How Miso Helped Me Find My Community in San Francisco

I

knew nothing about miso when I moved to San Francisco.

For the whole first year, I felt out of place meandering the city’s foggy hills and longed to feel at home — or, short of that, to at least recreate the life I had back in New England. Instead of reaching out to new acquaintances, I socialized primarily through FaceTime calls with friends back East. Instead of exploring the city’s food scene, I frequently Ubered to familiar chain restaurants like Shake Shack. And when I cooked for myself, it was exclusively a spaghetti recipe I’d learned in high school.

This was back in 2021, and as I grappled with my own displacement, I was also becoming aware of the displacement around me. My new neighbors in the Mission consisted of well-to-do transplants and the houseless people that I passed by every day, splayed out along the sidewalks. The worst thing about it was my sense that I was becoming numb to these sights of human suffering. Was I doing anything to make San Francisco a better place? If not, I felt leaving the Bay was the only contribution I could make.

Amidst these tormented thoughts, one day I noticed my neighbor was reselling the Japanese chef’s Maori Murota’s book Japanese Home Cooking. Honestly, I had no intention of breaking our tacit vow to only ever nod silently at one another. But the book’s cover had a drawing of a bowl of ramen — the preferred meal of my favorite childhood manga character, Naruto. Immediately, I wanted nothing more but to forget my present worries, binge-watch the Chunin Exams arc and scarf down a big bowl of noodles. I finally introduced myself to the neighbor, an interior designer named Seth, and bought the book.

One obstacle remained: Murota’s instructions for preparing the broth, which called for hours of simmering and many different pots, intimidated novice-cook me. In contrast, Murota’s brown miso vegetable soup seemed more approachable, with a simple dashi base made by soaking shiitake mushrooms and kombu in water overnight. I was relieved that my local grocery store carried the soup’s key ingredient: brown miso paste.

Still, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut didn’t lend itself to exposure to Japanese cuisine. My mother cooked foods from our Ghanaian heritage like banku, a ball of corn dough served in rich stew, and I understood it was the fermenting of the corn’s starches that gave the banku its bittersweetness. This thick, salty paste, made from fermented soybeans, was something different.

As it turned out, the vegetables I’d selected for the soup emerged transformed and delicious after being steeped in the miso broth. The radishes had mellowed and were now earthy rather than spicy. Tender potatoes made the soup creamy. The broth itself was excellent, each sip full of savory umami yet still refreshing. In short, I was hooked on miso.

I soon began exploring more dishes I could make with the seasoning paste. Murota’s book contains a recipe for Japanese curry, and I found that adding miso deepened the sweetness from the apple and brought out the stew’s mouth-watering aromas. On another occasion, when I was recovering from a cold, I soothed myself with a cup of steaming hot water mixed with miso. I liked the nutty concoction so much that I now alternate between it and tea for breakfast.

Miso’s brilliance comes from both its versatility and complexity. It has an intricate flavor, and it’s also easy and rewarding to use. And my success with these new recipes encouraged me to embrace changes that extended beyond cooking.

For example, I wanted to share my newfound interest with others — and FaceTiming my friends on the East Coast was no longer cutting it. Two classmates I vaguely knew from college had also moved to San Francisco, and I decided to invite them to my first dinner party. I prepared a pot of my miso curry.

Before I knew it, Jason and I were discussing the merits of our respective approaches to chopping onions. As I squeezed a packet of miso into the stew, Daniel lamented that he forgot to bring the miso he had been cooking with.

Once we realized we were all aspiring cooks, any initial awkwardness melted away. The conversation rapidly bounced around from miso to cooking more generally to cooking memes and, finally, to whatever crossed our minds. Once we started eating the curry, however, the only sounds were our collective “mmms,” “wows” and slurps. We finished the meal so satisfied that we decided to start a biweekly dinner series, which has since become a cornerstone of my time in the Bay. These home-cooked meals provide the stability and comfort I longed for.

The dinners have also introduced me to a host of new foods and people. It turned out that the miso Daniel had forgotten to bring was from Aedan Koji Kitchen, a specialty shop in the Mission that makes and sells Japanese fermented foods. He claimed that it was the best miso he had ever eaten. Later that week I purchased a tub of their country miso, fermented with barley. Dumping a spoonful into a new batch of curry gave it a hint of seaweed taste. I thought to myself, yeah, Daniel was right. It really was the best miso I’d ever had.

Eventually, I took Koji Kitchen’s miso-making course, taught by the store’s friendly, theatrical owner, Mariko Grady. As participants in the class pressed freshly fermented soybeans into mason jars, Grady exclaimed that the blend of bacteria on our hands would render each person’s miso unique, gesturing her hands in a claw-like motion to impersonate our hand germs. She instructed us only to make miso when we are happy because vibes — along with the germs — wind up getting imparted into the miso.

Later, I learned that Grady had in fact co-founded a Japanese theater troupe with her college friends, and that she had acted with the troupe for 30 years before settling down in SF with her family. She never considered miso to be a big part of her life until she sold homemade miso to raise money for victims of the 2011 earthquake in Japan. The demand was so high that she embraced miso-making as a new career. She founded Aedan Fermented Foods as a farmers market stand in 2012 and opened her physical store in 2022. She’s now arguably the most widely acclaimed miso maker in the Bay. For Grady, making miso has never been a predictable or solitary journey; her actions unexpectedly changed her and those around her.

This has been my experience with miso as well: More than anything, my interest in miso has provided me with a hobby to anchor myself in this strange and new city. It has emboldened me to cook whatever intrigues me, to embrace change more generally and to invite friends to accompany me along the way.

Just the other week, Jason and I took BART to Berkeley’s Tokyo Fish Market, determined to recreate a smoked toro, or tuna belly, that we had tried at a friend’s house. Back at my apartment, as the tendrils of smoke rose from the slices of blowtorched fish, Jason remarked that a day like this would have surprised him a year ago. I couldn’t have agreed more.

It had been over a year since I had Ubered to Shake Shack, and calling friends back East was no longer my default weekend activity. Because of miso, San Francisco has become a lot less lonely and a lot more tasty. And I am excited for whatever changes come next.