Went to the wet market one Sunday morning and saw some lovely white clams at my regular fish monger’s stall. This guy always has lots of different kinds of shellfish as one of his relative is a seafood wholesaler. The clams looked too good to pass and I bought a kilo of them.
Figure 1 White clams at the fish monger’s stall
Figure 2 Pretty good size clams and they smell fresh, without any unpleasant odour.
Figure 3 The fresh white clams after a good wash.
Clams are tasty but they need to be cleaned properly. To clean the clams, place them into a basin with enough water to completely cover them. Add 3-4 table spoons of salt and leave the clams to relax in the salt water spa! You will soon find the clams extending their fleshy foot appendages, put out their siphons and start purging the sand & grit within them. Leave the clams alone for at least an hour.
Figure 4 Here you can see a clam with its foot extended. You can be sure these clams are fresh & alive.
Figure 5 Clams with their exhalant & inhalant siphons extended. You can actually observe them squirting water from the exhalant siphon
Figure 6 Close up of a clam with its siphons extended. Bubbles formed when the clams exhale.
I had wanted to make Linguini with clam in white wine sauce but found that I had run out of linguini. Instead, I found some white miso in the fridge and decided to make miso soup with clams instead.
Figure 7 Organic japanese white miso
Figure 8 Korean netari mushroom (Agaric mushrooms). They have a very nice nutty flavour
Adding some Korean netari mushroom will give the soup a bit more flavour. Some cooking sake rounds out all the different ingredients and flavours nicely.
Figure 9 Japanese cooking sake without added salt
Here’s the finished result. For garnishing, I added some shredded nori. The soup turned out very sweet without having to add any other seasoning.
Figure 10 Miso Soup with White Clams and Netari mushrooms.
If you would like the recipe, just email me.
11 comments:
Wow, Gee sing. since when you become a gourmet in clams.
when will you do demo and sampling session?
no, I do not want the recipe, I want YOU to cook for me, since I do not know how to cook Japanese!
Hahaha.. Gee Sing ... Well Done ... A man with many talents.. from cues to clams, maybe you may some other interests in other things starting from A to Z... :-) :-)
Will be doing a lot of travelling in the month of july. Am also doing some research before I commit to buy a DSLR...
May be, there is some interests among some HSBP 74 members out there... Would like to hear more...
@wee hong & MK: come to singapore if you want sampling :-D. Not sure if it's worth your trip tho' LOL!
@YC: Try this site for reviews & buying guides for DSLRs http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/.
I am just a point & shoot guy. Guess I am just too lazy to fiddle with shutter speeds & apertures. Perhaps some day when I am retired with nothing to do :-)
Wow Gee Sing, fantastic looking pot of miso soup. I'm sure it tasted fantastic too. I'm a big fan of miso soup, but never had once made a nice palatable miso soup. If I may ask, how much miso did you put in that pot of soup?
Bee Kheng, I used about 50 gms of white miso in 500ml of the clam stock. The white miso is sweet whereas the red miso is salty. There are many types of miso and you can get the in-between or simply buy white & red and mix them in the ratio to your liking.
Here are a couple of tips:
1. use dashi(you can check on the net on how to make dashi)or some other lightly flavored stock instead of plain water to get a more flavorful soup.
2. use a fine sieve and slowly use a spoon to stir in the miso through the sieve into the soup and discard the white residue left in the sieve
3. Do not boil the soup once you have added the miso. Therefore if you are adding other ingredients into the soup, cook them first before you add in the miso.
good luck!
Thanks Gee Sing for the tips, I shall try to make some. But first I must get some white miso. The ones I had before were red ones I think. That's why my soup was always too salty by the time I get the miso flavour. Any tips for vegetarian ones?
Looks like you are bend on getting your miso right. Well miso is produced by fermenting soybeans, and/or rice, barley, with salt and the fungus kōjikin, so it is vegan.
For the dashi stock, just use konbu and disregard the bonito.
As for the optional ingredients, stick to tofu, wakame, and various mushrooms such as enoki & bunashimeji. You can also add vegetables such as bean-sprout and japanese leeks.
Garnish with negi(japanese spring onions) and nori.
There you have a vegan miso soup!
Thanks pal. We make some and let you know of the outcome.
Bee Kheng... Unless your efforts of preparing the miso soup were tasted and verified independently, any conclusion is likely to be invalid.
May be, we should all go to Perth to verify collectively using either Australian clams or mussles. Just imagine, Malaysian (PR ?) preparing Japanese miso soup on Australian soil and results vested by all of us ......Yum..Yum
Hi Gee Sing,
Made some miso soup 2 days ago with the same mushroom and some japanese tofu. Thanks to you it tasted much, much better than those I made before but still not as good. Need to improve on it. Maybe need some 'clamy' taste, but my daughter's a vegetarian. And I didn't add the sake.
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