Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Recipes

Healing Mushroom Miso Soup

My dad credits this soup with helping him survive lung cancer and finally conquering his life-long battle with obesity. This healing soup, made with shitake, portabella and maitake mushrooms, revived his spirit when he was diagnosed. He remembered how his mother, my Bubbe Mary, cooked for him when he was in a coma after being beaten up by a bunch of bullies in the sixth grade taunting him about his weight. Bubbe said it was the smells from her kitchen that brought him back to life. Bubbe was gone, but when he was sick he remembered Bubbe’s words… “soup is good food,” eventually turning her beliefs into a famous advertising tag line for Campbell’s Home-Style brand soup.

Related

1 (2–3 inch) fresh organic ginger root, peeled and coarsely chopped
½ organic onion, chopped
1 tablespoon of oil of choice (or ghee) 6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup sliced mixed raw mushrooms — shiitake, portabella, maitake
Water, or you can use 64 ounces of vegetable broth
1 cup organic dried Shiitake mushrooms
½ pound tofu, diced
¼ cup organic miso paste (There are many types of miso to choose from. I like sweet white miso — this is a paste not a powder — and you can add a little more if you like a strong miso flavor)
1 head of roasted garlic cloves, peeled and mashed
1 teaspoon of salt (preferably a truffle salt or good-quality Himalayan salt) or more to taste

1) In a stockpot, sauté the ginger and onion in the oil or ghee until the onion just begins to sweat. Add the raw garlic and raw mushrooms and cook till browned. Then add the water or broth to the pot and bring to a slow boil. Add the dried mushrooms and tofu and then lower the heat, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the dried shiitakes are fully reconstituted.

2) While the pot of mushrooms is simmering, ladle about 6 ounces of the broth into a separate bowl and add the miso paste to it, stirring until dissolved. Next, add the mashed roasted garlic to this mixture. Once thoroughly combined, add the garlic-miso mixture back into the pot. Stir well and enjoy all the healing properties of this magic broth.

Note: Miso is a traditional Japanese fermented soy or rice paste. Its healing power is often compared to chicken soup, especially when paired with immune boosters like garlic, ginger, onion and shiitake mushrooms.

Related

Recipe from “My Fat Dad: A Memoir of Food, Love, Family, and Recipes” by Dawn Lerman, Berkley Books/2015.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.