🍲 Miso Oden (Stewed Vegetables and Fishcakes with Miso)

The important ingredient for the cuisine in Aichi Prefecture is bean miso (red miso), like Hatcho-miso, Aichi's typical miso. ‘Koji' mold is bred with soy beans to make soy bean ‘koji' mold, and fermented and aged for a long time to make bean miso. It is fermented at least a year, or sometimes 2~3 years. Bean miso is rich in flavor and has sourness and unique bitterness. Hatcho-miso is one of the brand of bean miso. Hatcho Village (current Hatcho-cho in Okazaki City), the origin of Hatcho-miso, is located ‘hatcho' (about 870m) away from Okazaki Castle, where Tokugawa Ieyasu was born. It was easy to obtain ingredients for miso, like soy beans and salt, because it was a transportation hub where Tokaido and the Yahagi River are crossing over. ‘Miso Oden' is a unique dish in Aichi Prefecture used bean miso. A miso pot is placed in the middle of clay pot with stewed ingredients, and you dip the ingredients into a miso sauce when you eat. It is said that originally ‘oden' was not a stew, but its root was ‘miso-dengaku', skewered ingredients served with miso sauce. In Edo (current Tokyo), the ‘oden' stewed with soy sauce soup stock was prevailed (it was also called ‘Kantou-ni' when we mention about common ‘oden' with soy sauce soup stock.), but in Aichi, dipping with miso was rooted.