Fifteen-Minute Miso, Tofu and Wakame Soup
A bowl of broth with silken tofu, wakame and spring onion, ready in the time it takes the kettle to boil twice.
Why it works
Miso is a live ferment, and the case for it is the same as for any fermented food: a dose of live organisms and the compounds their fermentation produced, landing in a gut whose bacterial population responds to what you regularly eat. The Stanford fermented-food trial is the most useful piece of evidence here, because it measured what matters rather than what's easy, and it found increased microbial diversity and lower inflammatory markers over ten weeks. Wakame adds iodine, which your thyroid needs and which is genuinely hard to get outside dairy, fish, and sea vegetables. Miso goes in off the heat, which is a live-culture point and a flavour one: boiled miso turns flat and grainy.
The fermented-food finding comes from a 2021 Stanford randomized trial in Cell, which compared a high-fermented-food diet against a high-fiber one and found the fermented arm increased microbiome diversity and lowered inflammatory markers. Miso is also high in sodium, worth knowing if you're watching blood pressure.
Ingredients
- 700 ml water
- 1 piece dried kombu, about 8 cm
- 2 tbsp dried wakame
- 250 g silken tofu, cut into cubes
- 3 tbsp white miso paste
- 3 spring onions, sliced
- 1 tsp toasted sesame oil
- 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds
Method
- Put the kombu in the cold water and bring it slowly to just under a simmer, about eight minutes, then lift it out. Boiling kombu makes the broth bitter.
- Add the wakame and let it swell for two minutes, then slide in the tofu and warm it through without stirring hard.
- Take the pan off the heat. Loosen the miso in a ladleful of the hot broth in a small bowl, then stir that back into the pan.
- Ladle into bowls and finish with spring onion, sesame oil and sesame seeds.
