How to Make Rice Koji at Home (Plus Miso Making)

all right so this stuff right here is called Koji and most of you have probably never heard about it before and I don't blame you because it's really just started to catch popularity in the western culinary world but I guarantee that you are consuming foods that are made with Koji on a daily basis because things like soy sauce are made with Koji or how about a miso paste so it's good to at least understand how it transforms our food and that's exactly what I'm going to be doing today I'll be breaking down the science of Koji and how it actually works and then I'll show you how to make it at home completely from scratch and then I'll be taking that Koji and using it to make two different types of miso paste so buckle up because we are diving deep into the magical world of Koji now whenever I start a bigger food project like this I'm generally a bit overwhelmed because this isn't normal cooking we're working in the world of microbiology and that can be scary for me the best way to combat that is just to learn more about what's actually going on so that's the first thing we're going to cover and I'm going to try to do it very simply so the term Koji is the Japanese term for rice that is inoculated with a specific mold or basically has a mold grown all over it and that specific mold is called aspergillus orzai or aspergillus orzai however you want to pronounce it and it is magical it basically takes these starchy foods like rice or beans and it works like a key to unlock nutrition to unlock incredible flavor and really transform these basic dried Pantry Goods into incredible products that we all love to consume like a miso paste a soy sauce or even a sake and one thing that makes Koji very unique in the world of fermentation is that it's always a two-step process and I'll become covering both of those parts today the first step is actually inoculating your rice with this mold so we cook the rice and we grow the mold over it which takes about two days that right there is your actual Koji which I'll be showing you how to make in this video but if you don't want to make it you can buy it online or you can go to a local specialty Asian market or if you have a Japanese market around you they might sell it and Koji on its own just rice with mold on it pretty much has no value by itself I mean you can eat this stuff but you wouldn't want to eat a whole block of it this is where the second step of the Koji process comes in where we mix it with a starchy food so for making miso paste we're going to take the Koji mix it up with some cooked soybeans add some salt and what that Koji is going to do is over a long period of time it's going to take these starches and these proteins that are present in your soybean and it's going to start breaking them down over time and converting them into amino acids converting them into sugars which were actually present in your soybean but they just needed to be unlocked now one thing to keep in mind is that we end up using the Japanese term Koji the most in the culinary world because they're the ones that just went absolutely buck wild with it but humans have been harnessing this mold for centuries and when you look at Asia as a whole a lot of cultures have their own version of Koji so just keep that in mind actually my friend Jeremy whose book is this right here Koji Alchemy basically Jeremy has dedicated his whole professional life to studying coaching and in this book instead of saying miso paste or soy sauce he uses more generic terms and he calls them Amino Pace or amino sauces which in my opinion is a great way to explain these umami-rich fields and just give them a more generic term now aspergillus orzai like all of these microbes are naturally occurring in your environment which is why I'm sure at first first someone just left out some rice and boom all of a sudden they had Koji mold and then they got lucky and mixed it with some soybeans and they had miso paste so you can technically collect it naturally I don't know how to do that but I know it's possible but an easier way to do it on the fridge is to order the actual spores online so we actually have the spores in here and then they're just mixed with rice flour to make them easy to sprinkle over your rice and I'll explain where to get these in just a second so let's make some Koji and since we're making the most standard type of Koji which is rice Koji we need of course some rice now you can use both short grain and long grain rice for Koji but the mold actually prefers long grain rice because it has more amylose compared to amylopectin which is found in short grain rice now for my recipe I'm gonna use four pounds of long grain rice and just remember that roughly every pound of dried rice is going to give you about 1.3 pounds of finished Koji so the ratios just depend on how much Koji you want to make at home now we need to cook our rice to not only sterilize it to give the mold a nice clean base to grow off but also the mold won't grow on dried rice it needs to be cooked so it can attach itself to the grain so the first thing I'm going to do is Soak all of my rice overnight and I'm going to be steaming this rice which is by far the preferred way to make your Koji because by steaming we're really going to get a nice separated grain so the mold can completely cover every rice grain now having said that you can cook it in a rice cooker or in a pot you just won't get perfect separation of those grains which again is not as ideal as steaming but it will still work so now that my rice is fully hydrated I'll drain off the rice and one of the best ways to steam this amount of rice is to use a cheesecloth or a muslin cloth to really hold all of those grains together so I'll pour out all of my soaked grains onto my cheesecloth and I'll wrap that up at the top with a little knot to keep everything in a bundle and I've got a little steaming basket that I'm going to up at the bottom of my pot to keep the rice elevated above the water and I'm going to steam it for 50 minutes total and this is pretty cool right here because you can actually see the process of those rice grains slowly starting to gelatinize as they steam over time now after 25 minutes I like to take that bundle and just flip it over to the other side because I do find that the bottom which is closer to the heat is going to tend to overcook so this will really help even out the steaming of your rice and then I'll cut off the heat and I'll let that hang out for a bit just until that bag is cool enough to handle so this is what I'm talking about all of these grains because we steamed you can see these grains are cooked through but they're completely separate even this Clump will just break right apart show you close up see completely cook through totally separated so that mold can cover each and every grain so when I eat them it's not the type of rice that you necessarily want to just eat with the meal it's pretty Al Dente it's got a nice chew but it's gelatinized cooked through and that's all we need for this Koji so right now we're at 160 degrees now that would basically kill the Koji spores if we added them now I'm gonna get this down to around 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit because that's the temperature we're going to be keeping the Koji at so I'll just wait till it cools and we'll add our spores so the rice is finally cooled down after about an hour to around 95 degrees Fahrenheit so we're ready to add our spores and I'm gonna transfer all of the rice into a large mixing bowl and just start breaking up any rice clumps so everything's nice and even all right let's talk Koji spores so these are from a company called shared cultures out of San Fran and they are absolutely crushing the game with all things Koji and I like these Sports specifically because one I trust them as a company for high quality products plus they do pre-mix them with rice flour which makes them easier to sprinkle over your rice but I've ordered them online from other sources like modernist pantry you can find them on Amazon they're going to work just fine and just remember to follow the instructions on what your Koji starter or your sport packet actually tells you which in this case one of these little bags is five grams total and it's gonna make around five or six grams of Koji rice which is exactly what I weighed this out for so I'm going to sprinkle on one of these bags and just slowly mix everything together now on traditional Koji making you see these really cool wood pallets which I've been meaning to have my dad make me a few of those but I don't have those so I'm just using some basic sheet pans and I'll just distribute my rice in an even layer on all of the sheet pans and now we can talk about actually growing or inoculating this mold on the rice which is probably going to take a little bit of Ingenuity if you're making this at home because Koji is originally cultivated in a very humid and warm environment and for me I'm sitting right here in Long Island in the middle of winter which is the exact opposite we've got cold and dry so we need to figure out how to mimic a humid and warm environment at home and there's a few ways to do that so first we're going to tackle humidity because mold needs moisture to survive and the way I'm going to do that is take a few clean cloths soak them in water and just wring them out so they're just damp and lay those over the trays and then I'm going to wrap them all in some plastic wrap I'm using a compostable plastic wrap right here to keep that moisture in but I will poke some holes in there because I don't want to suffocate the Koji finding a nice balance where most of the moisture is staying in but you're still getting a little bit of airflow all right so we are in my fermentation dungeon AKA my basement to talk about the second variable we've got humidity taken care of with the damp towel plus the plastic wrap but we need to create a nice warm environment for Koji because it is a tropical mold and it likes a range between 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 degrees Fahrenheit the warmer it is the more sweeter notes you'll get in your fermentation projects versus the lower end of that range you're going to get more of those Umami notes so I'm going to be using my dehydrator right here which you can really tune into that temperature range another great option I actually showed this like four years ago in my old Brooklyn apartment is just inoculating the Koji on a sheet tray with a heat mat under it that's your super DIY version or you just live in a tropical environment and then you're really good to go I'm gonna pop these trays in I actually got this dehydrator specifically because it goes all the way down to 80 degrees whereas my original dehydrator right there from kosori I think the lowest it went was around 110 degrees so just keep that in mind if you really get into Koji making and you're going to buy a dehydrator I'll link this baby down below plus it's just an amazing dehydrator for dehydrating things so I'm going to set this for 90 degrees I'm using this Koji to make a few different types of miso and I want those Umami notes and the total time it's going to take to complete your Koji is around 40 hours so pretty much two days depending on the temperature give or take half a day so I'm gonna set it for 16 hours boom you always want to check in on it at least every day so I'll just let that inoculate and we'll check back in soon all right it's been 16 17 hours but let's see what we got under the hood oh yeah so it might be a little difficult to say it's either white mold starting to cover the rice I can smell it it's a beautiful smell it's like fresh flowers in here and that mold is just starting to develop which is a good sign it's not fully covering but it's building right now so what I'm gonna do is bring all of these trays up to the kitchen I'll unwrap the plastic take off the towel and every day you should be mixing up the rice which is just again a good practice to make sure that mold is evenly spreading through your rice and then I'll re-moisten those towels since they're pretty much dry at this point wrap them back up in the plastic and get those back in the dehydrator at the same temperature around 90 degrees Fahrenheit and I'll probably check back in in another 16 hours all right 16 hours later I'll turn off that fan okay you can see all of that water being captured which is up yet I see some good signs here whoa look at this we have completely matted up you see how quickly that mold builds the smell is intoxicating I'm telling you it smells like beautiful perfume or flour so these are definitely done we actually have some spores developing here which is the yellow stuff which I'll talk about in a second so I'll just bring these up and we'll investigate all right we've got Koji let's do a little reveal here see what we got you know what let's bring you in deep on this whoa check out that beautiful mat of Koji right there that's insane so the yellowing right here is a sign that the spores are starting to develop and you can actually capture those to make more Koji now if it starts turning green like if this whole thing turns green that's when your Koji has gone too far but just a little yellowing like this is no problem and there you go that is Phase One Making Koji at home and if all of that seems a bit insane I totally understand I mean you almost have to be like a crazy person to make your own Koji for me like this is the type of stuff I absolutely love just like Jeremy who's dedicated his life to this stuff I found a deep love for making Koji and all of the projects that come along with it which is phase two so it took us about two three days to make the Koji now for phase two we slow things down a lot we're talking months to potentially years of Aging these products like miso paste and soy sauce and of course there are so many things you can do with this Koji I would suggest reading a book like Koji Alchemy or any other books on Koji out there but today I'm just going to show you how to make a simple miso paste actually two different versions so to make a miso paste or any type of amino paste you only need three items your dried beans or legumes Koji and salt and as far as calculations of those three items I found an incredible resource from the blog Chopstick Chronicles and they created a simple miso paste ratio Excel document that I've linked Below in the description so if you want a shorter fermentation like three to six months pick a young miso if you want a longer fermentation like one to two years then you can pick the dry miso and you just plug in the amount of dried beans I kind of reversed engineered it on the amount of Koji that I had so ultimately I made two batches one batch I soaked 900 grams of dried soybeans or two pounds and the other bag I soaked 900 grams of chickpeas and you're going to want to let these soak so they're fully hydrated for at least 16 hours and then just like steaming that Koji rice in order for things to work we have to cook these beans so I'm going to first dump my soybeans into the pot add a little extra water for evaporation and just turn that heat up and you're really going to want to watch the pot for the first 30 minutes because they're going to give off a lot of foam and what you'll do is you'll just skim all of that off for the first 20 to 30 minutes until it's fully removed and you'll just simmer these beans for a good two to three hours making sure you're stirring them say every 15 minutes so nothing is scorching on the bottom and the way you know they're done is when you pick up one of the beans they should be able to pretty easily just smush in between your fingers but you don't want them completely falling apart so I'll drain off all the beans but you're going to want to reserve at least some of that bean liquid for this next step and we'll add those beans into a big bowl I'm going to add 1350 grams of my Koji and then 500 grams of salt which seems like a ton of salt but that salt is going to break down over a really long process and it's necessary for the preservation and the fermentation and I'll mix everything together while simultaneously mashing the beans in with the Koji and when things are feeling a little dry that's when we go in with the bean liquid in order to get a texture where you're getting these nice clumps just like this like a nice ball of wet sand that you could toss and like do some damage on a sibling and then I'll do that exact process for the chickpeas the same exact ratio making sure everything's Incorporated and balling up nicely now we have to pack our miso away I'm using this beautiful crock one of my favorite Crocs we sell this at promcoats.com it's from a company called in for men I honestly think it's the nicest crock on the market that you can get I've researched a lot like if you're really into this and you want to invest in for men is the way to go but I've made miso in just a regular food safe plastic container five gallon beer fermenters like this are going to work great and I'll start making balls and traditionally they throw the balls in the bottom because you don't want any air pockets but I don't have much room to throw things around so I am just going to pack these balls in kind of pushing to make sure I remove all the air pockets and when it's filled up to the top I'll sprinkle on a little bit of salt on the top just to create extra protection from any mold that you don't want growing in your miso and then I'll put a little plastic covering over top and you do want to weigh this down in some form I have these little weights here but I'm also going to use just a big bag filled up with water to add some extra weight because again as that miso ferments the carbon dioxide is going to release and create air pockets that can form mold within your actual miso so you want to weigh that down with something heavy and then what do we do we wait a really long time what which seems kind of crazy to do like a project that's going to take three months minimum but it's fun you check in on it and honestly before you know it you're gonna have miso paste and it's such a big amount of miso paste that it's worth the time you put in because you just have to make it once a year and traditionally these Crocs were put outside or buried in the ground so they went through multiple seasons and that's kind of what you want if you are going to keep it at one temperature I would suggest something cooler so it's just a little easier to maintain but a miso in its natural environment is going to prefer going through a cool season and then into a hot season and then potentially doing that all over again so for me putting mine in the basement and just checking in on it every now and then is going to be the way to go and of course I don't have anything to show you but I have made miso in the past which you can see here in a prior video the power Koji is just absolutely incredible so I will keep you updated on that miso process you're going to see in a lot of videos you'll see it on my Instagram I'm actually simultaneously making soy sauce from scratch which I'm not going to show until that's finished like six months from now and hopefully uh I don't know a few of you try this or you buy some Koji online or if you watch this video you at least now know where your miso paste comes from so I'll see you soon

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 534,818

Keywords: koji, soy sauce, miso paste, fermentation, inoculation, mike g, mike greenfield, pro home cooks, rice, sake, work in progress, koji alchemy, salt, umami, homemade, deep dive, Inferment crocks, dehydrator, how to make koji, koji breakdown, make koji at home, how to ferment koji, how to make miso, beginners koji, koji making, Japanese koji

Id: Llt80xkjp48

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023