Tub War: We Blind-Tasted Every Miso Paste on the Supermarket Shelf (So Your Soup Doesn't Suffer)

Miso has quietly gone mainstream. Ten years ago you'd have had to make a pilgrimage to a Chinese supermarket or wait for a delivery from Japan. Now there are at least five tubs sitting in the chiller or 'world foods' aisle at your local Sainsbury's, and one of them costs less than a meal deal.

But does the cheap stuff cut it? Or is that £5.50 imported tub the difference between proper miso soup and salty beige water? We bought every paste we could find, decanted them into unmarked bowls, and got tasting. Here's how it went.

The Contenders

We managed to track down six pastes across the big four supermarkets and one online order:

• Supermarket own-brand white miso (the budget option, roughly £1.80 for 300g)
• Supermarket own-brand miso paste, unlabelled as red or white (£2.20)
• Clearspring organic white miso (£3.60)
• Itsuki shiro miso (Japanese import, £4.20)
• Hikari organic red miso (another import, £4.80)
• A posh deli-brand brown rice miso (£5.50, and yes, we felt silly buying it)

Prices vary by store, but that's the rough landscape. Before tasting, we worked out cost per serving — a standard bowl of soup uses about a tablespoon, roughly 20g. That puts the own-brand at about 12p a bowl and the deli tub at 37p. Keep those numbers in mind.

Round One: Straight Up Soup

The classic test. Dashi from a packet, a tablespoon of paste, some silken tofu and a few spring onions. Nothing to hide behind.

The own-brand white miso was, honestly, a shock. Mild, gently sweet, with that proper fermented backbone. If we hadn't known, we'd have assumed it was a mid-tier import. The unlabelled own-brand paste was darker and punchier — more of a red miso character — and made a soup that leaned savoury rather than mellow. Perfectly drinkable, just different.

The imports earned their reputations. The Itsuki was the most balanced of the lot, with a clean sweetness and real depth. The Hikari red miso was the flavour bomb: intense, almost meaty, brilliant in small doses but easy to overdo.

And the deli tub? Thin, oddly sour, and slightly gritty. Either we got a bad batch or brown rice miso just isn't meant for soup. Nobody finished their bowl.

Round Two: Marinades

Miso-marinated fish is the dish that got half of Britain interested in miso in the first place, so cod fillets got slathered and left overnight, then grilled until blistered.

Here the results shuffled. The own-brand white miso caramelised beautifully but lacked the depth to stand up to the char. The red misos came into their own — the Hikari especially, which produced a lacquered, savoury-sweet crust that had us fighting over the last piece. The darker own-brand paste did a genuinely respectable impression at less than half the price.

Round Three: The Roast Glaze

Miso butter on a pork shoulder, brushed on for the last forty minutes — the gluey, sticky, Sunday-roast-adjacent test.

Mixed again. The sweet white misos burned fastest, so keep the foil handy. The reds held up and gave the crackling-adjacent edges a proper umami hit. The own-brand darker paste was arguably the winner here: bold enough to flavour a whole joint, cheap enough not to feel precious about it.

The Price-Per-Serving Verdict

So is the posh tub worth the extra quid? Mostly, no. If you're making miso soup a couple of times a week, the own-brand white miso is a genuine bargain and nobody at your table will notice. If you cook Japanese food seriously, keep one good import — the Hikari red for anything that gets grilled or roasted, the Itsuki if you're fussy about soup. That's a two-tub fridge, total cost under a tenner, covering essentially everything.

The one thing we'd say: don't buy miso you won't use. It keeps for ages in the fridge, but the fresher the tub, the brighter the flavour. Buy the size you'll actually finish, not the size that looks impressive on the shelf.

Your soup, your wallet and your Sunday roast will all thank you.