Nick Repenning of Go-En Fermented Foods in Maine presented Koji, Miso, Mushrooms with a selection of curated videos, during a live streaming. Based on feedback from the audience and the requests of people to have a non-Sunday event we re-did the event. We also re-edited the videos to make them more accessible.
Originally 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.
The event also has transcribed and captioned videos by Maroua Jellibi, Wade Fox, María José Mantilla, Nick Repenning, Haruna Deasy, Ken Fornataro, and Adonde Lab
We added videos from Meredith Leigh and Eiko Takahashi to demonstrate some of the things we ended up discussing at the first live screening. All 4 of these videos are now in their Vimeo showcase, and the original videos for the event are in their showcase - all available for viewing by Annual Members.
Anytime that you become an Annual Member during 2024 you have access to any videos previously created or broadcast. Also, some form of a live event video summary.
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Each video has a transcript that you can search for a specific word in, or that you can have scroll while you watch a video. This is the Miso Class transcript.
with 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.