Osuimono: Clear Broth with Fish

Osuimono is the other basic Japanese soup: the main alternative to miso soup when you’re making 1 soup-1 dish. At its best, osuimono is a very light broth: it should never be weighed down with too many ingredients, too much salt or – and this is a common mistake – too much soy sauce.

The basic ingredients are water, dashi, soy sauce and sake, but there’s a lot of room for variation with what you put into it. Dropping a beaten egg in it, for instance, works wonderfully. For this recipe, however, I used a filet of sole, some spring onion and lime rinds.

In Japan, I would use sea bream rather than sole, but we’re having trouble finding sea bream in Montreal, and frozen sole filets work well like this. Also, in Japan I would use yuzu rinds – which are soft enough to eat – rather than lime rinds – which you have to discard before serving. Living so far from home, you have to make some compromises.

Ingredients (for two)

for the broth

• Water – 1.5 cups
• Dashi – ¾ of a teaspoon
• Soy sauce – ½ a teaspoon
• Sake – 2 teaspoons
• Salt – just a pinch (less than ½ a teaspoon)
• Konbu – one small section*

*For standard clear broth you can skip the konbu, but for this recipe with fish, it’d be better to add a bit.

• Sole – 1 filet
• Spring onion – one
• Lime rind – one small section

Preparation

• Cut sole filet into chopstick-friendly squares and salt it very lightly
• Peel a bit of rind off of a lime
• Slice spring onion in very thin

Cooking

Make the broth

1. Add konbu to 1.5 cups of cool water and bring to a boil
   (When you don’t have konbu, just boil the water)
2. Add dashi
3. Add sake, salt and soysauce and bring to a boil again
4. Set fire on low and put on a back-burner
5. Add lime rind

*For simple osuimono, steps 1 to 4 are all you need.

Prepare fish and finish

1. Heat a non-stick pan – without adding oil – over a medium flame
2. Lightly grill the sole filet pieces on the pan for a few minute on each side until it gets a little bit of color (handle the fish carefully to keep the segments from coming apart)
3. Place grilled fish in the bottom of a large soup bowl and sprinkle spring onions on top of it
4. Pick out the konbu and the lime rind, discard
5. Ladle the broth onto the bowls over the fish

Serve up as soup in 1 soup-1 dish.

Itadakimasu!