What are the secrets to eating vegetables deliciously with less salt!?

Today's column is a continuation of yesterday's. I would like to share the secrets to eating vegetables deliciously with less salt, based on the diet of Dr. Yukio Yamori.

While a diet centered on Japanese food is often thought to be healthy, one drawback is that it tends to be high in salt.

Miso soup, which uses miso—a fermented food—is good for getting koji mold, but the salt content is a concern. Also, as a Kyoto native, I cannot do without pickles, but these also tend to be high in salt.

And for fish, things like salted salmon are tastier with a moderate amount of salt added. The same goes for grilled mackerel.

Given this, I want to incorporate vegetable potassium effectively to reduce the harmful effects of salt as much as possible.

The doctor suggests that steaming vegetables is best. However, since there is no salt, it can feel a bit lacking. Therefore, his recipe involves sprinkling sliced cheese over the steamed vegetables while they are still warm and tossing them with spices like curry powder.

It is a Western-style recipe, but it does sound delicious. I would like to try it myself sometime.

Another suggestion is to fill your miso soup with plenty of vegetable ingredients. If the bowl is filled with vegetables, the amount of broth is reduced, which kills two birds with one stone.

Come to think of it, I once saw a YouTube video by culinary researcher Yoshiharu Doi featuring miso soup packed with ingredients, and I thought it didn't need to have that many, but there seems to be a point to adding plenty of vegetables.

However, since the potassium in vegetables is water-soluble and leaches into the water, the effect is lost unless you drink all the broth.

In that sense, it seems better to have less broth!

Regarding ingredients, seaweed like wakame is high in potassium. Wakame miso soup is ideal, but while wakame is high in potassium, it is also high in salt. Therefore, using dried wakame that has been rehydrated in water can relatively keep the salt content down.

By the way, the salt content per 100g of wakame is 1.5g for fresh and 0.7g for dried wakame rehydrated in water. Dried wakame definitely seems better.

I would like to try making miso soup packed with vegetable ingredients as well.