo, his friends were confused. He is an artist, not a chef, and miso soup is always part of a meal, never the main event. Yet his Misonomi Cafe pop-up, which is also currently in Soho, offers just that. Usually, the soup is ladled into a dark lacquer bowl. Then, you are served a tray with a glass teapot of hot water and a glass bowl containing a ball of miso on a very thin monaka (rice wafer). The dashi (fish stock) powder and veg have been mixed into the miso, as have various flavourings (edible flowers, seeds, spices). You pour the hot water on, the wafer floats to the top and the bejewelled miso unfurls like a flowering tea. It tastes as good as instant miso soup usually tastes but it’s the Instagrammable aesthetic, designed to make the miso the star, that is unexpected.
How is miso made?
Miso comes in a palette of yellows, ochres, reds, rusts, and browns, and its texture and flavour vary just as much. To make it, you first make a koji by mixing the koji starter (or koji-kin) with a substrate (usually steamed rice, sometimes barley) to inoculate it, so it spores and grows. Then, you mix that with cooked soya beans and a lot of salt, and leave it all to ferment for at least six months, and often a whole year.
Ever since chef René Redzepi started using koji at Copenhagen’s Noma in 2009, intrepid fermenters in restaurants everywhere have taken miso in unexpected directions. As Yusheng Fu puts it in Noma’s Lab Dispatch blog, koji was “the key that unlocked so many doors in the world of fermentation”, with miso being “Door #1”.
For purists and official nomenclature regulators, miso can only be made from fermented soya beans. The Noma team, though, approached it as a concept and asked how they might embrace the tradition without appropriating the culture. They ended up with “peaso”, made of yellow peas and containing only 4% salt (compared to the 12%-20% found in traditional Japanese misos).
At London’s zero-waste restaurant Silo, head of fermentation Ryan Walker shows me all the kojis and misos currently in progress, in a cupboard the size of my bathroom. In one open-topped wooden barrel, he has a medley of navy beans, soya beans, fava beans, rice and chickpea natto weighed down by a pile of rocks. Walker explains that miso creation is 95% anaerobic, 5% aerobic (without and with oxygen, respectively): you need to prevent mould spots from forming but also allow the carbon produced to escape. Traditional factories in Japan use 2-metre-tall barrels of ancient cedar and rocks, each weighing 60kg, piled in on to the ferment below.
Speaking to fermenters in the UK, you get the sense that “to miso” is now a thing. Jonathan Hope, of artisanal brand Kultured, makes miso with pumpkin, red fox carlin peas, marrowfat peas, badger beans, and bacon with pearl barley. He has also miso-ed chicken nuggets, a Happy Meal, a Greggs sausage roll (“one of the most delicious things I’ve ever made”) and a bag of Wotsits. Chung, who tasted the latter and found it quite fun, says Hope is “very loose with the term miso”.
How does miso boost flavour?
“When you make your own miso,” says Edinburgh-based chef Stuart Ralston, “it’s a profile you can’t replicate.” He uses his own versions at three of his four restaurants: Noto, Aizle and Tipo.
What with Scotland being more of a barley country than a rice one, he’s used a barley koji to ferment a barley miso. He blends a chickpea miso, meanwhile, into a classic velouté for fish, or a glaze for hot food straight from the barbecue. Like many chefs I speak with, he doesn’t necessarily highlight miso as a primary ingredient in a dish, because its main purpose there is to enhance the flavour. He also always mixes miso into stir-fries and broths for his kids at home. “They don’t understand that it’s why they like it so much – why it tastes so good.”
This, to Chung’s mind, is what is finally landing in the wider public consciousness: that miso is the perfect flavour intensifier. Things really started to change in 2018 when Jamie Oliver slathered Miso Tasty miso on a piece of tuna before griddling it on TV. Oh my God, Chung thought, I’ve been telling people to put it on tuna for years. Her goal now is for the wider populace to keep miso in the fridge as a matter of course, next to the ketchup.
For her next cookbook, simply titled Miso, Chung has been digging into how umami works. She recently made two dishes of mac’n’cheese, one with miso and one without. Everyone, she says, thought the one with miso tasted “like it’s got more cheese”.
According to the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who invented the word as a way to describe the taste profile of the amino acid glutamate, “umami” operates differently than the other basic tastes. You can definitely oversweeten or oversalt something. But adding one source of umami (miso, say) to another (dashi or tomato sauce) boosts the glutamate levels exponentially: it’s what food scientists call “synergy”.
Chung is testing miso in the 30 most repeated dishes in UK home cooking. The only ones it doesn’t improve are fish and chips, and curry. Added to a pasta bake, though, or the gravy on a Sunday roast, the butter for a baked potato, even nachos, and you get something that doesn’t taste like miso but is simply more delicious. I give it a go making a miso butter pasta topped with parmesan, which turns out even better than Anna Del Conte’s Marmite-butter spaghetti.
I try miso in tuna toasties and a batch of cheese straws for my kid’s birthday picnic, then use it to salt the buttercream and white chocolate ganache for the cake. These are dishes I often make. I can’t taste the miso – and nor does anyone else – but the flavours are altogether richer, and everything gets eaten.
It is in sweet settings, in fact, that miso tends to cause the most surprise.
At Arôme bakery, just north of Oxford Street, I try an apple danish with a miso caramel glaze – an exquisite example of pastry lamination and the kind of salted sweetness you lick off your fingers. At Crème, a small shop serving huge, chewy cookies with soft-serve and coffee, I have a slab of cookie with white chocolate and miso. The umami saltiness hits from the first bite and doesn’t let go. “A salted caramel is sharper because it has more of a spike on the flavour journey, whereas miso is more rounded in its depth,” explains Chung.
Ralston makes an intense chocolate ice-cream with a cocoa nib miso: “It makes a really, really rich, almost smoky coffee-roasted, nutty sort of dark chocolate flavour,” he says. Similarly, Adolfo De Cecco, owner of east London’s Casa de Fofò puts his sourdough miso in mousses and ice-creams. “It is so very versatile, it can really be used in many preparations and styles of cuisine,” he says. “A spoon of miso can add depth to any soup, or make a pastry cream taste nutty, savoury and much more delicious. You can add miso to your tomato pasta sauce to boost the umami and add sweetness. Anything tastes better with a bit of miso in it, really.”
At Silverleaf at the Pan Pacific London, general manager Liam Broom says that what chefs were working on 10-15 years ago is usually an indication of what bartenders are looking at now. He coolly mixes up the bar’s legendary old fashioned, which combines whisky and brown butter with miso and a pineapple caramel. I can’t taste the miso, but each sip feels like a whole room, such is the depth of flavour. As Dram co-founder Chris Tanner puts it: “We’re not setting out to make a miso-flavoured drink. We’re just bringing that salinity and that complexity from the miso into something that’s already delicious.”
Some people worry about the salt content in miso, but research shows that regular consumption of miso soup does not have a significant effect on blood pressure. Further, it can entice those who need to (picky children, hospital patients, elderly people who’ve lost their appetite) to eat more and help those who need to eat less to feel fuller.
So, some tips for using it. In her latest, award-winning book, Emiko Davies recommends having two types – sweet white miso and the more versatile brown miso (made from barley or rice) – and mixing them to taste. You can actually buy a blend, called awase miso, which Harumi Kurihara, the doyenne of Japanese home cooking, usually uses. My favourite of her dishes is a fish and aubergine gratin, where slightly sweetened miso is added to the cream.
You can take that idea further by mixing it into white sauces, cream sauces, cheese sauces, pizza bases, tomato sauces – any time you need to add depth and savouriness. It’s also very useful for marinating meats and fish, for tossing veg in (with some olive oil) before roasting and for giving oomph to dressings.
Red miso is more intense and pungent, and works as well for marinating red meat as it does for intensifying the chocolatiness of a chocolate brownie. The most important thing to do is taste as you go. And fermentation expert Sandor Katz highlights the goodness of blending miso – any miso – with yoghurt or peanut butter.
Everyone will tell you never to boil miso soup because in doing so, as Walker explains, you cook off the small quantity of alcohol in the miso, and with it the esters (or flavour compounds) that provide its aroma. However, when the miso isn’t the main ingredient, but rather a flavour enhancer, boiling it doesn’t matter – you still keep all the umami.
Casa de Fofò’s De Cecco sums it up neatly: “Miso is a secret weapon; it makes cooking much easier.”