Tastes of Japan’s Tonjiru

I’m the worst person for eating healthy during winter. Winter time I am like a bear and I want to hibernate. But I’m also like a bear preparing for hibernation so during my hibernation I eat everything. So, for dinner I tend to want to make things that no matter how much of it I eat, I don’t feel so terrible because everything it contains is just good for me. Soups often do the trick. 

Watching one of my friends YouTube channels I was inspired to make some Tonjiro, or pork soup. Part of her work has her as a cohost for a cooking show online. Tastes of Japan. So far the recipes are really good and it’s all Japanese food.

I followed the recipe for Tonjiru but I changed up some of the ingredients. I left out all the konyaku because I’m not really a fan of the spongy texture and the initial smell. 

If you watch the show you can figure out what to do to get rid of the smell which is nice but I still plan to leave it out. I also left out the firm tofu that they had used. Instead, I combined the deep fried tofu skins with the firm tofu, I just had fried tofu.

There is one thing that I definitely didn’t want to leave out and that was the burdock root. I had actually forgotten to buy it while doing our weekly shopping so I specifically went to the store to get some. 

When buying burdock there’s two choices you can usually make - clean or unclean. The unclean version was ¥20 cheaper so I decided to go with that one.

Burdook is a root vegetable. Unlike a potato you can’t just wash it with your hands, but you don’t wanna really peel it like a carrot either. My friend’s mother had actually taught me how to clean a burdock root. You take the back end of a butter knife and scrape while rinsing underwater. This allows you to scrape the burdock without taking away too much of the flesh. This is important because burdock root is really thin. I think these are the only changes I made to the recipe.

This recipe really is so simple that even my son, who is five years old, could do it. He of course needed a little help cutting things. 

But he really enjoyed adding miso soup and mixing it together. Just like the video had taught us we separated the miso soup, put it in once before boiling and then after for a little bit of a stronger kick a flavor.

I wanted more inspiration for what I should make next so while enjoying our delicious steaming bowl of pork soup we watched a marathon of episodes of my friends cooking show. 

Having a recipe gave me an excuse to put in the ingredients that I liked instead of the ingredients that my husband likes into our miso soup. Because that’s basically what pork soup is - just miso soup with pork in it.

I have to say that the flavor of the pork really gives it nice depth. I’ll probably be the weirdo and add chicken next time something I have never seen inside of miso soup. But honestly as a former vegetarian you could easily just leave out the pork have regular miso soup and the protein in the tofu is enough to get you by.