2019-10-17: Made some Miso

I made some miso today. And since Steve asked to document it, and prior to this Daniella asked a while ago in a more generic way to record some of the stuff I find interesting, I created a new blog to capture some of the things I have learned or I am learning. This is the first post in that series.

Lets talk about making miso. I have never done this, but I read a bunch of books on fermentation and even entered some notes how to make miso into my Raspberry Pi Rails database. To be specific, this is going to be a red miso which needs minimum 1 year of fermentation. I am roughly following a recipe from the book "Wild Fermentation (2nd edition)" by Sandor Katz (available in the Ottawa library).

One of the reasons, I haven't made miso earlier, despite having an active interest in fermentation, was that I could not find koji rice in any of the local Ottawa stores. And I had no clue where to look elsewhere. Things changed, somebody made me aware of J-Town in Toronto and I found koji rice there when looking through all the J-Town grocery/deli shops in detail (the J-Town shops are worth a visit if somebody is interested in Japanese grocery items).

I ended up using a mixture of dried soybeans and chickpeas (an old bag of dried soybeans did not contain enough beans, so I added some additional dried chickpeas to get to about 1kg of dried beans. I soaked the beans for about 18 hours (give or take).

The beans after soaking

Then I cooked the beans for about 90 to 120 minutes and drained them. I also reserved about 500ml of the cooking liquid and mixed it with about 180g of pickling salt while still hot.

The drained beans after cooking.

The reserved salted cooking liquid.

Then I started to mash the beans with my potato masher. There is a degree of freedom in terms of how much the cooked beans are mashed. I simply mashed until I thought the chunkiness was to my liking. The beans were around 60C and cooling when I did the mashing.

The consistency of the beans after mashing without the liquid.

To dissolve the pickling salt, I stirred the cooking liquid from time to time. The liquid also cooled down. I had to wait until the temperature of the liquid and of the mashed beans came down to about 40 to 42C. I added about 2 to 3 tbsp of mature miso to the cooking liquid after the liquid reached the 40C area. I stirred the liquid to dilute the mature miso in the liquid. I did not follow the recipe closely here, because I only had aka-miso (a mixture of red and white miso) in the fridge. So will see.

The cooking liquid with the diluted salt and mature miso was then added to the mashed soybeans and chickpeas with another round of mashing happening (the temperature of the mashed beans was about 38C when I added the cooking liquid). For a while I thought I had to much liquid in the bean mash, but things thickened up after the round of mashing and after adding the koji rice. I was quite happy with the consistency.

The consistency of the mashed beans after the cooking liquid with its salt and mature miso was added.

The koji rice I bought in J-Town (20oz Cold Mountain Firm Granular Rice Koji (10.50 CAD)).

Adding the 2nd half of the koji rice into the bean mixture.

After mashing the cooking liquid, I added the koji rice in a few steps followed by rounds of mashing to ensure that the koji rice was properly distributed.

The consistency of the mash after the koji rice was mixed in.

Then the bean mash was transferred into the long-term fermentation pot. Before doing that, I salted the bottom of the fermentation pot with pickling salt. I used about the same amount of pickling salt for the bottom as I used for the top (see pictures below). I compacted the bean mash from time to time to avoid air-pockets.

The fermentation pot filled with the compacted bean mash.

Adding a layer of pickling salt on the top of the compacted bean mash to minimize spoilage.

Afterwards a weight was added on top of everything. I further added a loose lid (the mixture has to breath) and I am going to store this thing in the garage for the time being (it needs an unheated place). Maybe during our cold winter I move it down into a corner of the basement as far away as possible from the heated air circulation.

Topping everything with a suitable weight.

And now I have to wait for about 1 year. Only time will tell if this red miso is any good :-). Supposedly red miso can ferment for several years and if the conditions are right it will taste better and better. I guess I will write another post in about a year from now to report how it all turned out.

I could have done a better job of rinsing the fermentation pot with boiling water to disinfect everything. But I believe this particular pot is very sensitive to boiling water, so I skipped that step (it has a crack in the bottom which is probably from the time I did the boiling disinfection step for another ferment). Normally I do that pot disinfection step for all my ferments.