Miso Nuts

The Recipe:

Miso Ginger Lime Glazed Nutty Mix

Savoury with a little sweet and a hit of citrus, the ginger here is not overpowering. The glaze for these nuts would be lovely on tofu or fish, you might want to add a little more oil if you start cooking with it. The glaze itself is just a little too tasty. It works a bit better on nuts with ridges to help hold on to the glaze, I think pecans are my favourites.

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Course Snack

Ingredients

  

• 1½ tsp Grated ginger
• 2 Tbsp (35g) Red miso paste
• 1 tbsp (16g) Brown sugar can substitute honey (20g) or maybe maple syrup
• 2 tsp Sesame oil
• 1 tsp Olive/sunflower/rapeseed oil a mild or neutral cooking oil
• 3 cups Mixed nuts Ridged nuts work best (like pecans and walnuts) see notes for some gram/cup conversions.
• 1 Lime ~1 Tbsp each: juice and zest of

Instructions

 

• Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C/Fan 160°C. Line a roasting pan with foil or parchment
• In a small saucepan over low heat whisk together miso, lime juice and zest, ginger, brown sugar, sesame and olive oils until the it comes together into a smooth glaze (~3 minutes). Taste and add salt if desired.
• In a bowl, toss the glaze with nuts to coat, and spread out in a single layer in roasting pan.
• Roast for about 15-20 minutes, stir after 10 minutes to prevent clumps and to move them around the pan (nuts at the edges may finish roasting first).
• Once the nuts are rich brown with a few darker bits here and there, remove from the oven and set aside to cool.

Notes

I use an even split of: Almonds, Walnuts and Pecans.

If the lime yields more than a tablespoon of zest, I’d reserve some to sprinkle it on the nuts while cooling, it’s nice to see the flecks of green.

Large seeds like pepitas or sunflower seeds might be a good addition.

Keyword almonds, glaze, miso, nuts, snack

The Waffle:

I had a craving for nuts with a miso glaze, and I scoured the internet. Chef Hiroko Shimbo’s Curried Miso Nuts sound fantastic, but I didn’t want a big batch of sauce alongside it. However… rereading the recipe now, a couple months later, it’s on the short list and that sauce would definitely come in handy.

On the other end of the scale, I saw Hello Fresh basically just cakes almonds in miso and pops them in the oven, which is worth a go, I love miso, but I was looking for something a little more… complex flavour wise. I decided I did want to see if this could be kept vegan, no egg binding the sauce to the nuts like in the sweet and spicy rosemary nuts.

Then I stumbled on this description on pintrest boards and cached in google search – but no recipe, and really, it sounded like exactly what I was looking for:

Roasted almonds glazed in miso, lime juice, ginger, honey, and sesame oil. Subtly sweet, salty, savory and crunchy for holiday snacking.

Mallory Roth “Miso Ginger Glazed Almonds” Chase the Flavors

But the links were all pointing at a no-longer hosted food blog. Then I tried to see if anyone had done variations, and gave up, and guessed at a recipe. FINALLY I remembered archive.org’s wayback machine – if you’re lucky, they might have a capture of a now down website so that you can access that snapshot in history and peep what was there. For example the dearly departed purple.com which until sometime in 2017 was mostly just the colour purple, full screen, and now is a mattress retailer.

THANK YOU WAYBACK MACHINE The original recipe is from Mallory Roth – if you know her, thank her too. I was a little pleased to see my guess of a recipe was pretty close, but went for the sure thing and tried hers. I had trouble with it as written, the first time I made it, I burned about half of it, and even burned, it was very oily. I don’t know what I did wrong anything from rushing and reading things wrong to maybe not using enough nuts. I’ll say this: it was tasty, in the burned bits, the subtleties were gone of course, but they had a nice smoky bbq flavour, the just right to “almost over done” bits were amazing, but oily.

So this is my adaptation with a fraction of the oil. I think next time, I’ll look at using less nuts, so they get a little more glaze each – that first batch had a great intense flavour. That’s why we switched to ridged nuts (pecans and walnuts – I think I like pecans better here for their mild but sweet flavour) – they hold on to the glaze a bit better than the almonds. My mix is about an even split: Almonds, Pecans, and Walnuts.

I’m on the fence about adding more lime, 1 lime has about ½ the zest originally called for and that citrus hit is really nice, that said, the current batch doesn’t really need more lime. It’s there.

I may let it rest before putting the nuts in the oven, like a marinade, next time.

Because I really do prefer weighing things, here’s a quick list of some volume to gram conversions – these are “healthy” cups, not heaping but not level.

Weigh These Nuts