Tonjiru (Pork and Root Vegetable Miso Soup)

Variations

• Hokkaido butajiru: the same soup under its other name, with plenty of potato and a knob of butter. That is the direction of more fat, not less.
• Kasujiru: slacken sake lees in along with the miso for a much heavier winter bowl.
• Without the pork: take the meat out and the principle goes with it. If you must, double the sesame oil and add fried tofu to stand in for the fat.
• Without konjac: it adds chew and nothing is lost without it. Blanch it if you use it.
• With dashi: you can use dashi instead of water, but the pork fat and the fried vegetables are already making the broth, so it changes less than you would expect. What stocks and broths calls the question of what is making the liquid taste of anything is already answered inside this pot.

Tips

• It runs in the opposite order to miso soup, and that is the dish. There you build a dashi and drop tofu and wakame into it. Here you fry before you boil. The fat rendered from the pork coats the vegetables, and when the water goes in that fat disperses through it and does the work the dashi was doing. That is why there is broth flavour without any dashi at all.
• The rule about not boiling after the miso still holds. Miso soup states it plainly — a hard boil kills the aroma. What changes here is everything before the miso, not after.
• And yet this is the one people keep until tomorrow. It sits squarely against "miso soup is best straight off the heat", and both are true. What is lost overnight is the aroma of the miso; what is gained is broth inside the daikon and the potato, and pork fat through all of it. It is a trade, and a bowl with daikon in it usually wins on the second day (reviving leftovers). Reheat it below a boil as well.
• Do not skim the fat off the top. Udon blanches its aburaage to take surface oil off, because there the film stands between the broth and a sponge that has to drink. In this bowl the fat is on the broth's side: the film is holding miso particles in suspension, and skimming it leaves the soup thin.
• The burdock goes into water for the browning, not for bitterness. Kinpira gobo treats the same root the same way. Five minutes is the limit — longer and the aroma leaves with the colour.
• Daikon and potato do not go in together. Daikon needs a long simmer to turn translucent and potato collapses well before that. Adding the potato later is about the broth rather than about looks: a disintegrating potato clouds it and leaves nowhere for the miso to go.
• Measure the miso against the solids, not against the water. The more vegetables, the less liquid is left, so judge the four tablespoons against what is in the pot at the end rather than against the litre you started with. This is always a little stronger than a plain miso soup.
• Frying in sesame oil is the Japanese default here. It is not a garnish: the first seconds in the pan build a toasted aroma before any pork fat has rendered, which is blooming spices' fat-soluble argument used ahead of the fat the meat is about to give up.