Miso soup is about as pedestrian and unremarkable a dish as you’ll find in Japanese cuisine, or at least that’s the common perception of it. Imagine a bowl of miso soup, and chances are you’ll be picturing a cloudy broth with a few thin slices of green onion, some cubes of tofu, and some bits of green seaweed floating around in it. This is a completely normal bowl of miso soup and exactly what you’re likely to wind up with if miso soup comes as part of your meal at a Japanese restaurant.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with such a bowl of soup, and that reliable sameness can even be comforting. It can also be pretty dull, though, if that’s the only version of miso soup you ever have. Fortunately, there are other versions out there. In varying its ingredients, an immense array of combinations can be made.
I first started thinking about this for purely practical reasons. Most mornings, I make my wife’s breakfast, and have done so for almost eight years now. There’s always rice, usually served with either natto or an egg, and there’s always miso soup. It didn’t take very long to realize the need for variety, particularly with the soup. And changing things up every day does require a bit of planning and careful shopping, but it’s easily worth the effort. It means a better meal for her, and it’s a way for me to start the day with some creativity in the course of taking care of my favorite human.
In making miso soup, there are three main decisions that need to be made each time:
- What kind of soup base (dashi) will be used
- What kind or kinds of miso paste will be used
- What mushrooms, vegetables, or other solid ingredients will go in
Of course, if you’ve only got one miso and one type of dashi on hand, and only a couple of old vegetables in the refrigerator that need to be used before they go bad, you just throw those things together without any additional thought. Might not be a very inspired bowl of soup, but it’ll probably work just fine.
It’s a lot more interesting and enjoyable, though, when there are more options available. Of course, take it too far and you’ll set yourself up for decision fatigue and the sort of culinary paralysis that comes from having so many options that you can’t actually choose among them, but in practice this basically never happens. If you have a couple types of miso, a few dashi options, and a handful of whatever’s interesting and in season at the greengrocer, you’re well positioned to make a range of variations that keep things interesting day-to-day.
Just how many different versions of miso soup could you make, though, if you really went for it? This is a question that I kept coming back to for years, and recently I finally decided to tackle it. What follows is an imperfect but enthusiastic exploration of the staggering combinatorics of miso soup.
The more rigorous among you may come away from this exercise with serious objections to my method, and that’s fine. I’m a big nerd, but not a math nerd. And while I am absolutely a food nerd, I am not a food historian, food scientist, a trained chef, or any other sort of expert. This whole thing is somewhat arbitrary and imprecise, but I’ll at least try to explain why I did things the way I did. At some point, once I am further along in my research journey into miso soup, I may do a more exhaustive analysis that includes even more variables and possibilities, but for the sake of a blog post, one must know their limits.
I’ve tried to categorize potential ingredients in a sensible way: dashi, miso, proteins, vegetables, mushrooms, and seaweeds.
At very least, for miso soup you need dashi and miso, so those two categories are non-negotiable and must be included. For the other categories (proteins, vegetables, mushrooms, and seaweeds), you don’t have to include any of them, though in practice you usually throw a few in. For some of those categories, you’ll typically choose no more than one option to include, while with other categories you can add a few. The upper limits to what might be added to each category is based on personal experience and observation, plus some pragmatism. While my list includes forty different vegetables (all documented in extant recipes) that you might add to miso soup, you’re never going to add all forty. Or thirty or twenty or even ten. Though a cooking pot might be large, a bowl of soup is a small thing and there’s simply a limit to what you can reasonably fit, which is why I set the upper limit to four.
In researching this, I looked at hundreds of recipes. Hundreds of variations. Trends I noticed are that there tends to be only one dashi used per soup, one (usually) or two types of miso (a blend), one protein, a small number of vegetables, a mushroom or two, and one type of seaweed. Of course, this being food, there’s all sorts of stuff you could do with the concept of miso soup that are beyond the scope of this exercise. Even things as simple as topping your bowl with a little chili oil or ground sesame seed are excluded here, as variables need to be somewhat controlled or the whole thing will balloon out of proportion.
In reality, there are many more options for ingredients than I have included here. I limited miso to eighteen regional varieties, for example, though if you were to go out looking at actual options, you’d find hundreds of commercially available miso pastes of different styles. After lots of research and tweaking of lists, I came up with the following categories and numerical requirements for the calculations:
- Dashi: 10 total, minimum inclusion 1, maximum inclusion 1
- Miso: 18 total, minimum inclusion 1, maximum inclusion 2
- Proteins: 12 total, minimum inclusion 0, maximum inclusion 1
- Vegetables: 40 total, minimum inclusion 0, maximum inclusion 4
- Mushrooms: 10 total, minimum inclusion 0, maximum inclusion 2
- Seaweeds: 7 total, minimum inclusion 0, maximum inclusion 1
What does this mean? Well, you have to use some sort of dashi, but not more than one. With miso, you’ll want to select one or maybe do a blend of two. For vegetables, you don’t have to include any, and you wouldn’t normally include more than four. You get the idea. These minimums/maximums are based on observation, mainly, and the need to put some guardrails on this thing. For the purpose of this post, I won’t get into the specific options comprising the above categories, but will explore them more in subsequent posts.
The mathematics of this are far beyond my knowledge and ability, so I would like to thank @chrisecramer.bsky.social and @notruescottman.bsky.social for their help in actually figuring this out. Combinatorics is a fascinating area, but my math skills petered out in about tenth grade and there was simply no way I was going to manage the calculations on my own.
In any case, given the numbers outlined above, we wind up with an astonishing 1,016,728,352,640 possible variations on a bowl of miso soup. If you were to be more rigorous and better articulated some of these categories, thereby expanding the options per category, you’d wind up with an even more absurd figure. Though not literally infinite, on a human scale the possibilities may as well be.
With that number, which again is still far short of the actual number of possible variations of miso soup, you could have a different version of miso soup every day, never a repeat, for nearly 2.8 billion years. Were you immortal and had the time to spare in attempting this, you’d still probably get tired of miso soup in general with nearly 2.8 billion years still on the clock. Even if you lasted a full century trying a new one each day before throwing in the towel, you’d still have only tried 0.00000359% of the total possible combinations as outlined above.
Consider, too, that in addition to there being more actual options than are listed, nearly all of the possible ingredients have possible variations within them. Shiitake mushrooms, for example, come in many sizes and styles. They can be grown locally or at industrial scales, might be cultivated in mushroom beds or on logs, and can be harvested at different stages in their growing cycle, yielding a variety of grades, flavors, and aromas.
There’s also more that you can do than just slicing something up and chucking it in the pot. Sure, you can make some thin slices of green onion and keep it simple, but you can also grill it first, giving it some color or even a little char, before cutting it into larger, more rustic chunks. This would yield a richer, more complex flavor profile that is especially complementary to certain other ingredients, such as a dark red miso and/or eggplant.
There are more than a trillion possible variations of miso soup you can make without even getting especially ambitious with potential ingredients, and I find that absolutely delightful. Sometimes I get stuck towards the end of the week, trying to make a fresh version of miso soup with what I have on hand, but knowing the sheer number of possibilities out there does help keep things interesting. At very least, it’s a good reminder that I should be having fun with it. After all, no matter how long I keep up this habit of making miso soup nearly every morning, there’s never any reason to run out of new things to try. Any shortage of ingredients is only ever going to be temporary, and if I go to the supermarket with a sense of possibility, it’s pretty much always going to be enjoyable.
This post is an adaptation of something from a larger project surrounding miso soup. There will be a miso soup zine I’ll be putting out once I figure out how I want to handle it. My goal was to put out the zine this week, actually, but then I realized that I kind of wanted to change almost everything a out how I’d put it together, so for now I’m just going to put out a handful of miso soup posts here on the blog and will follow up with the zine once I’ve gotten things better sorted out.
If you want to support these things, please consider backing my travel book project, which you can do for as little as USD $10. In addition to the travel book itself, I’m throwing in the various zines I’m working on, too, so when you back the book, you’ll actually get a lot of other things along with it in the long run.
