Ingredient Spotlight: Miso

... and how to use miso to transform your desserts!

Oct 26, 2024

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“It’s hard to describe the flavour of a courgette, but miso is so flavourful that it’s hard to stop describing it - you might detect barnyard, nutty, brown-butter, caramelised, exotic-fruit (banana, mango, pineapple), olive, briny, boozy or chestnut blossom notes.” Niki Segnit, The Flavour Thesaurus More Flavours

French Toast with Miso Sugar and Umeboshi Plum Compote

Following a number of requests, today’s Ingredient Spotlight features one of my favourite ingredients to use in desserts: Miso. For past editions of the Ingredient Spotlight series click on the following links: Hibiscus, Labneh, Sumac, Tamarind and Turmeric. If there are other ingredients you would like me to highlight in this series, drop me a comment below.

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Many of us might have had our first encounter with miso in the form of small warming bowls of cloudy Miso Soup typically served with some sliced spring onion and wakame and a few cubes of soft tofu bobbing on its surface and that might come with your sushi order. Yet, by now most of us will have a sense that miso paste has much wider applications than just Miso Soup - both in Japanese cooking but also non-Japanese dishes. However, given my sweet tooth and the fact that this newsletter is almost entirely about cakes, desserts and other sweet treats, today’s Ingredient Spotlight will shine the light on just how versatile an ingredient miso is when it comes to sweet applications. How miso can transform your desserts by providing not just a savoury note but also added umami and complexity. As always, with plenty of recipe ideas to try. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s cover the basics first.

Prune and Chinese Five Spice Powder Sticky Toffee Pudding with Miso Butterscotch Sauce

What is it?

At its most basic, miso is a fermented soybean past made by fermenting soybeans with salt and koji. Koji is a type of fungus that is cultivated on rice as well as various other grains and provides the starter culture not just for miso but also soy sauce, sake, rice vinegar and shochu. You can find miso made using not just soybeans but other grains (for example, barley) as well beans and peas.

Similar to how you can buy parmesan at different stages of maturity (and the older the parmesan, the saltier and more complex the flavour) you can also buy different kinds of miso based on how long they have been fermenting for (ranging from just a few months to several years).

An article about miso on Epicurious mentions that there are over 1,300 variations of miso in use today - a mind-boggling number. But for today’s purposes, we will limit ourselves to just a couple of the most common varieties of miso and that you can easily find outside of Japan as well. These include:

Shiro Miso (also known as white or sweet miso), as the name implies, is a sweet tasting miso with a delicate and quite mild flavour. It is light in colour (similar to set honey) and the mild flavour comes from a short fermentation time (3 months to 1 year) and the high proportion of rice koji to soybeans used in its production. It is the type of miso I use most frequently in baking and desserts because to me it provides a perfect balance of flavours.
Aka Miso (also known as red miso) is a dark coloured miso with a very concentrated flavour and pronounced saltiness thanks to a longer fermentation time (often 6 months but you can find red miso that has been fermenting up to 10 years). Although it is referred to as red miso, some types of red miso are closer to brown or even black in colour. You can certainly bake cakes etc. with red miso as well but you’ll want to start adding just a little bit given its strong flavour and pronounced saltiness.

Note different types of miso will also go by different names depending on what grain was used to make its starter culture: kome miso is made with a rice koji starter culture (and is the type of miso most commonly available), mugi miso is made with a barley koji starter culture and mame miso is made with a soybean koji starter culture.

If you want to read more about the different types of miso, this article has a great short overview.

What does it taste like?

Given the sheer variety of different kinds of miso it is hard to describe in a single word what miso tastes like (and Niki Segnit probably provided the most comprehensive summary of all the different flavours you might be able to detect in miso). Because miso is certainly salty but it is so much more than that. It’s fruity and nutty at the same time as being salty. And then depending on the type of miso you are tasting, the fruitiness and nuttiness might be more in the background and the saltiness might be the thing that stands out to you.

What does it go well with?

In some ways the question should be rephrased: what does miso NOT go well with?! Given its saltiness, miso unsurprisingly goes well with desserts where a little bit of salt goes a long way - such as anything made with chocolate and caramel (from brownies to chocolate cake to butterscotch sauce for ice cream etc etc). Nuts and seeds are obvious candidates as well. However, there is no need to stop there. Miso also goes very well with various kind of fruit, from bananas to apricots, pears and apples for example. And Niki Segnit mentions how miso also goes incredibly well with honey and vanilla. In short, miso is a versatile ingredient to keep in your modern baker’s pantry and can help transform cakes, brownies, cookies, other baked goods and desserts into something truly special!

How can I use it?

First things first, you might be wondering why we cannot simply continue using salt instead of miso. This is of course a valid question. I love using salt to add a savoury edge to desserts - from making salted butter caramel, to sprinkling some fleur de sel over chocolate chip cookies or Claire Ptak’s perfect Rye Brownies etc. But as mentioned above miso offers so much more in terms of flavour than just salt - it also provides umami, a certain savouriness and complexity that goes beyond saltiness (hence why it is used in a lot of vegetarian cooking!). Depending on the type of miso you are using you might also get some fruity sweetness.

A few things to bear in mind: if a recipe calls for a specific type of miso, you often cannot swap in other types of miso 1:1. E.g. if a recipe calls for Shiro Miso, don’t be tempted to use the same amount of Aka Miso, as this will likely make the final dish too salty.

Also, if you start experimenting yourself, bear in mind that miso is around 60% amino acids. And if you know a little bit about the Maillard reaction you will know that it is a chemical reaction between amino acids and sugars that occurs when the two are exposed to heat. In short, cakes and cookies have a tendency to brown much faster when made with miso given the increased presence of amino acids.

Here are some ideas for how to use miso in sweet applications:

Cake

My Triple Buckwheat Coffee Cake with Apricot Miso Jam

Christina Tosi’s Burnt Miso Pound Cake

My Prune and Chinese Five Spice Powder Sticky Toffee Pudding with Miso Butterscotch Sauce

Bon Appetit’s Blueberry Miso Crumb Cake

Epicurious’ Vegan Banana Bread with Chocolate and Miso

Miso Cheesecake with Caramel Sauce

Benjamina Ebuehi’s Miso Tres Leches Cake

Cookies and Brownies

Okonomi Kitchen’s Miso Caramel Cookies

Justine Snacks’ Pumpkin Miso Caramel Cookies