While doing some spring cleaning, I came to the
conclusion I have a ton of rice. When I
told Carla this, she remarked, “We do? But we never eat rice.” This is true.
We had about 5 types of rice, each one with only about ¼ or ½ cup
missing from the bag. Clearly, something
needed to be done. In thinking about it,
I went to Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, and came across a recipe for miso. Miso is actually a bean ferment, but it
involves a lot of rice as well. After
doing a bit of measuring, I was set: I was putting up a two gallon crock of
miso.
Miso is traditionally thought of as a soy product,
but it gets a lot of its distinctive flavor from rice. Moldy rice to be exact. Really - this is also how they make sake. To get the starch in the rice to convert into
a sugar, you need to inoculate them with the mold Aspergillus oryzae. This beneficial mold activates enzymes that allow the
conversion of starch to sugars. It’s a
similar process to malting barley for brewing beer, except that you need mold to
help the rice along, while barley is just allowed to sprout, and is then
roasted, which activates it's starch/sugar enzymes.
Making Miso is easy, but making the moldy rice
(called Koji-kin) is really hard.
Reading about it, I think I was still in "brewer" mode, which explains my
issue in getting the rice mold to start growing. In one forum a miso-enthusiast remarked that
it’s wrong to think of growing mold in the same way as cultivating yeast for
beer. While yeast will grow and multiply
quite easily, mold needs to be held at a certain temperature and humidity for
quite some time, so it can mature to its spore stage and reproduce. It’s much trickier and requires much more
diligence and attention to detail. With
yeast, the little bugs are just going to keep multiplying so long as there’s food – perhaps
slower if it’s cold and faster if it’s warm, but they’ll keep chugging along.
But I think I finally got there. After about 3-4 days of tending to my koji
rice and finding a sweet flavor and cheese-like aroma I mixed it with thoroughly cooked (nearly mushy) soybeans and steamed rice. Then I made a strong brine of salt and the
beans' cooking water and packed it into a crock with more salt smeared across the
sides and bottom. This thick paste was
then weighted down and covered. In about
a month I’ll overhaul the miso, bringing the bottom layer to the surface, and
pushing the bottom under. One
side-product of the miso is that it’ll produce a salty, dark liquid on top called
tamari, which can be used just like traditionally brewed soy sauce.
Today the miso crock is sitting in a dark
closet. It’ll stay there for about a
year, although one fascinating facet of miso is that the age is measured in
summers, which is the time of the most fermenting activity. So if I crack it open next fall, it would be
considered a two-summer miso, even though it would be less than two years old. But either way, that gives me plenty of time to devise what to do with two gallons of miso.
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