As a nutrition researcher whose work centers mainly on local food, I have found that when we choose local food, food that the soil and climate are naturally suited to grow, it affects not only its freshness and ripeness, but also how well it meets the needs of the body.
From the perspective of local food, Japanese cuisine may seem distant to a historian of the Levant at first. Its ingredients, climate, techniques, and daily habits grew out of another landscape. For many years I looked at it from that distance: with curiosity, but also with the caution of someone whose work is rooted in the foods of this region.
Over time, though, I began to notice that some culinary ideas travel in surprising ways. Fermentation, preservation in salt, deep savory pastes and sauces: these are not only Japanese stories. They appear again and again in historical food cultures, including ours. One of the most fascinating examples is miso.
Miso is usually thought of as Japanese, and rightly so in its modern form. But when we follow its wider history, and place it alongside ancient fermented sauces and pastes such as garum and muri, it begins to look less foreign. Not local in the simple sense, perhaps, but familiar in a deeper historical sense: part of an old human conversation about preserving protein, deepening flavor, and making food last.
Still, there is one important ingredient from Japanese cooking that is very much worth knowing: miso, the paste-like substance usually made from soybeans, considered highly nourishing and an inseparable part of Japanese cuisine. Fortunately, it may not be entirely accurate to call it only Japanese. The fascinating history of miso reaches all the way to our region, and that makes it possible even for someone like me, who tries to stay close to local food traditions, to bring it into the kitchen wholeheartedly.
What Is Miso?
Miso is the product of fermentation. Fermentation is a natural method of preserving food that developed at the very dawn of history and is still used today. Sometimes we do not even realize that a food is fermented. Among the fermented foods we use today are yogurt, labaneh, aged cheeses, wine, vinegar, sauerkraut, olives, homemade pickles, and even sourdough bread.
The way miso is made places it in a family of fermented foods that use salt in the fermentation process to help protect the food from spoilage. The “technology” used to make miso is called high-salt fermentation, or savory fermentation, and its products are pastes and sauces. To create the paste-like texture, a salt solution of 13 percent or more is added to a protein-rich mixture. This causes the proteins to break down, while preventing spoilage and the development of harmful bacteria. As with yogurt, the fermentation is carried out by microorganisms. I will explain the process in more detail below.
Miso in East Asia
To understand how miso came into being, and what our connection to it might be, we need to assemble a small puzzle that begins with a brief historical survey of miso’s development in East Asia.
The original name of what we now know as miso is chiang, and it comes from China. A product believed to be chiang is mentioned as early as the third century BCE, though the term chiang, meaning “paste-like spread,” appears in Chinese writings only in 85 BCE. Researchers believe that this product was not made from soybeans, but rather from meat or fish. The meat and fish were mixed with rice wine and a strong salt solution, then preserved in clay vessels to ferment for about one hundred days. The paste that formed was used as a seasoning and as a base for soup. It was a rich and available source of protein for the poor, and also a delicacy for the upper classes. Chiang made from soybeans is first mentioned in China only in 535 CE.
The earliest known recipe for making miso had two main stages. In the first stage, soybeans were soaked and cooked, then mashed and shaped into balls. The balls were placed inside rice straw and hung beneath the house. After about thirty days, mold developed on the balls. These were the microorganisms. In the second stage, the balls were transferred to an 18 percent salt solution for about a year. During this period, the proteins broke down and both solids and liquid were formed. The liquid was soy sauce, and the solids were miso.
The connection between miso and soy sauce is emphasized by the meaning of the Chinese word for soy sauce: chiang-yu, meaning the liquid pressed from chiang. The word tamari comes from tamaru, meaning to accumulate or collect, and refers to the liquids that collect during the production of miso. Shoyu is a Japanese word, and it appeared only in the modern period.
Over the generations, chiang spread beyond China to Korea, Indonesia, Japan, of course, and many other East Asian countries, becoming a central ingredient in the region’s food culture. In addition to meat-based miso and soybean miso, different forms of miso developed across East Asia, each according to the grains, legumes, and ingredients common in that place: rice, barley, soy, wheat, or animal-based ingredients such as crabs, shrimp, deer, eggs, and poultry. Miso-like preparations were also made from fruits and vegetables: eggplant, daikon, radish, green leaves, melon, peaches, and apricots.
Although the common view is that miso originated in China, researchers still debate this question. It is therefore important to mention that a fermented fish-based sauce also developed in Japan independently, alongside the development of chiang in China. Even today, animal-based miso remains very popular in Japan, where there are more than twenty-eight different kinds of miso.
Weren’t We Talking About the Middle East?
In our region, too, a product made by high-salt fermentation developed in ancient times. Its better-known name is garum. Pliny the Elder, the Roman historian and naturalist of the first century CE, described garum as being made from the parts of fish that were not eaten. These parts were soaked in brine and became a sauce. The by-product of this fermentation was allex, the sediment of the garum, which was used as both medicine and food and was sometimes produced separately from the garum itself.
This product bears a surprising resemblance to Chinese miso, which was also originally made from fish. There is even earlier evidence suggesting that in 2800 BCE the Egyptians exported salted fish to the Phoenicians, who lived along a narrow coastal strip from the coast of Lebanon down to the Carmel range. The Phoenicians traded these fish along the Mediterranean coast. Preserved birds and fish appeared in the tax records of Assyrian kings, and also in the lists of offerings in Phoenician port cities. In Philistia, fish are mentioned both as dried in baskets with salt and as preserved in brine.
From Garum to Muri
Following the development of garum around the Mediterranean basin, medieval Arabic nutritional literature tells of a product called muri. A fifth-century Greek writer named Palladius mentions a vegetarian muri made from plums that had rotted for three months. Until recently, researchers saw muri as the equivalent of Mediterranean garum. But newer research, which has tried to trace the roots of muri in the medieval Islamic empire, found that the muri in question was not necessarily identical to garum.
A Jewish physician named Isaac ben Solomon Israeli, who was born in Egypt and lived in Tunisia in the tenth century, mentions in his dietary writings both muri made from fish and muri made from barley. When he discusses the temperament of these products, he says that fish muri is less hot than barley muri.
A tenth-century Arabic cookbook gives us an idea of how muri was made. The first stage describes preparing a dough from barley flour with a great deal of salt, to protect it from worms. The dough was wrapped in grape leaves and buried in ash for forty days, until mold developed. The moldy dough was then used like a sourdough starter, to transfer the mold and bacteria, and from the resulting mixture small loaves were prepared. These loaves were then used to make muri sauce. One researcher who tried to recreate this recipe noted that the dough smelled like soy sauce.
Arabic muri was better known as fish muri in the western part of the empire, and as barley muri in the eastern part. In the west, both forms were used, while in the east, barley muri was used almost exclusively. Its source was apparently in the region of Persia, even before Islam. Susan Weingarten, a researcher from Tel Aviv University, found in her research that the Jerusalem Talmud mentions garum in several places, while the Babylonian Talmud mentions kutach, which we identify with Persian muri. Pesachim 43a states: “You shall eat no leavened thing, including Babylonian kutach, Median beer, Edomite vinegar, and Egyptian zitom.” The Talmud referred to local concepts and matters, so it is possible to assume that barley muri was more common in the regions of Babylonia and Persia, while garum was more common along the coast and in the southern Levant.
In Japan, vegetarian miso has become very common and part of everyday food. In our region, this did not happen. Fish muri was indeed common and had an important nutritional role in antiquity, but it disappeared over the course of history. With it disappeared barley muri as well, a more domestic product that had been common inland, in the region of Persia.
As someone who consumes natural local food, I would have preferred to bring garum back into my diet, but using fish today is complicated for many reasons. Therefore, the closest relative for me is barley miso, and it is never too late. Should we make barley miso a central ingredient in our diet?
Miso (and Muri) as a Multivitamin
Miso, like other fermented foods, contains various acids. The central one is lactic acid, as in yogurt, which makes it very easy to digest and friendly to the stomach. Miso contains about 5 percent unsaturated fat, rich in lecithin and linoleic acid, as well as B12 and vitamins from the B-complex group.
Although miso is made from legumes or grains, it is low in phytic acid. Phytic acid protects the seed’s stores before germination, but in our digestive system it can interfere with the breakdown and absorption of vitamins and minerals.
Miso usually contains 12 to 13 percent complete protein, and can sometimes reach 20 percent. This protein includes all eight essential amino acids. Chicken contains about 21 percent protein, beef about 20 percent, and milk about 3 percent. But the quantity of protein is not the only important factor; its availability to the body, its biological value or NPU, matters as well. The breakdown of proteins through fermentation creates proteins with very high biological availability. Fish has an availability level of about 80 percent, beef about 67 percent, and miso about 72 percent.
In 100 grams of miso made from soy and barley, there is 13.5 percent protein, with an NPU of 72 percent. In other words, it contains 9.7 grams of protein available to the body. A hamburger of the same weight contains 13 percent protein, with 67 percent availability, so only 8.7 grams of its protein will be available.
Many studies conducted in Japan have suggested that miso may have beneficial and protective effects in relation to illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, liver disease, and more.
Miso contains about 12 percent salt, which is certainly a substantial amount. But if we compare miso soup with another soup to which salt or soup powder is added, the amount of salt in the miso soup may be lower. And soup, of course, is the main use of miso.
The simplest way to prepare miso is the way millions of Japanese people eat it every day: as soup for breakfast. Miso soup is very nourishing as a morning meal and very simple to prepare. Dissolve one tablespoon of miso, or less if that concentration is too strong for you, in a cup of hot water and drink. To enrich it, you can add any kind of dried seaweed, chopped green onion, shiitake mushrooms, steamed vegetables, and more.
If you want to prepare family-style miso soup, use vegetable or fish stock and add one tablespoon of miso for each cup of water. It is best to add the miso at the end of cooking and not bring the soup to a boil after the miso has been added. This preserves more of miso’s nutritional benefits.
Notes
- This article is not a scientific paper, but it is derived from a scientific paper I wrote on this subject. Anyone interested in the list of sources for further reading is welcome to contact me by email, and I will gladly respond.
- Unlike olives, which are fermented in a low-concentration salt solution.
- Through hydrolysis.
- In fish-based miso, the molding process is not required because of the bacteria found in the fish’s intestines. Today, to shorten the process, prepared bacterial extract or prepared mold is used.
- Temperament: ancient medical theory was based on four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, from which the world and its creatures were composed. The four elements are embodied in four qualities: heat, dryness, cold, and moisture. The combination of the four elements and four qualities in a person creates that person’s temperament.
- The salt and burial in ash protect against worms.
