If you buy shrimp with their heads and aren’t going to cook them whole, then you should make shrimp stock. You can also make shrimp stock with just the tail shells, if you don’t have the heads, though the stock will be less rich. Source: My own recipe, based on generic recipe available from many sources.
To make miso soup from dashi (dashi recipe is available here): Add a few tablespoons of dashi into a small bowl. Add some miso to the small bowl; you will need about 2 – 4 Tbsp of miso for 3 1/2 cups dashi. You can use one kind of miso, or you can mix two types (e.g. mild and a stronger aged miso) for a more complex taste. Use a spoon to dissolve the miso into the broth in the a small bowl (if you add the miso directly to the dashi it will be hard to blend and your soup may be full of miso pellets). Add the softened miso to the soup, to taste. That is, stir a portion of the softened miso in warm or hot dashi; keep adding the dissolved miso until the soup tastes salty enough to you and has as much miso flavor as you want. Optionally, instead of stirring the dissolved miso directly into the soup, you can pour it through a strainer to remove large particles in order to …
Dashi (wikipedia definition) is a type of Japanese soup stock; one of the most well-known uses of dashi is as the base that you add miso paste to make miso soup, however dashi is also used in many other applications in Japanese cooking, similar to how French cooking uses stock. Dashi is extremely easy and quick to make. All you need to do is measure out ingredients, boil water, and strain. It is made from just three ingredients: konbu (giant kelp), katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), and water. Quantities for these ingredients are given in the recipe below; however once you have made dashi a few times, you can eyeball the quantities since it isn’t necessary to use exact quantities. In fact, if you compare various recipes for dashi, you’ll notice that they often differ from each other in the amounts and ratios of konbu and bonito flakes used–I’ve seen recipes which use nearly twice as much konbu and bonito flakes and ones that use only half as much as my recipe below; you can adjust the …
My mother often made stock at home, so I tried out making stock soon after I started cooking. Michael Ruhlman’s is by far the simplest and easiest stock recipe that I’ve found, and it has given me the best results so far. I used a combination of Michael Ruhlman’s chicken stock recipe on his blog, and the chicken stock recipe in “Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto” and some other tips from recipes that I’ve read over the years. The difference between the two recipes is that in the book, he suggests chicken has cooked in water for several hours and then adding the vegetables and aromatics and then cooking for 1 hour more. On the blog, he cooks everything together. When you break down a chicken, you can save the spare parts (e.g. backbone), in a bag in the freezer until you have enough to make stock. You can also save the carcass from a roasted chicken to make a dark roast chicken stock, . Cooking the stock in the oven was a revelation …
Lox, Stock, and Barrel 