Coping with Failure 2

The last post was about my third attempt at making koji. Now, what happened to my second failure?

Before talking about my second koji,　here is what I tried to do with my second attempt.

First, I tried to use my little rice cooker rather than steaming my rice. Following Mr Yamada's recipe, I thought I would be able to prepare dry enough rice by using less water in a rice cooker. Then, instead of wrapping the rice in a clean tea towel, I have directly put it into a plastic container and wrapped the container with towel to keep it warm. My first attempt failed as there was not enough moisture, so this time, I went for a lot of moisture in a full swing.

The result was koji mixed rice too soggy to become a proper dried koji. If anything, it smelled and tasted like very condensed amazake, slightly sour.

After 3 days of gazing and marveling at this,  I decided to mix the whole thing with hot water and keep it warm overnight. The result was amazake alright, which also means that my clumsy attempt at koji making did not, at least, develop wrong sort of mould on my rice.  The books tell me if I am not sure if my koji is alright, take some and make amazake. If I can make sweet amazake, without strange smell or taste, I have something edible there.

OK. I do have amazake alright. Now the question is if I would put any yeast in this hot, sweet concoction.

It is not at all like the refinement of proper sake, but I do taste something akin to junmai sake (pure rice sake) in this failure no.2 amazake.