1. You can slice daikon in a different way if you like. Cutting daikon into sticks is also quite common.
2. Aburaage is deep fried, thinly sliced tofu which you can buy at Asian grocery stores. They come in a frozen pack of 3 sheets.
3. Depending on the type of miso and the brand within the same type of miso, saltiness varies. So you might have to adjust the amount of miso to add to the dashi. I used awase-miso in this recipe.
If you have miso which already contains dashi, you can use water instead of dashi stock. However, I think that the dashi flavour mixed in the miso is not as strong as it should be. You might still have to add some dashi to the water.
4. If you don’t have an appropriate sieve to use, place the miso paste in a small bowl, add some dashi to it and dissolve the miso in it. Then pour the miso mix back into the pot. It is important not to just drop the paste into the pot as it will take a while to dissolve the miso and prolonged cooking of the soup after adding miso will lose good flavour of miso.