Do soy sauce and miso contain fish?

Not in their basic form: soy sauce is soy, wheat, salt and koji, and miso is soy, rice or barley, and salt. The trap is in prepared versions. Some bottled dipping sauces are mentsuyu or dashi-shoyu, let down with bonito stock, and there are miso pastes labelled dashi-iri, with the dashi already blended in. Look for katsuo or bonito on the label.

Which restaurant dishes most often hide bonito dashi?

Miso soup, soba and udon broths, tempura dipping sauce, chawanmushi, and many simmered vegetable dishes that contain no visible meat. Yudofu, goma ae, sunomono and a cucumber maki, on the other hand, are safe. Ask about the broth rather than about meat, because a cook does not think of dashi as an animal ingredient.

How long does homemade dashi keep?

Two to three days in a sealed jar in the fridge. It freezes very well, and an ice cube tray is the most practical format: a few cubes make soup for two. Shiitake soaking water keeps the same way and beats any granulated stock.

What do I do with the kombu and shiitake after making dashi?

Do not throw them out; temple cooking wastes nothing. Rehydrated shiitake can be sliced back into a soup, a rice dish or a noodle topping. The kombu can be cut into fine strips and simmered with soy sauce, sugar and rice vinegar until dark and tender, a preparation called tsukudani that is eaten in small amounts with rice.

Japanese vegetarian cooking, beyond sushi

Eating vegetarian in Japan asks for vigilance rather than sacrifice. The country holds a monastic tradition of cooking without animal products that goes back eight centuries, and a stack of everyday dishes that happen to be meat-free without anyone deciding so. The trap sits elsewhere: in the stock.

Shojin ryori, cooking from the temples

Shojin ryori comes from Zen Buddhist monasteries, where nobody takes a life and nothing goes to waste. The monks cook without animal flesh, and without garlic or onion, judged too stimulating. What remains is seasonal vegetables and soy in all its forms, with seaweed carrying the background flavour.

The constraint produced a technique. Lacking animal fat, temple cooks pushed hard on drawing umami out of dried mushrooms and kelp, and they learned to use every part of a vegetable, peels included. You can still visit a temple in Kyoto and eat this way today.

Yudofu shows that economy of means: tofu poaching in water scented with kombu, served with a sauce on the side. Nothing else. The dish rests entirely on the quality of the tofu, which is why Japanese cooks buy theirs from a specialist.

Dashi, the real obstacle

Dashi is the foundation stock of Japanese cooking. The common version pairs kombu with katsuobushi, shavings of dried bonito. That fish hides in the miso soup at a restaurant, in the broth of a so-called vegetarian ramen, and in nearly every granulated dashi sold in sachets. Turn the packet over and look for the word bonito or katsuo.

The vegetarian version has always existed, since temples never used fish. Two ingredients cover it.

Ingredient	What it brings	How to extract it
Kombu	Clean umami, sea salinity	Cold soak overnight, or heat without boiling
Dried shiitake	Depth, a woody note	Soak in warm water, keep the water
Kanpyo, vegetable peels	Light sweetness	Short simmer, a top-up

The rule that matters: never boil kombu. Past a bare tremble it releases a sliminess and a bitterness that spoil the stock. Lift it out as bubbles start to climb.

That stock becomes the base of a miso soup, where the miso goes in off the heat to protect its ferments, and the broth of a vegan ramen in which shiitake supply the body that meat gives elsewhere.

Tofu is not one product

Saying you dislike tofu is like saying you dislike cheese. The word covers textures with almost nothing in common.

Four textures, four uses

Silken tofu, very fragile, gets eaten with a spoon, cold in summer or floating in soup. Firm tofu takes a pan and a grill. Between them, standard momen tofu suits braising. Apart from those, fried aburaage and freeze-dried koyadofu play specific parts in simmered dishes.

Agedashi tofu shows what handling changes: silken tofu drained, rolled in potato starch, fried fast, then flooded with warm dashi. The crust holds for a few minutes before it softens, and that window is the point of the dish. Serve it straight away.

Press before you fry

Before any pan cooking, press firm tofu for twenty minutes under a weight. The water it holds stops it browning, and most failures start there.

A Japanese meal is built from small plates

The everyday Japanese format, called ichiju sansai, brings together rice, a soup and a few side dishes. Nobody sets a single centrepiece in the middle of the table. That structure works in your favour, because it asks for simple preparations instead of one showpiece.

The small plates around the rice

A cooked salad always earns its place. Goma ae blanches spinach and dresses it with toasted sesame seeds ground in a mortar, five minutes of work. Against it, sunomono supplies acidity, cucumbers salted then rinsed and dressed in rice vinegar, which clear the palate between richer mouthfuls.

For the rice, vegetable onigiri turn leftovers into a meal you can carry, and kappamaki reminds you that a cucumber roll is the oldest roll in the repertoire, not a reduced version of something else.

What beginners get wrong

Two habits make the difference, and neither needs equipment. First, season your vinegared rice and taste it on its own: bland rice sinks anything you lay on top of it. Second, never boil miso, which loses its aroma in a few seconds too many.

Buy fewer ingredients and better ones. A brewed soy sauce and an unpasteurised miso will change your cooking more than ten extra condiments. Japanese home cooking runs on few things, for a long time.