Koji Fermentation
Miso and Shio Koji with Nick Repenning
Is it Done Yet?
The difficulty most people have is determining when their stuff is ready. That’s a question that always has many variables, especially what are you trying to make in the first place.
Were you trying to preserve or save something from a harvest so you have food for when there isn’t a lot available?
Are you fermenting something to increase its taste along with its nutritional quality (or remove its potential harmful characteristics)?
Are you culturing koji on barley to create a source of enzymes for drinks, or to use the actual inoculated barley to eat in a miso or jang or hishio?
We've heard many times that people are afraid to make their own koji, or that they just can't wrap their head around everything they believe is involved.
People will insist that making koji demands expensive equipment like thermometers, and probes, and humidifiers, and timers.
None of that is true.
People have safely been making koji in different ways for thousands of years.
Grow it Yourself
But, intentionally growing a mold on something like rice or beans can sound a little scary so we asked Nick Repenning of Go-En Fermented Foods to answer all the questions you might have while actually showing you how to use pre-made koji to make miso.
Growing your own koji can also be less expensive, as long as you don’t end up throwing it out.
Contrary to popular belief, mono-cultures or isolated single strains of a mold called Aspergillus (usually Aspergillus oryzae for miso) that is used to grow koji on rice are not the only microbes that grow.
Every batch of koji also has bacteria and yeasts and other molds that grow along with whatever pure koji spore you sprinkle on your cooked grains, although hopefully they co-exist in harmony. But, not everyone uses pure koji spores. And that’s definitely not how koji started out.
In fact, some traditions don't even require you cook your rice or whatever substrate you are molding out - although certain things like soybeans or roots that contain things you don’t really want to eat must be prepared - letting the humidity and heat of where you are make somewhat slower work of accomplishing your goal.
As long as their is a source of food and water, microbes like Aspergillus species - that's what is sometimes called seed or tane koji - or Bacillus species which are everywhere and typically used to make natto or dawa dawa, will grow.
It's really up to you to facilitate the process. But if you're using already made koji you're really all set.
Nick Repenning of Go-En Fermented Foods in Maine presented Koji, Miso, Mushrooms with a selection of curated videos, during a live streaming. Catch him at Maine Ferments.
Nick demonstrated rice koji and how to turn it - whether you buy it or make it yourself - into a shio koji, a rice koji based miso, a mushroom shio koji, or a mushroom miso.
This was down for a Fermentation Fridays class with Ellie Markovitch of the University of Maine at Orono. Nick brought lots of samples of misos and amino pastes that he makes.
Nick Repenning of Go-En Fermented Foods: My partner, co-founder of my business, and my son's mother, she's from Japan. So when we came to this country, she came to this country, I had to feed her and we couldn't find a miso that she liked. But we started making one that was very particular to the region she's from, which is just north of Tokyo.
So the miso that I normally make that's available in stores usually, mid-summer it should be back in stores around, that one is very particular to what she needed to eat. And then once we started growing our own koji, then we started digging in a little deeper and then we started getting into all these other things.
We make homebrew sake, like a doburoku, we make something called amazake, which is rice ferment broken down into simple sugars, shio koji, and then just like a slew of things, like once I have this koji, I can break all kinds of stuff down with it. And that's what I got like, once I started getting into it, then I was like, all right, well what else can I do with this thing? And when I started making koji, there wasn't a lot of information in English, so we kind of like we're teaching ourselves in a lot of ways.
And my wife being from Japan, she could read some literature, but even then it was kind of hard to to kind of figure out and translating. And so we started making koji to feed ourselves, and then everybody else wanted some, and yeah the story goes. Koji is this really crazy rabbit hole, so careful.
I have to speak to koji if I'm gonna speak to miso. Miso itself is an all-purpose seasoning. Miso is a Japanese word, so when we talk about miso, we're talking about a Japanese food.
In China, there's histories that date back a lot further, and a lot of other countries throughout Asia have different variations on the fermented bean paste using some sort of fungal culture, which is the koji thatwe're using in Japan. Koji itself is also a Japanese word. When I speak to these things, I'm speaking about Japanese food in particular and those styles of fermentation.
Miso itself is an all-purpose seasoning. For people who aren't familiar at all, I say it's like soy sauce but a lot thicker. It's not that, but that's a really simple way to think of it. And it's an all-purpose seasoning that we use.
Most people are familiar with miso soup, but we can use it as a marinade. We can use it in dips and sauces, and making your own will also make you able to use it a little more liberally.
I brought in two types of miso with me today, and there's a lot of terminology that gets passed around when we're speaking about miso. In America, we like to color code them. In Japan, it's a very regional thing, so you would have different types of misos for different regions, depending on the ingredients that were available or the climates that they live within.
This one here is a shiro miso or a white miso, which is what we're going to be working on making today. This one finishes really quickly. We can finish that in one to three months, depending on the salt percentage and the temperature of the environment that it's made within.
This one here is a red miso or aka miso. Aka means red. And this one is the one that I usually teach and make, and this takes about a year to ferment.
A lot of things I make take a long time. This is an experiment here, which is similar to miso, and it was made with groundnuts, which is a wild tuber, Apios americana. It's groundnuts and pine pollen, and I u se a miso recipe with different ingredients other than beans, and I'll let y'all taste that.
I don't think it's quite finished. I think we're in about six months on that one now, and I thought it would be done at three months, but it's different ingredients than I'm used to using, so I just have to wait and see what happens.
When it's done, what am I looking for? So that one there has a little bit of, like, an alcohol taste to me. So, and we'll go into, like, that process talking about the misos. I'm waiting for that to kind of dissipate.
Alcohols that are produced in the miso making process, and they will be mixing with other things to create deep flavors and smells and things like that. I'm waiting for that one in particular.
It may be texture. There's a lot of different ways that I'm gonna use to analyze the miso, but it's done when you think it's done.
I have two other ones which are misos that have course ingredients added to them. So I have one that's nettle and wild garlic, so I get the stinging nettle when they're really short, and the wild garlic, and then also these groundnuts and the fiddleheads.
Miso is made of a few ingredients. Traditionally, miso is soy, so in Japan there's laws around that, like, you have, if it's called miso, it has to have soybean. In this country, they use a lot of different other beans too, and then you an use other proteins, so we're getting into amino paste and things like that.
Technically, a miso is an amino paste, so it's the protein from the bean that's broken down, but when I speak to miso again, I'm speaking to a Japanese food and it is with soybeans that I make it. You can use different beans, but there's some microbial reasons to use the soy, some specific yeast that are present on the soybeans, even after the long cooking period. They can stand those high heats.
The miso has a lot of the microorganisms in there, can work on a lot of our food toxins as well. Miso has been proven to kill salmonella, Staphylococcus. It's been proven to kill a lot of our foodborne pathogens, so using miso as a marinade on things like meats and things like that, which is what I like to do a lot with it, actually gives you this protective layer on the outside that can let you to marinate for longer.
Miso is made from a fewdifferent ingredients, beans, koji, salt, and water. Really simple ingredients, but really complex. I've already measured out what we will be using for our recipe.
This is a fairly fresh koji. I made it a week ago. It's been sitting in my walk-in, so you can pass that around. Y'all are welcome to taste that and you can give it a good smell.
Koji has this really wonderful aroma as well. It's grown on rice and the moisture content is kind of low in there from the process of growing it. Koji speaks to the fungus, but it also speaks to what it's grown on. So when we speak about koji, we're speaking about a particular fungus, but anything that it's grown on as well.
Koji is grown on rice often, occasionally, or it can be grown on barley, and I'm just speaking of traditional things that it's grown on. So rice, barley, or soybeans. When we'retalking about something like a soy sauce, it's actually generally a shoyu.
Shoyu is a Japanese word for soy sauce. That's grown on soybeans and wheat. I've heard of it grown on peanuts. I keep it pretty traditional for what I do for thecommercial product, and I usually just grow it on rice.
So this is kind of, I've got my method, I go in there and I spend a lot of time with the koji. It takes about 48 hours from when it's inoculated to go through its life cycle.
I tend to push mine about 52 hours, and there's specific enzymes that are produced at specific temperatures during the lifetime of the koji.
So if I'm gonna make it for a sweet miso, I'm actually going to grow it a little bit quicker. When you're growing the koji, you're producing different enzymes.
So maybe I want to focus on enzymes that can break down carbohydrates. I'm gonna grow it differently than if I'm specifically working on breaking down proteins.
In a sweet miso, we're looking for more of that carbohydrate breakdown, where in a darker miso, or like a red miso, or something that's gonna age for a long time, I'm looking more to break down the protein.
When I'm breaking down the proteinsproteins, I'm breaking them down into simpler forms, and they're simplest, some of their simplest forms are amino acids, hence amino paste.
The koji, koji is just like this beautiful suite of enzymes. Koji, it's creating these enzymes, and we're gonna use those enzymes. I actually finished the koji before it can make spores, so I finish it before it's done its life cycle.
When it starts to produce spores, it stops making those enzymes. We're basically farming enzymes when we are growing koji, and we're gonna use those enzymes to break down other foods, and specifically with a miso, we're using those enzymes to break down the beans.
And I grew mine particularly to break down, or specifically to break down proteins, because I made this for a miso that's gonna age for about a year, so this red miso here.
So this red miso is a higher salt percentage, this is about 12%salt, and this one I think is about five to six percent salt, and this is a shiro miso, and you can taste the difference. Both of these are at least an extra, so from their finish point, at least another year, and they've been in the walk-in for that amount of time, so it slows it down. You're welcome to taste those there.
When I speak to the salt percentage, so miso is koji, it's beans, it's salt, and then we balance the ratio of ingredients depending on the type of miso that we're gonna make.
And the koji actually, so those are the enzymes, those are the things that are breaking things down really quickly. That's kind of the speed of the ferment, but also the salt is this parameter that it's kind of like the bodyguard, so it is deciding who can be in that environment, or the bouncer is a better term for it.
So, depending on the salt percentage, different microbes aren't able to live in higher or lower salt percentages, so when that salt percentage comes up, it's eliminating a lot of different bacteria in there.
So, the koji is the speed of the ferment, but the salt also is a speed parameter too. So the salt, when that gets higher, that fermentation slows down. If you made a sauerkraut, you're probably in, what, about 2% salt or something like that, maybe 2 to 3% salt.
That ferment can happen really fast. If you put it up to 10% salt, you'd be rinsing that cabbage off later, and it wouldn't be breaking down quite the same way.
With the miso, it's kind of the same. The darker one there is at 12% salt, so that I'm gonna let that go for an entire year. That lighter one there, that white one, has about 5 to 6% salt, so that I can have that fermentation happen faster.
But the white one as well has a higher amount of koji. So I'm speeding it up with more enzymes, and I'm also lowering the salt so that I can keep things moving fast. So those ratio of ingredients is actually between the white and the red.
There's almost twice as much koji in the white one than there is in the red one. The red one is equal part beans and koji, and then the white one is actually two parts koji to one part beans.
I'm gonna pass these beans around. So once we have the koji, then we're gonna take that and we're gonna mix that with our soybeans.
And these are beans that I soaked. So I soaked these beans for about 24 hours. I will pass them around. Take those beans and break one in half, and look at the center of it. Those were dried beans, and I soaked them for about 24 hours.
Those are soybeans. Different beans are gonna soak for different amounts of time, so if you want to use a different bean, you're just gonna have to be conscious of how long it takes to look at the center of the bean.
The moisture has made its way all the way to the center of the bean, and I always forget to bring ones that aren't quite soaked all the way. When the moisture hasn't reached the center of the bean, you'll see a dry spot in the very center, and you might see that on one or two of those.
Ideally, we're soaking those beans until the moisture has been able to penetrate to the center, and that's usually gonna be what the final weight of the beans that we're cooking is.
So we want to make sure that the beans have soaked in their moisture all the way, because if you start cooking them and they haven't, you're gonna have a dry center through the bean.
After they soak for that long, we're gonna cook them. We're gonna cook them for in an open pot. I like to cook them in an open pot. We're gonna cook them for two to three hours for the soybean in particular, but in the Instant Pot we can do it for a pressure cooker. We can do it in about 20 minutes.
This one was set for 30 minutes, so these ones should be good and soft. When that cools down enough that I can touch these beans, I'm gonna show you what that looks like, but we're gonna basically be able to squish the bean between our thumb and our pinky and and have it squish pretty easily, and that's how we'll know if it's finished cooking.
When these beans have lost that pressure a little bit and I can get in there, we're gonna weigh these beans, and I'm judging the salt percentage of my miso based on the finished weight of those beans and this koji so that I get an accurate percentage.
We're all gonna start getting to work here. We're gonna be mixing a little bit of salt in with this koji here, and then we're also gonna be mashing these beans. I'm doing two parts koji and one part beans. That was done by dry weight of beans. When these beans soak, they're actually probably taking on, they go from one to like 2.24, so they're taking on over 100% of their weight in water as we're soaking them, and I didn't weigh them before they went in here.
I usually wait until we're done cooking. I'm gonna step us ahead a little bit. I know what those beans should pretty much weigh, and we're gonna weigh them to see if I was actually accurate, but I'm gonna measure out your salt so that we can start mixing that in with the koji now.
Generally we'll take that koji, and I like to mix the salt with the koji first, and that's doing two things. That little bit of moisture that is in the koji is actually getting pulled out by that salt, but it's also getting a good mix of the salt around the koji grains as well, and kind of, you know, grinding them in a little bit.
I use a Celtic sea salt, and it's a little coarser than a fine salt, and when we're speaking about salts, I tend not to try not to use an iodized salt. Something that's been processed. I particularly like sea salts.
I started with 600 grams of dried beans, and they should have taken on two to times 2.24, so we should be ending up with 1344 grams of bean. We're gonna find out in a minute when that calms down, and then my ratio of ingredients.
So the koji was based on the 600 grams of dried soybeans, so I'm gonna be using 1200 grams of koji, which puts us up to a little over two and a half kilos, and then I use a fairly simple method for guessing my percentage, which isn't completely accurate, but I'm fine with it, and I'm gonna just multiply that.
I'm going for about 5% salt, so I'm just gonna times 0.05, and it's gonna give me 134 grams of salt. That's a little more than we're gonna need. I put some salt in there, and what I'm actually gonna do is kind of massage that salt into the koji, and at the same time, so if I were growing this koji fresh, it would be in like cakes, so I'd be breaking that koji up first, but I'm actually just kind of massaging that koji a little bit.
I'm massaging that salt in, and it's very little, but it does actually start to pull some of the moisture that's out of here, and this koji is about 30% moisture.
We're gonna do that before we get to the beans, and just kind of brush the salt out first and look for any little black dots or anything there. Maybe you want to take it out, and something else that's happening while we're doing that is those microbes rom our body are actually getting into there as well, so the things from my hands are getting onto that as well.
Yeah, if you have cuts on your hands, then you probably want to use gloves, especially if you're massaging salt with your hands, but more so for the other people in the group.
These beans are finished cooking, and this pot is obviously cool enough that I can touch it with my hands. We're gonna strain this out, and I'm gonna save some of this liquid to mix back in.
With a red miso, I generally don't find that I need to mix it back in, but if it's not moist enough, which could be a couple different factors for why, then we're gonna add a little bit more liquid back in.
This is another step that we could do. You can just take, and just a light little squeeze, and that skin comes off real gentle. Just squeeze between the fingers, and I'm gonna ask you if you want to see what the beans need to be cooked to when they're done. I'm taking it, and I'm gonna squish it between my pinky and my thumb.
They're kind of hot right now, so you might not want to do it yet, but it should squish pretty easily between my thumb and my pinky, and that's how I judge when the beans are fully cooked.
So I've reserved a little bit of this liquid aside, and then we're gonna see if I was accurate with the weight of these beans.
I was really close. I'm only about 40 grams off from where Ithought it was gonna be, so they did take on about 2.24 from their original weight.
We're gonna mash these beans now. I'm gonna go about 350 grams in each one.
We want to mash these up really good, and you can mash it as little or as much as you want to, depending on, like this is like a preference thing, and those of you who haven't made miso, which is, is everyone here not made miso before? So you don't know what your preference is yet, but what I need to do is mash these.
So sometimes I use potato mashers. I have at home, I have this wooden, flat wooden thing that I use to squish them. You can use your food processor.
This potato masher has these slots in it, and it doesn't really do that great of a job. I have some that are flat with little holes, yeah, and what I got for y'all too as options for mashing are these slotted spoons. Anything that can mash these. Your food processor would work really well.
I kind of like to put my energy into it too though, in that like, you know, using your muscles to push down on those beans, and, and then, you know, once they cool down a little bit, you can just get your hands in there and squish them down. We got the wooden tool over here, which is probably my preferred one, but yeah, just squish them all up and have fun.
They mash much easier while they're hot, so when they cool down, that process gets a little bit harder.
And there's another reason right now, and particularly with a shiro miso or a white miso, there's another reason why we want to do it hot, is that we just brought these beans, we heated them up, and we heat treated them.
We didn't necessarily sterilize them. In a pressure cooker, you're getting a little closer to that, but we just killed any of the harmful bacteria that could have been on them, or most of it anyway, and then as those beans are cooling down, the chance of getting contaminated by something is increasing.
So ideally, we're gonna cool these down, and especially with a sweet miso, which is a little more prone to contamination, as it has a little less salt.
We're going to be mixing this koji in as soon as this cools down to body temperature, and we're doing it when it cools down to body temperature, because the enzymes will die at about a hundred and forty degrees, so at about a hundred and forty degrees, we're killing off the enzymes in the koji.
So when we say body temperature, that's an easy one. You can feel it. If it doesn't feel too warm to the touch, if it feels just really comfortable, that's about body temperature.
We don't have to get a thermometer out for this, but it's a good way to just get that sense.
A hatcho miso, a hatcho miso is made with just soybeans, so you'd be growing that directly on the soybeans.
I do it on rice for the miso, so the sweetness in the rice, or the sweetness in the miso is coming from the rice, so particularly with a sweet miso, I want to do it on the rice because of that.
But barley also, one of the best sweet misos I've had, is almost a hundred percent barley, and the barley has its own flavor profile.
Miso is a harmony food. When you bring it, when you're using it in cooking, it brings all the flavors together, so it's harmonizing a dish, and then when you put things into the miso.
Like for the blends that I make, I put these ingredients in there, and they take a long time for the microbes from the ingredients that I'm adding in, to kind of harmonize within that mixture, and that miso is gonna invite them in, and over time, they're gonna kind of become one.
So I think of miso as harmony food, and the koji is this really amazing harmonizer too, and that's what it does.
So how's that feel to you? Yeah, and what how about temperature-wise? Yeah. It's not that much warmer than your body though, right? Just doesn't feel hot to you, right? Yeah. So it's probably ready to mix the Koji in.
Once these beans have kind of gotten to like, just kind of warm to the touch, they're not hot, and it's getting closer to body temperature, this Koji that has had the salt mixed with it, is gonna get, we're gonna mix that into the beans, and I'm making sure to get all of my salt in there.
I'm gonna speak a little bit again to the sweet miso. Sweet miso can range from anywhere between three and a half percent salt to, I would say upwards of six percent salt, and that's just per me, and what I'm familiar with, and what I know.
The ratio of Koji to dried beans was two to one, so two parts Koji to one part beans. So the sweetness of a sweet miso, a shiro miso, is coming from the Koji itself. So the sugars from the rice are what's gonna make that sweet. The beans don't really have carbohydrates to them, so they're not gonna give you those sugars.
And then we're gonna just kind of mix that in as much as we can, and make a really good paste with that. So really just doing our best to like, get that Koji mix in there as well as we can, so that everything is pretty consistent.
Then once you've done that, we're gonna look at that, and we're gonna make little balls with it, but we're gonna see if the texture's right, if the moisture content's right, and I'll explain that in a minute.
Get a consistent mix, and we're actually gonna be adding a little bit of the water from the cooking back in, because this is gonna be a little drier than we want it, but let's mix it all up, and then I'll show you what too dry looks like.
We're gonna actually add some water back to it. Make a ball or two with that, and we're gonna bring it over here, and I'm gonna add a little water to it, but I want to show you what too dry looks like first.
Generally when a miso is finished, or when after we get mixing it up, we make it into these little balls, and if we're making a lot of miso, maybe it's going into a crock or something like that, I take these balls and I'll be like throwing them down into the bowl.
Look for a little bigger bowl. It might make a mess. So you throw it down into the bowl. That crumbled into bits and pieces, so ideally that miso is going to just kind of like, not necessarily splat, but it's gonna get like a firm plop. If your miso crumbles like that, then it's too dry.
Now with a sweet miso, I knew that this was gonna be this dry because my Koji ratio is a lot higher. That's why I reserve some of the cooking water to be adding back in afterwards. The problem with adding the water back in, or the only thing you need to think about, is that if you make it too moist, then it's hard to get it drier.
And some people make really wet misos, but, and we'll go a little technical on this, is that when it's too wet, the water activity of the miso is higher. And that, when the water activity, so the water activity is the free water within the food. It's really dry and that salt locks in water activity.
The microbes are actually gonna lock in water activity as well. But when the water activity is too high, we have free water. And when we have free water, water that's not being used by something in there, then other bacteria can come in and contaminate it.
The water activity is actually a safety parameter for the miso that I make. Misos, misos don't fall within what most food safety people will consider safe. They don't fall within the correct pH. They tend to be around a 5 or so. And 3.5 is usually about what safe is considered.
So miso doesn't fall within that. So that one of the safety parameters for making miso that I follow is actually the water activity. And when we make it too wet, that water activity comes up a little high. And then that makes room for something harmful to get in.
I wouldn't say necessarily I would see I've seen much harmful stuff get into a miso. But what I would say would happen if the water is too high is it's gonna get sour. And ideally we don't want this sour miso. The lactic acid bacteria would start to dominate.
In the miso fermentation, there's a bunch of there's a few different fermentations that are happening at once. Koji is breaking the carbohydrates down or the Koji itself is breaking down into carbohydrates which are in working with yeast to make alcohols in there.
Your proteins are breaking down to amino acids and then your oils and your fats are breaking down into fatty acids. The alcohol mixes with the fatty acid and creates something that's called an ester which is going to be your flavors, your aromas. And then as those proteins break down, they're breaking down to amino acids which are giving you those umamis.
So those sweet flavors and things that are in there are a combination. And so a lot of the flavor and aroma is a combination of the alcohol mixing with the oil or the carbohydrate mixing with the fats. And then that protein just coming along behind it and giving you that deep flavor that umami.
So there's like a couple different fermentations that are actually gonna happen during this process as it sits. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna add a little bit of water to this but not too much water.
And I over explained the too much water but it is really important safety parameter when you're making a miso. And that being said, don't worry about it and don't overthink it.
I'm gonna come around and we're gonna break up those balls that I just had you make. If you want you can throw them into the pot or just crumble in your hand. It shouldn't crumble. When we add this water in you're gonna see what enough moisture is gonna be like.
So it's not gonna crumble but it's not gonna be sticky like sticking to your hand. It's just gonna be like this in-between where it's moist enough that it's kind of like gonna be like putty in your hands but but not falling apart like that.
So if you have balls of miso you are going to crumble them back up and I've got some.. Yes. And I am going to add some water. And I'll show you how much water to add. Again this is an experience thing so I'll try not add too much but I'm gonna add a little bit at a time.
And this water is cooled down enough that it's I would say is above body temperature but the temperature that we're looking for is below 140 degrees. So the enzymes are gonna die at 140 degrees. And I've got my finger in there. It's my my accurate thermometer right now. And this feels a little bit hot to me.
The stuff in this open bowl is a little bit cooler. But again you're going if you have a thermometer and you want to check you're going for below 140 degrees because the enzymes will die above that temperature. So I'm gonna add a little bit of this.
If you want to crumble those up we can add some liquid to them. I think that that is gonna be just about right. But just mix that all up and then we're gonna mix them all together at the end so if we're not right. And then you're gonna mix all this up together and I'm just getting a sense of how much is in there. I might add a little much but we're gonna mix all three of these together when we're done. It shouldn't be sticky.
This one might be right on the edge of too much moisture but one of these other ones is gonna be right on the edge of too dry. So we'll get pretty close but it shouldn't crumble and it shouldn't stick to you. We're just gonna add a little bit at a time and then I'm gonna start mixing that up and I'm getting a pretty good sense of where this is gonna be.
This one might be a little on the dry side but one of the other ones is gonna be one of the other groups is a little bit on the wet side. We're gonna mix all three of them together. So I didn't add much liquid to that but mix that up and then it shouldn't crumble in your hands but it also shouldn't be all sticky to your hands too.
What's it taste like? Taste it. It reminds me of Play-Doh. I like Play-Doh right? You've eaten Play-Doh though.
So make some balls with that or just make a ball with it and see what it feels like to you. It kind of feels less crumbly. It's more together. It's about right. Yeah. You see how it didn't break into pieces? It cracked a little bit so but one of those other ones over there I think is gonna be a little a little bit wet so we will mix them all together. If you feel like you're done mixing that up we're gonna bring them all over here and then mix them all up together. We can just dump all that in together.
I didn't even talk too much on the origins of alot of miso so originally it wasn't soybeans The Chinese brought the soybeans to Japan 1,500 years or so ago but prior to that there were a lot of these were made with meat so just breaking other proteins down and when Buddhism came to Japan they brought a vegetarian diet and they also brought soybeans as well.
Taking these three that we all did together and I'm mixing them all up and what I talked about the texture of this so I don't want it to be too crumbly but I also don't want it to stick to my hand so adding a little bit of water at a time and then mixing it all up is really a good way to make sure you don't get it too wet.
If you do get it too wet it's fine. Where are you putting these in small jars so we're not gonna weight it down but I normally weight it down and I've seen some misos that were so wet that the weights just kind of like sunk into it. That's way too wet.
Making a ball with this it's not sticking to my hand and it's slightly crumbly but it's not just falling into pieces and we're gonna throw it down into this pot here and see what happens if it shatters or if it crumbles into pieces then it's a little too much so that made a really satisfying splat noise or not necessarily splat but and it didn't really crumble around the edges too much ideally that's kind of the perfect moisture for a miso.
I think and if I was putting this into a crock what I would be doing is making these balls and I'd start throwing them into the bottom and and this way we're gonna be pressing out a lot of the air and we make a layer all the way around the bottom.
I won't do the whole thing but this is really satisfying when we're making it in a group and a lot of people together like if we were putting this all in the one crock and we all get to go in and if anybody wants to do this too just for the satisfaction of throwing the ball into there please come and do it but we would get like start making a layer around and and that in that process we're kind of like pushing the air out and then you can just come and kind of press that down and then I'd come in with another layer on top of that and keep doing that process the oxygen is going to be the defect of the miso.
So normally we would weigh down the top and a liquid would rise to the top over time which is your tamari but this is an anaerobic process so this process is happening without oxygen like a lot of our fermentations there's a few like vinegar kind of needs oxygen but for the most part yeah oxygen is gonna be what will allow a mold to grow it's gonna need that oxygen so fungus needs oxygen to grow so if you're gonna get a mold it's gonna be on the top where it has access to oxygen
When you're fermenting this if you do get like a mold on the top of your miso as it's fermenting ideally we're gonna put something on the top so we are gonna put a little bit of salt on the top and then you would put a weight so that you could exclude the surface area but I make miso in larger batches.
So we're gonna be putting this into eight ounce jars for each of you to take home. If it were a really long ferment I mean, I do at least a quart jar size but you know with a larger batch it’s different.
You have less surface area to be exposed so the chances of it getting contaminated are much less if you get a little mold on the top you can wipe that off.
You can clean around the top with alcohol you can also do this other thing that I usually don't say on camera too much is that you can leave it there because as that mold creates a film layer or creates a layer on the top it just created a seal and then it can get down into the miso a little bit but it's not gonna go all the way down.
Sometimes it could but well you know it's you, it's your choice I'm not gonna tell you it's a good idea I'm not gonna tell you that I haven't done it before either.
An easy way to weight down like something like a quart jar or two you could put salt in a bag on the top that way if the bag breaks you just gotten your miso salty but I brought 9 ounce jars so that we could put about 8 ounces of me so in there and well you can decide if you want to weight it down or not with a sweet me so it's gonna finish pretty fast so not too worried about it.
If we're gonna let it sit for a year that's a different story. This one fermented for about six months.
There's a sweet miso and it's been in my walk-in for about a year or two. Yeah the temperature. Bring it into the refrigerator it's just gonna basically stall the fermentation.
Ideally I make it seasonally so I you would usually make this miso a little closer to the spring, so coming into the summer so as those temperatures are rising for the red miso which is why I usually make, I like to make it in the winter time.
I'm putting this all in barrels and my kitchen is like 40 50 degrees maybe I'm putting it in these barrels and I work with the seasonal temperatures you can totally make this happen faster by bringing that temperature up. It's up to you it might take a little bit longer.
So I work with the seasons with my me so I usually make it in the winter time putting it away when a the environmental bacterias are low.
Also I'm putting it away and I'm letting it kind of like have a minute to settle while it's cool because as soon as those temperatures rise then that fermentation starts kicking on and then I let it go through the summer.
So I say I do it for a year but really it's like three seasons and hmm saying a year with something like a miso it doesn't necessarily mean a year.
I would say that doing it after the autumn equinox and then finishing it before the summer solstice is probably fine I would just go that whole year.
People think I'm really patient because I can wait so long for ferments but it really has to do with remembering that there's something in that barrel over there and then if, and I'm not really good with short ferments like you're talking about making kvass, kombucha things like that.
I'm, I really messed those things up because I got to pay attention to them but I put things away and if I forget about it for another year it's usually not bad it's usually better actually so I think that there's nothing to do with patience it's about memory oh yeah don't worry about going too long or too short maybe you won't like it yeah then you want to keep them out of the light
We've got a bunch of jars here you've sterilized these jars with alcohol so ideally you would be sterilizing them with an alcohol to make sure that they're clean.
I like to use a 50% alcohol so something like a vodka or something like that because it evaporates a little bit slower so it can kill off the bacteria if you're working with a virus you're working in more like the 75% alcohol range you're talking about bacterias you want to go 50% because it and you want to let it kind of evaporate off of the jar because it takes a little bit longer for it to evaporate.
If it were a hundred percent alcohol would evaporate really quickly so at 50% it evaporates a little bit slower so that a 50% it evaporates a little bit slower so it gives it a little more time to kill the bacteria in your container you can salt the inside of your container you could do a lot of different stuff so we're gonna put this miso into some jars and see how much you can fit in your jar we're gonna get it in there.
We're gonna try and clean up the top of our rim don't pack it all the way to the top give yourself about an inch or so if you can or half inch if you actually if you can pack it to just below the thread on those jars it should be okay and it's going to it's gonna ferment a little bit in there so it's not gonna blow your lid off your jar like a sauerkraut or something like that but it is maybe gonna leak in your cabinet.
I've stained plenty of cabinets with tamari from misos so this is a miso tamari so that tamari you're talking about it's more of an amber color usually except for this one see there'sdark yeah that's tamari I get about a gallon or two of miso tamari off of about 500 pounds of me so you don't want to make a ball and then you can make a little tiny ball okay make a little tiny balls and press them down into your jar.
I would normally do this with alcohol or something and then sprinkle a little bit of salt on the top which is on the middle table right now and then just kind of rub a little bit and I'm just talking a little sprinkle in there just get a light coating on the top of your jar.
I was gonna bring something in called kasu which I forgot kasu is the mash for making sake and sometimes I'll coat the top of the miso with that and nothing harmful gets through that it's like this forever food, too.
I mean and I've had I have some kasu that is eight years old now and it's like black it's like mmm it's good stuff I've mixed it with the maromi so I mixed it with the mash for making soy sauce so the mash for making sake mixed with the mash for making soy sauce and that stuff is like really like specific flavor but it's this real dark, rich and nothing goes bad in that it's a really strong medicine.
Yeah, so you want to finish the miso first you could put things into it at this point but you would want to finish the miso first and then take it out of the jar mix those things and put it back in with this sweet miso it's gonna finish it three months give or take I let it go six months but into three months so after a month you can start looking at it you can start tasting it and then we're gonna say when it's good to you it's good to use.
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