Halloween Miso 2012

 

We are now eating the miso we made on the day of Halloween last year. We have started eating it around late August. With a risk of sounding very temae-miso-ish, very good indeed.

The other one with Chick pea blend is still maturing in my fridge and now I am thinking about making another batch for next year.

Lime kosho

I talked about Yuzu-kosho the other day.

 Today, I prepared lime kosho by mixing koji, lime rind and salt.

I have already made a lemon kosho without koji and really loved it. The recipe is from Milliam's Kitchen (Japanese).
The lemon kosho by her recipe was salty, full of fresh lemon flavor, and had a real kick of chilli. I love spicy condiments. My kids are too small to enjoy spicy food, but I do and having spicy condiments at hand, I can always jazz up my dishes. So plain grilled chicken for kids, when I have the same thing with this. As she says, it would be wonderful with middle eastern dishes. I can imagine sish kebab with this and it waters my mouth.
This is not Milliam's recipe, but often people make fresh yuzu kosho by mixing the following in this way.

Chilli pepper: Citrus rind: Salt= 4:1:0.5to1

Get rid of the seed of chili peppers and put it through food processor. Grate the citrus rind. Mix all the ingredients. Add more salt if you think it is not salty enough.  And that's it. Simple but beautiful.

These would keep in a fridge for up to a month. It would make sense to make tiny amount before a BBQ (or Christmas, if you are thinking about how to eat up the left over roast).

While Milliam's ( I think this is how she spell her pen name) recipe has got its beauty in its absolute freshness, yuzukosho with koji will keep in a room temperature.  I will talk about it in my next post.

Yuzu kosho? No, lemon kosho.

Now that I have a passable koji, I really wants to make yuzu-kosho.

Yuzu kosho is a mixture of salt, yuzu, koji  and chilli peppers. They give wonderful kick to grilled meat. Though I was introduced to it much later in my life (when I was younger, it was a regional condiment. Now it is truly national) I am absolutely hooked to it. One of the reasons is kids who demands my cooking to be pretty much chilli free, no doubt.


Unfortunately, getting hold of fresh yuzu is extremely difficult here in the UK. But I have found a lemon kosho recipe on the web and have tried it. It was not the same thing, but did have great affinity to western food and I absolutely loved it. Now my next ambition is to make lemon kosho with koji.

Shio Koji

Now that my fourth koji is made, I decided to make Shio Koji . Shio koji is a type of seasoning that suddenly became very popular in Japan. Fermented koji and salt used in order to give flavour to pretty much anything. An article about shio koji by Los Angeles Times will give you some idea about the craze.

Koji has an ability to change protein into umami, so apparently you can work wonders by using shio koji rather than just salt with meat.

The recipe? If you are talking about fresh koji, instead of dried ones, it's as follows.

koji: salt: water=3:1:3

Put all the ingredients into a sterlised jar or tupperwear.
Water should just cover the salt and koji. If it does not, just add a little until it does. Then you leave the container in room temperature. In winter, it should take about two weeks until it gets ready. It changes the colour to slightly more amber like. When it fermented enough, it's ready to be used.

Will keep you updated!

Chick pea & soy beans

My fourth koji is doing very well. I have started soaking chick pea and soy beans. My next miso should be mixture of the two. I am thinking about maturing koji a little more than I usually do, in the hope that it will give miso a fuller taste.

4th Koji-- success!

After three attempts, I feel I have mastered tomo-koji method. My Denby enameled cast iron pot proved to be good enough an incubator for koji, so far as I am using tomo-koji method.

This time, I have put another moist tea towel (microwaved for sterilization and put into the bottom of the pot in order to give extra moisture. My steamed rice in my linen tea towel went on top of that wet towel and, well, it seems my koji seems to love it there.

For the first time I experienced koji emanating heat. Very, very excited.

Mirin facts

Mirin is a great liqueur that many Japanese people forgot how to enjoy.


If you ask your average Japanese friend if they ever had drunk mirin, they would look at you as if you went bonkers. They may even try to educate you, telling you that it is not for drinking but for cooking.
I remember in my teenage years, adults were talking about kitchen drinkers who drunk "even" mirin. Drinking mirin was seen as the final denigration.

And yet, mirin had a place akin to port wine during the Edo period. Its rich sweetness was much valued and mirin infused with herbs was ( and to a certain degree still is) an indispensable drink to mark New Year.

Much like you make sloe gin by infusing sloe in gin, mirin is made by infusing koji and glutinous rice(optional) into distilled alcohol, mostly shochu.
The recipe is something like below.

Koji: glutinous rice: distilled alcohol=1:1:4
Koji: distilled alcohol=1:2

The latter is supposed to be quicker to mature ( about 3 months?) but I think the former, which takes minimum of 6 months to mature, tends to have richer sweetness.

Of course, mirin's sweetness meant people used it in cooking, especially when sugar was hard to come by. But what damaged mirin as a drink is a combination of tax and advent of supermarket.

Japanese alcohol tax used to be very strict and, proper, drinkable mirin was not allowed on supermarket shelves for a long time. You needed to go to a proper wine shop for a bottle of mirin those days.
But, of course, there was a leeway. If you added 2% salt to mirin, making it too salty to drink but good enough for cooking, you could sell it in a supermarket. Also, it was much cheaper as it was technically not alcohol.

For many people, mirin is that salty sweet liquid, disgusting to drink, but good when you are stewing food, or making teriyaki sauce. I myself have never tasted proper matured mirin until well into my thirties, but when I finally did, it overwhelmed me by its complexity of flavor and taste.
I find it rather sad that once prized drink is so totally forgotten in its own birthplace.


Now, if you are wanting mirin just for cooking, you can pretty much substitute it by mixing rice wine and sugar. But properly matured drinkable mirin is a totally different story. That is something worth waiting for a year or two.


This year, I was surprised to find a bottle of mirin on a supermarket shelf in Britain. My memory was that mirin was one ingredient that was hard to get hold of in mainstream supermarkets.
I bought a bottle and only when I came back home, checked the label. Ingredients: Glucose syrup, water, rice, alcohol, corn syrup. Made in Japan.

Well, I don't blame the supermarket as it is what majority of my folks believe what mirin to be. But maybe it is worthwhile to start infusing some more now.

Mirin making update

About a month since I put my first koji in rum. The color started to change slightly.

Miso making update

More than two weeks since I put my miso into ziplock. Just changed the bag as the old one seemed to be leaking. It looks more and more like miso.

A short break

This is just to say I may not be updating this blog for a week or so. My husband is asking me to brew beer.

Well, I may learn something in the process, but it will be a little more difficult to make another batch of koji for a while.

I am hoping I will be learning something, particularly about making alcohol.

Koji facts 1

In my first post, I said koji is 'a type of mould'. However, strictly speaking, it is actually thousands of types of mould belonging to the same family.

In this blog, I am mainly talking about Aspergillus oryzae, but even Aspergillus oryzae has  thousands of types. They have names such as Aspergullus oryzae xxx and do belong to the same family, but strictly speaking, different types. Juzo Nagata, who was brought up in a koji making family, writes in his book how he was surprised to see various types of koji in his adulthood. Until he actually had to buy koji from other shops, he thought good koji were always the white ones with long velvety furs.
Added to this variety within Aspergillus oryzae family, there are other moulds which are called 'koji'. Monascus purpureus is a famous one of those.
 
It is possible to catch wild koji from your own environment-- in a traditional manner. Aspergillus oryzae are quite common in Japan and long time ago, people did use house koji or house yeast.
Sometimes, catching wild koji can be an absolute necessity. After the Second World War, for example, Okinawan people tried to revive black koji by doing exactly that. The island was bombed flat and they lost all the koji.

There is something that is fundamentally empowering in the idea that you can catch your own koji. It is a bit like foraging. The sheer knowledge that it is possible excites me.

And yet, on this particular issue, I am more conservative and rather buy my spore from a well established shop. Some of the Aspergilus moulds (not oryzae as far as I am aware) can produce toxin and I am not willing to risk my own or my family's health.
Cooking and eating food is so mundane but it is also so fundamentally about life and survival.


Well, I think if I am starting my own journey with koji, it probably is a good idea to start with a little bit of guidance.

Miso soup

Foto: Flickr TheDeliciousLife

Miso soup has two Japanese name. One is misoshiru (味噌汁) and the other is omiotsuke. The latter is the name I usually use and it has a rather impressive assortment of kanji when you write it down.

御御御付

For those whom do not understand Japanese, I tell you that the first three kanji (chinese characters) are honorifics. 
The most common and the most everyday of Japanese soup seems to be loved so much that it somehow managed to acquire this peculiar name. But what soup in the world could live up to such a name?

It is difficult to give you a standard recipe for miso soup. What is constant there are only two ingredients-- water and miso. Every family has their own recipe and even the same family will be eating very different soup depending on the season. 

At a Japanese restaurant, you tend to have more well-defined miso soup. Bonito flake stock　with tofu and sea weed, possibly with salad onion on top . 
At home, it can change drastically.
Any seasonal vegetable can get into it-- aubergine, mushrooms, leek, pumpkin, even some tomatoes. It can also contain some meat, fish, left over tempura. Not the sort you will get in a posh restaurant, but that is home food. If you have a family to feed, and are worried about balanced diet with less sodium intake, chucking lots of cut vegetable into your morning miso soup is a quick and easy way to get nearer to your goal.
I remember my mother doing that. I find myself doing that. 

So here's what I do.  Boil two cups of water, chuck in one or two cut up pieces of kombu  (approx.2x2 cm). If I happen to have chicken soup stock freshly made, I may use that instead of water. If I have bonito flakes, I chuck about two table spoonful in. 
Add whatever veg around into the soup. Thinly sliced onions and potatoes are my favorite as they are easy to get where I live.  When everything is cooked, I put something like one table tennis ball size of miso, stop the heat, taste the soup and decide if I should add some more miso or not. If I am happy with the taste, finely chopped up salad onion goes on top of adult miso soup. 

Unless I have a guest, kombu and bonito flakes stay in the soup. Not all that refined but kids love it and that's what matters when you are cooking for family.
Why, I even made miso soup from the left over of a roast chicken the other week, getting soup stock from its bones. And that's what, for me, makes the miso soup worthy of its three honorifics. It is wonderfully accommodating of new ingredients. Purists would forever grumble about some ingredients not being 'authentic'. But it seems to me that the authenticity in home food is a whole different kettle of fish from a restaurant authenticity.

Pampering afternoon

Photo from Flickr: Randomidea

If you think making koji is all about preparing and eating food, you are mistaken. Today, I had my idea of ultimate luxury: sakekasu bath.

The idea is simple enough. Put some sakekasu (I would say, half your fist in size would be good amount) in a cotton bag, close it either by a string or by tying the thing itself, and then, chuck the thing into your bath.

Sakekasu gives out lovely sake like smell and milky white cream into your bath water.

It is a subtle smell that commercially produced artificial perfumes would easily overwhelm, but still it is wonderfully aromatic.

Sakekasu is supposed to improve your skin conditions. There are women who make clay pack using sakekasu.

Having a toddler and a seven year old at home, I don't have time for a sakekasu pack, but, yes, 20 minutes of hot bath cocooned by the aroma of sake brought me right back to my experiences of nice holidays in some of Japan's best rustic spas.

Hot bath, smell of sake, minus kids screaming--- bliss!

Sakekasu

All is not lost however. I was left with quite a bit of lees ("sakekasu" in Japanese).

It is another versatile ingredient.
It can be made into a cake, mixed into a bread,  used for pickling vegetables, fish and meat. Japanese vegans use it when they want to add creamy, cheesy flavour into their western style dishes. Hence, pasta sakekasu tomato sauce, sakekasu quiches etc. etc.

The tastier the sake is, the better tasting its lees is, but there is no shop selling the thing, so my own sake is the only option.


To begin with, I start with something more simple-- sakekasu soy sauce.

Sakekasu: Soy Sauce= 1:1

I use it as if it is just a normal bottled of soy sauce when I am cooking stir fry. Half the sodium, tastes better. I think I can keep it in a fridge for up to about a month, though it has never really lasted that long.

Ages ago, sakekasu was 'the alcohol of common people' as the lees is much cheaper but still pretty alcoholic. It must have been particularly so in those days before the machine wringing out every drop of sake out of it.
 There is a particularly memorable joke people told during the Edo period (1603-1868) introduced in  Drinking Japan .

The friends of one nortoriously penniless drunkard ask: "How much did you drink?" He replies "Half a kilogram". (p.14)

Well, I don't think my sakekasu is good enough to eat on its own, but it does seem to make good enough a sauce.

Doburoku

There were two different types of sake brewing in my kitchen in the last week. One is largely following the recipe of Yoichi Yamada. The other is an amazake with yeast chucked in.
Two days ago, when I tasted them, Yamada recipe one tasted rather nice. I thought I should filter and bottle the day after but was too busy to do so on the next day. Only today, I filtered them.


LESSON: NEVER WAIT TO BOTTLE YOUR BREW IF YOU FEEL THE BREW IS AT THE RIGHT POINT.


Lovely sweetness has disappeared and the acidity that was behind the sweetness is now overpowering. Very disappointed.