Customer Reviews

Ajinomoto - Hon Dashi (Soup Stock) 5.28 Oz.

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The basic stock for 1,000s of Japanese recipes, dashi is absolutely essential for anyone wanting to cook authentic Japanese cuisine. As famous chef Shizuo Tsuji once said " "many substitutes for dashi are possible, but without dashi, dishes are merely a la japonaise and lack the authentic flavor".

Dashi can be made pretty easily from scratch, boiling some kombu or katsuobushi shavings, but you often make far more than you need for the particular recipe, and it can be a pain to spend all that time boiling. Instant dashi does the trick just fine, and almost no one will notice the substitution. This kind here, "Hon Dashi" (meaing "Real Dashi"), is the cream of the crop of instant substitutes. Made by the company Ajinomoto, Hon Dashi is absolutely brimming with umami, the fifth basic flavor found in Asian cooking. Hon Dashi is made from katsuobushi shavings, so it is a basic fish stock and not suitable for vegans, who would probably want to make their own kombu stock.

I use Hon Dashi for almost everything, from basic miso soup, to tamagoyaki, to using it to boil vegetables and give them a heartier flavor. Along with mirin and soy sauce, it is one of the most basic ingredients in a Japanese kitchen.

My best friend returned to Japan and I felt that unless I went to a Japanese restaurant, I would never, ever have real miso soup.

I tried every paste, every color. I tried making my miso with and without wakame; I even tried mixing the pastes and still could not get it right.

I FINALLY got it! I didn't even intend to order Hon Dashi, had it on my wish list, but it was the best mistake I could make.

I'll be experimenting with my dashi to see what else I can add it to. The smokey flavor is superb.

I thought dashi was a soup stock made from fish flakes and kombu. The top two ingredients in this product are Salt and then Monosodium Glutimate.

I am very happy with this dashi. I like that I can use it to make just a small amount of stock if a recipe calls for it, and it also makes an excellent miso soup without having to get take-out every time I happen to crave some. (For two servings I use 1 tsp dashi powder, 3 cups water, 2 big tbsp miso paste - plus add-ins like onion, tofu, etc. It's really good!) This is a good value too - a box this size will last me a long time. Inside the box there are 3 foil packets to help it stay fresh. They do recommend refridgeration of the opened portion, but the rest can stay on a shelf.

Although salt is listed first on the ingredient list, the sodium level in this product is not very high. Which is good considering the amount of sodium that other Japanese ingredients tend to have in them. It's important to remember that ingredients are listed by weight: salt is going to weigh much more than the dried fish flakes.

I bought this product so I can make miso soup at home. It turns out perfect every time. It taste just like the kind you get at a Japanese restaurant.

I buy this locally in a much larger box but it is the same product. This product is just as good as making your own, which I did for years before finding it. The larger box has 1,000 servings but that is for a weak dashi so I use double the granules. For this product with the 3 packets, just add them into a small jar and use 1 ts per cup hot water (adjust to your tastes). That adjustment is why it says '3 to 6 cups'. Also, this product stores with no loss in flavor in a sealed container for years. I actually have some in a salt shaker (with rice to keep it dry) and use it commonly as a flavor boost to vegetables (green ones especially work well with it).

This is actually a good starter size box. For those not sure what to do with it, a sample recipe:

3 cups made up dashi (1 packet)- taste and add water if you wish it weaker.
1 packet Udon noodles (may use cooked spagetti) appx 1.25 cups volume
1 cup lightly packed leafy vegetables (spinach, mustard greens, cabbages etc)
Optional- baby bok choys whole, shellfish (whole or chopped), peeled shrimp, miso

Bring to a simmer and as soon as the veggies and optional meats are done to your liking, it's ready. This is the 'kitchen sink' soup of Japan, meaning just about anything might land in there though the items are normally pre-cooked leftover bits.

Just back from a trip to Japan, hungry for some good nabeyaki udon, I ordered this stock. There's got to be something better on the market. I love salt, and dashi should be salty, but not overwhelmingly so. And why sugar, let alone two or three types of sugar? While I don't have a problem with MSG myself, I do try to avoid it. Probably my own fault; I should have specified "No MSG", except it never occurred to me that a package with this many bad chemicals wouldn't be labelled somewhere!
Outside of any of this, the dashi has none of the complexity or subtlety you hope for in a dashi base. I know if I want all of that, I need to make it from scratch, but since purchasing this I've tried several non-MSG brands and all of them are better. Sad to say, because Ajinomoto is a venerable company, but stick with Maruhachi or one of the other, healthier brands!

Here's a nice link to name almost all the things that contain MSG.
[...]
Who hasn't had Doritos? I forgot the commercial about some snack that having one wasn't enough, but anything that you want more and more mostly likely contain MSG. Almost all processed meat, sauces, soups, and snacks contain MSG.

I haven't even tried this stuff yet, but with the first ingredient being salt, the second being MSG, then finally the third being dried bonito powder, then the next sugar, then dextrose(more sugar)...then some chemicals(disodium inosinate, disodium succinate), which sound like more salt or preservatives, or both...WTF? None of the other reviews even mention this marvelous combination of lousy ingredients...kinda stupid. If I'd wanted 3 packets of sugar, salt, and flavor enhancers....I'd have ordered salty/sugared MSG soup base.

UPDATE: I did some research and I thought this was interesting, and since this product, and the topic of MSG seems to be so bantered about, maybe this will be interesting to someone else.

The food additive, monosodium glutamate, was first used in the United States in any quantity in the late 1940s. According to Dr. George Schwartz, author of In Bad Taste: The MSG Syndrome, although considerable effort had been spent to introduce MSG to the USA, little had been accomplished prior to World War II. However, sometime during the war, the use of MSG in Japanese soldiers' rations was noticed. In 1948, a symposium on MSG, presided over by the Chief Quartermaster of the Armed Forces, was held in Chicago for members of the food industry.
By the 1960s, Accent, the leading brand of the flavor enhancer called "monosodium glutamate," had become a household word. Simultaneously, other hydrolyzed protein products such as autolyzed yeast, sodium caseinate, and hydrolyzed vegetable protein gained in popularity. Every hydrolyzed protein product, regardless of the name given to it on a label, contains MSG.
Although glutamic acid had been isolated in 1866 by the German chemist Karl Ritthausen, it was not until 1908 that its flavor-enhancing potential was noticed by Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo, Japan. Prior to that time, the Japanese had used seaweed as a favorite flavor enhancer, without understanding that glutamic acid was its flavor-enhancing component.
From 1910 until 1956, the process underlying production of glutamic acid and "monosodium glutamate" in Japan was one of extraction, a slow and costly method. Elsewhere, crude gluten or other starting materials were hydrolyzed by heating with hydrochloric acid. In 1956, the Japanese succeeded in producing glutamic acid by means of fermentation; and after considerable research to identify suitable strains of microorganisms for starting the requisite cultures, large-scale production of glutamic acid and "monosodium glutamate" through fermentation began.
Even before the Japanese discovered the flavor potential of processed free glutamic acid extracted from sea weed, the potential of freeing glutamic acid from protein using acid hydrolysis was being explored in Europe. At the time, however, the method was not widely used. Indeed, it was not until some time later that the flavor industry realized that various of their hydrolyzed protein products contained considerable amounts of processed free glutamic acid (MSG) -- the flavor-enhancing component of the food ingredient "monosodium glutamate" -- and production of hydrolyzed protein products for their flavor-enhancing potential escalated.
When "monosodium glutamate" was brought to the United States in the years following World War II it was still manufactured through extraction. By 1956, after considerable research to identify suitable strains of microorganisms for starting the requisite cultures, Ajinomoto Co., Inc. had succeeded in producing glutamic acid through a method of bacterial fermentation wherein bacteria (some, if not all of which are genetically modified)(10) are grown aerobically in a liquid nutrient medium. These bacteria have the ability to synthesize glutamic acid outside of their cell membranes and excrete it into the medium to accumulate there.(11) It was in 1956 that truly large-scale production of glutamic acid and "monosodium glutamate" through fermentation began.
We find it fascinating that the first published report of a reaction to "monosodium glutamate" did not appear until "monosodium glutamate" was being made by bacterial fermentation. The first published report of a reaction to "monosodium glutamate" appeared in 1968 when Robert Ho Man Kwok, M.D., who had emigrated from China, reported that although he never had the problem in China, about 20 minutes into a meal at certain Chinese restaurants, he suffered numbness, tingling, and tightness of the chest that lasted for approximately 2 hours.
The following year, John W. Olney, M.D. reported that laboratory animals suffered brain lesions and neuroendocrine disorders after being exposed to monosodium glutamate. Scientists studying retinal degeneration in mice treated with free glutamic acid had noted that these mice became grotesquely obese. Olney, who speculated that the obesity might be a sign of damage to the hypothalamus (the area of the brain that regulates a number of endocrine functions, including weight control), found that infant laboratory animals given free glutamic acid suffered brain damage immediately, and assorted neuroendocrine disorders later in life. Pharmaceutical grade L-glutamic acid was often used to produce these disorders until neuroscientists observed that monosodium glutamate, an inexpensive food additive, could be substituted for laboratory-grade free glutamic acid in these studies and produce the same effects.
In the years that followed, neuroscientists replicated the work of Olney, and Olney spoke out repeatedly about the toxic potential of monosodium glutamate. In 1972, for example, Olney testified before the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that ingestion of MSG places humans at risk, with the greatest risk being for the very young; and that a National Academy of Science panel organized to determine whether MSG ought to be banned from baby food had produced an "industry arranged whitewash" by a group of scientists with almost no experience in neuropathology. In the early 1970s, manufacturers of baby food voluntarily removed the monosodium glutamate from their products, but replaced the monosodium glutamate with MSG-containing ingredients such as autolyzed yeast and hydrolyzed vegetable protein. In the late 1970s, manufacturers "voluntarily" removed all obvious MSG-containing ingredients from baby food.
Use of MSG in food has grown in the last 30 years and is still growing. MSG is found in most soups, salad dressings, processed meats, frozen entrees, ice cream, and frozen yogurt, in some crackers, bread, canned tuna, and very often in "low fat" and "no fat" foods to make up for flavor lost when fat is reduced or eliminated. It can be found in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and dietary supplements. It is found in enteral feeding products and in infant formula. It is found in vaccines -- including vaccines used on children. It is found in hospitals where it is hidden in the jello, chicken soup, and some IV solutions given to very sick patients.
Very often manufacturers use hydrolyzed protein products as MSG-containing flavor enhancers instead of using "monosodium glutamate." In the industry, an ingredient that contains MSG but is not necessarily recognized by consumers as containing MSG is called a "clean label" ingredient.

I received in a timely manner. The product was great! Very fresh. Will buy from again.