Protected local food
Sanuki Shiro Miso
サヌキ白みそ
A smooth, cream-coloured white miso from Kagawa that is low in salt and sweet. It goes into many local dishes and into the white-miso soup Kansai families eat at New Year.
Key facts
- Registered as a protected name
- 31 January 2023
- Region
- Shikoku
- Official name in Japanese
- サヌキ白みそ
- Official area (in Japanese)
- 香川県
Sweet, mild white miso
Sanuki shiro miso is smooth and almost translucent, with a cream colour. It has less salt and more sugar than everyday miso, so it tastes mild and sweet. Many Kagawa home dishes depend on it, and Kansai cooks use it for white-miso zoni, the soup with rice cakes eaten at New Year.
A thousand-year-old method
The method came from Kyoto in the Heian period. Kagawa is warm and dry, and it grew plenty of rice and soybeans and made salt, the three ingredients of white miso. Farmers made their own, and a miso industry grew from there early on.
Good to know
- Kagawa's New Year speciality is an-mochi zoni: white-miso soup with rice cakes stuffed with sweet bean paste.
- Kagawa is Japan's udon capital. Takamatsu is about an hour from Okayama by train.
Questions travellers ask
How is it different from regular miso?
It uses more rice koji and less salt, so it is lighter in colour, sweeter and milder.
How long does it keep?
White miso is less salty, so keep it in the fridge and use it sooner than dark miso.
Where it comes from
More protected foods from the same area
Crafts from the same area
Heritage stories from the same area
Sources
We checked the facts on this page against these sources.