Miso, Tofu and Edamame Soup with Buckwheat Noodles
Fifteen minutes, one pan, and the rule that decides whether it is worth eating: the miso goes in off the heat. Boil it and you have thrown the best part away.
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp brown miso paste
- 200g firm tofu, drained and cubed
- 120g shelled edamame, frozen is fine
- 120g buckwheat soba noodles
- 2 spring onions, sliced, white and green kept apart
- 2 cloves of garlic, sliced
- A thumb of ginger, cut into matchsticks
- A sheet of nori or a pinch of dried wakame seaweed
- 2 handfuls of spinach or pak choi
- 1 tsp toasted sesame oil, and a few sesame seeds
- 900ml water
Method
- Cook the soba in plenty of unsalted water, a minute short of the packet time. Drain and rinse under cold water — soba releases starch and turns claggy if you skip this. Set aside.
- In the same pan, warm the sesame oil and soften the garlic, ginger and the white of the spring onions for two minutes. Do not colour them.
- Add 900ml water and the seaweed. Bring to a gentle simmer for five minutes.
- Add the tofu and edamame and heat through for two minutes, then the spinach for one more.
- Take the pan off the heat. Ladle a little of the hot broth into a small bowl, whisk the miso into it until smooth, and stir that back into the pan. Never boil miso. It is a live fermented food, and heat above roughly 60C kills the cultures and flattens the flavour into something salty and dull.
- Divide the noodles between two bowls, pour the soup over, and finish with the green spring onion and sesame seeds.
Why it works
This is a lunch that leaves you awake at three in the afternoon, which is the first thing most lunches fail at.
It carries about 29g of protein from three plant sources, and nothing in it produces the glucose spike that a sandwich does. Buckwheat is not wheat and not a grain; it is a seed, and it brings magnesium and a slower glucose response than white noodles.
Miso and tofu are both soy, and soy is where this gets interesting for women. Soy contains isoflavones, a type of phytoestrogen — compounds that bind weakly to oestrogen receptors. Meta-analyses of soy isoflavones and hot flushes report a modest reduction against placebo, but the effect size is small and the trials are inconsistent, partly because only some people carry the gut bacteria that convert the isoflavones into their more active form. Worth eating; not worth expecting much from a single bowl.
Miso is also fermented, which is why the off-the-heat rule matters. Live cultures are the argument for eating it rather than stock.
The magnesium is the reason this one carries a sleep tag. Magnesium holds an authorised claim for contributing to normal muscle function and the reduction of tiredness, and intake in the UK is commonly below the reference intake. A lunch that steadies blood sugar also helps: the 3am wake is often a glucose swing rather than a mind problem.
More: eating for your hormones · menopause, sleep and hormones.
