Mushroom Stock

Good for miso or for cooking buckwheat noodles in. I almost never follow this recipe, though.

• 1 liter jar nearly full of water (~600g)
• dried mushrooms, shiitake usually, shredded. matsutaki if you can find some (5 to 6g or so)
• 1T rice wine vinegar
• 1/8t soy sauce (miso, later, provides more salt)
• dried seaweed (2g or so)
• optional, dried octopus or bonito flakes (not more than 2g)

The mushrooms probably need a bit of a boil to extract the flavor? Really need to do some taste tests on just simmer versus a longer boil. Too much octopus can be a problem, especially if it's not just octopus and includes milk or sugar.

Other good additions are dried onion (sweet), pomegranate peel and rind (bitter), etc.

Uses

Miso Soup

Break up some miso paste in the mushroom stock, add fresh grated ginger, simmer a bit and ensure all the paste got broken up. Without ginger you may need a little bit of sugar from somewhere to help tame the salt? Strain out the ginger, unless it was grated pretty fine. Maybe add some chives.