Japan – Zosui / Japanese Rice Soup

by Zayna Khan

Zosui is a very healthy and full nutritious soup dish with all the healthy elements to add its benefits to the dish. This includes Vegetables, rice, chicken, seafood, and dashi broth. This soup is a rice-based soup with almost a thin consistency. We can add soya sauce, mirin, sake, vinegar as the seasoning we have salt, pepper, etc. This dish is so easy to make, we can add pre-cooked rice into the dashi or chicken broth to make this dish. Then cooked vegetables, canned vegetables, chicken, fish, added and a congee styles soup is ready to serve. We can make a fresh version of the soup by adding rice into the broth and cook it into the broth to make it more flavorful, and cook vegetables into broth until they tender enough to give the whole nutritious effect.

It is a Japanese version of Congee. Congee is actually a rice porridge dish, very famous in China. It is a gruel food that has mushy rice and some additional flavors like you can make it as a dessert by adding milk, sugar, and nuts. It has also a spicy version by adding salt, spices, vegetables and make a full healthy bowl of porridge gruel.

CONGEE

Congee is a dish that is originated in China and now a very famous Gruel dish in Asia. This dish is a rice porridge dish also known as gruel rice. This is a bowl of plain mushy rice that is cooked on low heat with a huge quantity of water to make a slimy and soupy texture. When this rice is cooked, some salt, pepper, and herbs are added to give flavor and texture to the dish. The additional ingredients are cooked vegetables, sometimes spring onions, carrots, peas, etc. Meat is also added for a wholesome meal in small pieces. Fish and chicken are the two most used elements in the dish.

This dish is very healthy and easy to digest so it is also served as a staple food for patients and healthcare workers. This is also known to be as Baby food.

When nabemono is cooked, the leftover soup can be also used as the Zosui.

Nabemono is also known as Nabe, is a one-pot Japanese stew with many other elements like noodles, udon, fish cakes, meat fillets, vegetables, etc. When this dish is left can be consumed as ZOSUI by adding rice and cooked together.

There are different variant of using instead of rice

UDON

Udon are thick noodles made by wheat flour. They are thick in diameter so also known as thick noodles. When you are not willing to add rice into this dish, as a substitution we can add udon into this zosui. There are different dishes made up by using Udon noodles. Hot soup udon with some vegetables and meat is a variant of Zosui.

RAMEN

Ramen is a wheat flour Chinese thin noodles. These are also known as PULLED NOODLES. They are very famous and versatile noodles because they are easy to make. These are the second variant type of noodles used in zosui.

We can add boiled eggs, healthy vegetables, fish cakes, prawns, corns, mushrooms, dashi broth, into it.

VARIETIES OF ZOSUI

MARU ZOSUI

Maru zosui is the same dish of rice soup but with the addition of one special element that can be eliminated while you are preparing simple basic zosui that is CHINESE SOFT-SHELL TURTLE.

Its meat is used in very famous Chinese soup, turtle soup. As the soup type we have this variation in Zosui as a Chinese soft-shell turtle zosui.

It is famous in China but can be cooked and loved by Japanese people. It is not the usual basic soup but has very special meat for special occasions. Meat is too soft to cook, so mince is added into this soup so the flavors of soft-shell infused into the soup.

FUGU ZOSUI

Fugu is also known as Bokk and Chinese pufferfish. t is the special meat addition to this type of zosui. Pufferfish is loved by Japanese people and they have a huge number of dishes made up of pufferfish, So the addition of their main ingredients into the dish is common.

TORI ZOSUI

Chicken zosui is very common and usually we add chicken mince, chicken slices, chicken chunks in rice soup to add very delicious flavors.

KANI ZOSUI

Kani is crab meat, zosui with crab meat cooked with vegetables giving this rice soup a tick of flavors.

MAIN COMPONENTS OF ZOSUI

1. BROTH

Broth that is usually prepared for zosui are :

• Dashi Broth
• Chicken broth
• Vegetable broth
• Instant broth
• Hot-pot leftover broth

2. COOKED RICE

We can use leftover rice, freshly cooked rice. rice in different styles are added :

• Steamed rice
• Boiled rice
• Fried rice
• Vegetable rice

3. VEGETABLES

• Spinach
• corn
• Onions
• Beans
• Peas
• Mushrooms
• Tofu
• Siitake
• Nori seaweed sheets

4. MEAT

• Chicken
• Fish
• Crab
• Octopus
• Salmon
• Prawns
• Turtle
• Lobster, etc

INGREDIENTS OF ZOSUI

FOR BROTH

• Dashi Broth : 4 cups
• Soya sauce : 4 tablespoons
• Kosher salt : 1/2 teaspoon
• Sesame oil : 2 tablespoons

FOR ZOSUI

• Cooked rice : 1 cup
• Corns : 1/2 cup
• Peas : 1/2 cup
• Scallions : 2 chopped
• Nori seaweed sheets : 2
• Chicken boneless : 2 breast pieces
• Shiitake mushroom : 1/2 cup
• Eggs : 2 ( hard boiled )

SEASONINGS

• Kosher salt : 1 teaspoons
• Black pepper : 1 teaspoons
• Soya sauce : 2 tablespoons
• Mirin : 2 tablespoons
• Sesame seeds : 4 tablespoons

COOKING DIRECTIONS

• We have to make dashi broth so we can cook chicken and vegetables into this broth.
• To make this broth, we must use instant dashi sachet and add into 4 cups of water.
• Add soya sauce, kosher salt and sesame oil into the dashi broth and bring all the ingredients to boil until they mixed together.
• Cut chicken into small pieces and add into the broth, this gives nice chicken flavor into dashi broth to enhance the taste.
• It takes around 10 minutes to cook small piece of chicken into dashi broth.
• Now add all the vegetables .rice and bring them to boil on high flame to maintain the crunchiness of the vegetables with infusion of the taste.
• Add seasonings like kosher salt, mirin, pepper, soya sauce into the broth.
• Now our thick consistency of soup is ready to serve.
• Enjoy 🙂