Freshly cooked rice, pounded until about half the grains break, is pressed around skewers and browned, then cut into pieces that soak up chicken broth and turn chewy, much like rice cake. Kiritanpo comes from Akita Prefecture, where the rice is traditionally wrapped on cedar skewers and grilled over charcoal; this version browns the sticks in a dry pan instead.
Doenjang, not gochujang, seasons this crab stew, so it tastes nutty and savory before it tastes hot, with the chili flakes and Cheongyang pepper staying in the background.
Blue crabs in spring are packed with meat and taste noticeably sweet. Here they are halved and simmered in their shells with chili flakes and Cheongyang peppers, and the closer to live the crabs are when they go in, the more of that sweetness comes through.
Thick bone-in rounds of carp and the head simmer for close to three hours, until the flesh flakes at a touch of the chopsticks and the miso broth turns thick. This style from the Saku area of Nagano adds miso in three stages. The first portion is added with sugar to season the fish, a middle portion ground smooth with cooked rice thickens the broth, and the last is stirred in near the end for aroma.
Soybean pulp (kongbiji, the solids left from making soy milk or tofu) drinks up the anchovy stock as it cooks, and with the pre-fried ground pork and sour kimchi mixed through it, the pot ends up thick enough that a spoon leaves a hollow behind.
Once the bean sprouts are in, the lid goes on and stays shut for seven minutes. Koreans have long held that this keeps the beany smell away, and with those seven minutes included, the soup goes from prep to bowl in about 15 minutes.
Bean sprouts go into a milky broth made from toasted dried pollack, and it is the soup many Koreans make the morning after drinking. The sprouts cook briefly with the lid off, so their stems stay crisp.
The kimchi decides almost everything here. Well-fermented, sour kimchi goes in with plenty of its brine, which turns the broth a deep brick red; if yours is not sour yet, a little vinegar makes up the difference.
In Aizu this soup was served to guests, and at weddings it was one dish people could go back to for more as often as they liked. The broth combines bonito dashi with the soaking water from dried scallops, and since the scallops and mushrooms need eight hours in the fridge, the work starts the day before.
Kuuri means ice and jishi means meat, but the ice here has nothing to do with temperature: it is the egg that spreads across the clear broth in soft white drifts, like snow. Before the war, when eggs were scarce in Okinawa, families made it at Obon to welcome the spirits of their ancestors.
In Akita this soup belongs to Little New Year, and with daikon, potato, mountain yam, wild greens, tofu and candied chestnuts in it, it is made in one big pot. Near the end, yaki-zunda, small cakes of green soybean flour and glutinous rice flour browned in a pan, go in for a final five-minute simmer.
Red lentils fall apart on their own as they simmer, so the soup thickens to a golden, spoonable body without any added thickener. Cumin and turmeric make it deep in both color and aroma.
The lobster meat is boiled and set aside, and the soup itself is made from the shells. They are browned in butter until the bottom of the pot colors, flamed with cognac, then simmered with tomato and fish stock for more than half an hour before being strained out. The meat comes back only at the very end, after the cream.
In this Finnish soup, salmon and potatoes cook in fish stock and the pot is finished with cream and dill. The potatoes, carrot and leek are almost tender before the salmon goes in for its last few minutes, so a spoonful comes up with large flakes of fish.
Grated lotus root, skin and all, thickens this miso soup on its own: no flour, just its starch and sticky mucilage, with tiny coarse bits left in the broth. Also called gorigori-jiru, it comes from central Miyazaki and is tied to the stringy lotus grown in the pond beside Mizunuma Shrine, associated with the water deity Suijin-sama. Cultivation reportedly began when the Takanabe domain encouraged planting a good Yamato variety to strengthen its finances. Dried horse-mackerel stock gives the base a gentle fish savor.
Maesaengi, a winter seaweed, grows in strands as fine as thread, and once it is loosened with chopsticks in anchovy stock the whole pot turns deep green within minutes. Its aroma fades with long cooking, so three to four minutes is all it gets.
This is a soup for November through February, the months when maesaengi (a seaweed as fine as thread) and oysters are both in season. The seaweed spreads loose through the broth, so every spoonful lifts green threads along with an oyster or two.
The flavor of this broth comes from the innards packed in the crab's top shell. That is why the shells go into the pot with the radish before the bodies, so the innards can be stirred loose into the gochujang broth. It sits on a tabletop burner, and as it cooks down, a little water goes in so everyone can keep eating to the bottom.
Cod and pollock are soft-fleshed fish, so once the pieces are in the pot they are never turned; the spicy broth is just spooned over them. That is how the pieces stay whole all the way to the table. Swap in clams or shrimp and it becomes a seafood maeuntang.
The wide Chinese glass noodles need about two hours in lukewarm water and should be put to soak well before any cooking starts. Mala sauces vary in salt and oil from brand to brand; stir some into the beef-bone broth first and taste before deciding whether to add more.
Bite into one of the small wheat dumplings and a piece of walnut sits at the center. Mamebu-jiru belongs to Yamagata-cho in Kuji, Iwate, and is linked to flour dumplings that reportedly replaced celebratory noodles during poor Edo-period harvests. It still appears at New Year, ceremonies and winter meals. Around the dumplings, a clear soy broth of kombu and dried sardines carries carrot, burdock, kanpyo gourd strips, mushrooms and grilled tofu.
There is no chili flake or gochujang anywhere in this pot. Big dumplings cook in a clear anchovy and kelp stock flavored by shiitake, oyster mushrooms and napa cabbage, and any seasoning still needed at the end comes from salt alone so the broth stays pale. Some people finish the leftover broth with a scoop of rice.
Napa cabbage lines the bottom of the pot, and kimchi, blanched beef, tofu, enoki and frozen dumplings are arranged around it in separate blocks of color before anchovy stock with gochujang is poured over. A drop of perilla oil goes on just before it reaches the table.
Store-bought frozen dumplings go straight into boiling anchovy stock without thawing, and in about five minutes they float. Many Korean families make this instead of tteokguk at Lunar New Year, and adding rice cakes turns it into tteok-manduguk.