
What’s filled with vibrant vegetables, savory seasonings, healthful herbs and classic Asian flavors? This Vegan Miso Soup with Tofu and Vegetables, Korean-Style. You’ll love it as a vegan main course or as part of a rice or grain-centered meal.
Vegan Soup from Big Vegan by Robin Asbell
When my good friend Robin Asbell asked me to be part of an online potluck celebrating her brand new book, Big Vegan, I said “Yes!” real fast. Robin is an accomplished and prolific food writer and brilliant cooking teacher. She knows food and cooking, and her inspired recipes remind me how much pleasure there is in eating good-for-me food.
Though Robin lives up in Minnesota and I’m way down here in North Carolina, she got me in on today’s potluck feast, along with fellow bloggers around the country. Our various posts make up a meal from her book, giving you the flavor of its wide-ranging recipes, from scones and smoothies to soups, stews, pastas, sweet and savory pies, and more.
Robin ends this volume with a luscious round-up of dessert recipes, including Pistachio Thumbprints, Lemon Cake with Pomegranate Filling and Orange Glaze, Pumpkin-Cherry Bundt Cake, and Ginger-Mango Rice Pudding. My potluck contribution is a rustic and satisfying Korean-style soup, made with a hearty miso-powered stock and boasting a beautiful bowlful of textures and flavors: daikon radish, fresh shiitake mushrooms, tofu, potato, zucchini, and red peppers.
A Book Giveaway (Contest now closed)
By the way, Robin is providing me a copy of Big Vegan to give away to one of you wonderful readers. Leave a comment after this post, and I will draw a name to see who wins that treasury of great eating. Comment by November 10 to be included in the drawing. (Update: Contest closed)
What’s flavoring this vibrant, vegan soup?
Here are the ingredients for the soup stock. Starting at the top you’ll see:
- squares of dark green kombu,
- a sturdy and intensely flavored seaweed with a feisty little pile of
- coarsely ground chiles on top
- garlic cloves
- onion,
- dried shiitake mushrooms
- slices of daikon radish
- fresh ginger
- Miso, a fermented soybean paste beloved in Asian kitchens for centuries and an essential ingredient in the traditional cooking of Korea and Japan.
The miso paste in the bowl in the center is the engine that drives this soup to flavorful heights:
After simmering these ingredients together to make an excellent stock, I strained out all the taste-makers, keeping their mighty flavors and composting their remaining elements. Then I returned the soup pot of great stock to the stove and added the tasty items pictured below.
What vegetables are bringing color, crunch, nutrition and flavor to this vibrant vegan soup?
Here’s what added to the umami-filled stock:
- green onions, thinly sliced on the diagonal along with small strips of
- red Fresno chile, cut in thin strips (or use red bell pepper)
- zucchini
- fresh shiitakes
- potato
- soft tofu.
Once the stock was ready, I could have set it aside for later, or even frozen it for future soups. It would be a marvelous frozen-pantry item to have ready, definitely one to consider making in quantity to keep on hand. Big Vegan includes several recipes for making a quantity of vegan stock with various flavor profiles. The soup stock was rich and fragrant, and we were hungry, so I quickly forgot all thoughts of putting it aside and instead finished up the recipe, in the time it took the potatoes to cook. Then in went the zucchini and tofu, and supper was ready; fast, fresh, and fine. I wanted to make the soup with whatever I could find at my local Whole Foods. This meant using a dark miso with rich, very deep flavor. With red or white miso from an Asian market, this soup would be a little more delicate, a good choice for springtime meals. All in all, the recipe gave us a hearty, gorgeously-hued bowl of soup/stew, perfect for the rainy fall evening on which we ate it for supper. The true test of its deliciousness was when my high-school aged daughter (who had eaten dinner) wanted a bowl of Korean Miso-Tofu Soup with rice as an 11:13 p.m. homework snack. This Big Vegan soup would work well as one of several dishes in a rice-centered meal, or paired up with a salad and Quick Indian Flatbreads (page 106), or Sweet Potato Drop Biscuits (page 103), or your favorite sandwiches. For the recipe, scroll down to the end of this post. To learn more about Robin Asbell, and to check out all the bloggers and recipes in this Big Vegan Potluck, look at these links below. A baker’s dozen of recipes by food bloggers who love Big Vegan: Here we go!
Author Robin Asbell and Big Vegan
This is Robin’s website and blog:
You can find Big Vegan wherever books are sold, as they say. For a link to independent booksellers around the country, click here:
To find Big Vegan on Amazon, click here:
To enter my drawing for a copy of Big Vegan: leave a comment on this blogpost, and do so before November 10th. Many thanks to Robin Asbell and Chronicle Books for providing a big, gorgeous copy of this excellent, gorgeous and worthwhile book to share with one of my readers.
Korean Miso-Tofu Soup
(doenjang jigae)
4 large dried shiitake or black mushrooms
3 oz/85 g daikon, peeled and sliced
1/2 medium onion, sliced
1 6-in/15-cm piece dried kombu
7 tbsp/90 ml dark miso
4 slices/11 g fresh ginger
4 garlic cloves, halved
1 tsp red pepper flakes
2 cups/360 g cubed zucchini/courgette
8 oz/225 g cubed red potato
4 ox/115 g fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed
12 oz/3400 g silken tofu, cubed
1 large red Fresno chile, slivered, for garnish
2 large scallions/spring onions, diagonally sliced, for garnish
1. Put 2 qt/2 L water in a large pot and add the dried mushrooms, daikon, onion, kombu, miso, ginger, garlic, and pepper flakes. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer for 20 minutes. (I let mine simmer 45, since I wasn’t in a hurry and wanted its flavors to have more time to blossom). Line a colander with a sturdy paper towel/absorbent paper and set it over a bowl. Strain the liquid through the paper, carefully shifting the vegetables to the sides to help it drain completely. Discard the solids.
2. Add the broth to a large pot and bring it to a simmer. Add the zucchini/courgette, potato, and shiitakes and cook for about 10 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked all the way through.
3. Add the tofu and simmmer for about 5 minutes to heat through. Serve the soup in bowls garnished with the chile and scallions/spring onions.
Serves 4

Vegan Miso Soup with Tofu and Vegetables, Korean-Style
Based on a Korean soup called doenjang jigae, this vegan miso-centered soup can be a part of a rice or grain centered meal, or a vegan centerpie dish. Vary the vegetables to suit your taste and cook with the seasons.
Ingredients
Stock
- 4 large dried shiitake or black mushrooms
- 3 oz/85 g daikon, peeled and sliced
- 1/2 medium onion, sliced
- 1 6-in/15-cm piece dried kombu
- 7 tbsp/90 ml dark miso
- 4 slices/11 g fresh ginger
- 4 garlic cloves, halved
- 1 tsp red pepper flakes
Soup
- 2 cups/360 g cubed zucchini/courgette
- 8 oz/225 g cubed red potato
- 4 ox/115 g fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed
- 12 oz/3400 g silken tofu, cubed
- 1 large red Fresno chile, slivered, for garnish
- 2 large scallions/spring onions, diagonally sliced, for garnish
Instructions
- Put 2 qt/2 L water in a large pot and add the dried mushrooms, daikon, onion, kombu, miso, ginger, garlic, and pepper flakes.
- Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer for 20 minutes. (I let mine simmer 45, since I wasn't in a hurry and wanted its flavors to have more time to blossom).
- Line a colander with a sturdy paper towel/absorbent paper and set it over a bowl.
- Strain the liquid through the paper, carefully shifting the vegetables to the sides to help it drain completely; then discard the solids.
- Add the broth to a large pot and bring it to a simmer. Add the zucchini/courgette, potato, and shiitakes and cook for about 10 minutes, until the potatoes are cooked all the way through.
- Add the tofu and simmmer for about 5 minutes to heat through. Serve the soup in bowls garnished with the chile and scallions/spring onions.
Love the soup! I don’t eat food like this often enough: you know what I mean? Healthy, light, delicious…. we tend to eat food that is too rich and heavy. Wonderful book! I see more and more vegan recipes on food blogs and it all looks so good!
I do know what you mean, Jamie. Easy to be in a rut, even a delicious rut, and to think of this plant-centered cooking as difficult. Adding a few things to the pantry/fridge (miso and kombu) and picking a few new items from produce (fresh shittakes and daikon radish) was all it took. Robin’s book is gorgeous and use-full indeed.
I have to confess that I was put off by my first taste of miso soup – a ghastly instant thing, but this looks and sounds delicious. Maybe I’ll have to try again!
Rosemary, I recommend another expedition into miso-land. It is quite apart from the food of my childhood and experience, and not for everyone. But you may like it more on mutliple tastings. Or not — not everything is for everybody, is it? Happy cooking to you and let me know how your miso-adventure goes. Glad you stopped by.
My Dad uses daikon all the time and I really like it, but neither of us have used kombu…the recipe looks so easy and delicious I’ll have to give this a try. Thank you for sharing it!
When you buy kombu in the places where I have found it (Asian markets, Whole Foods, ‘health food’ stores), it comes in packages with at least 5 times what you would need for a given recipe. It is shelf-stable, probably forever, so you can keep it without worrying about its going off before you use it. I love its sea-flavor and the deep background it gives to subtle Japanese soups and stocks. As I’ve said in other comments, by the time I made the stock, i wished I had more of it for another meal or two. Next time I would definitely make a double or triple batch, as you have the ingredients on hand and are in the chopping process, where doing more as you go won’t be harder and will leave you with more meals to look forward to. Many thanks for visiting my blog,
This looks like such an awesome cookbook. I am loving the potluck idea, too. 🙂
Isn’t it wonderful? I only had to “cook” one dish (this fabulous soup), and I get to sample all these other dishes freshly made by my food-writing pals. Delicious! Thank you for visiting here, Janet.
It’s a pleasure to hold and an appetite-inspiration when you browse through its pages. The potluck was a treat for all of us. My first one, but I will enjoy doing it again when other friend’s books debut. It has an old-fashioned/new-fangled aspect that I like so much. Many thanks for stopping by.
I’d love to add this to my cookbooks. I’ve been vegan for about a year and 1/2 now and have about 4 cookbooks, I get most of the recipes I make from awesome blogs!!!
Good to hear from you, Gloria. “Big Vegan” is a big deal in the best possible way. Thanks for visiting my blog.
Sounds like a very authentic recipe! I would love to win a copy of this cookbook to see what other great vegan recipes are in there!
Thank you for reading this post, Genevieve. Just reading the recipe titles makes you hungry, and the photos confirm your suspicion that it is a treasure trove of excellent meals, snacks and treats.
I have been eyeing this recipe in Robin’s book. Now, I’m definitely going to make it. Thanks, Nancie!
Wonderful! I love your “Big Vegan” post not only for the mango-jicama salad but also for your hilarious story about that long-ago dining adventure.
Lovely recipe! I would love to win this book to learn more about vegan cooking!
Many thanks — I got all the ingredients at the Chapel Hill Whole Foods. We Triangle cooks are lucky to have so many places to choose from now when shopping for ingredients which used to take an expedition to find.