This episode is brought to you by Bend the Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Learn more at bendthetable.com. That's B-E-N-T-O-T-A-B-L-E.com. And when you use code H R N for a new subscription, you get $20 off, and we at HRN get $10. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you. Recorded on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez chilling in Stanford at her house. How are you doing, Stas? Good.
Yeah. We got uh Matt in his uh in his little hidey hole COVID booth up in uh Rhode Island. How you doing? I'm good, except I'm actually back in Brooklyn. Whoa, what?
Uh who comes back to New York? We we should not waste precious minutes on this, but yeah. All right, all right. All right. And uh, and of course, uh, you know, uh BDX uh BDX, you know, newcomer extraordinaire, John Nahool, also there.
Uh, and he's gonna play a big part because he is a huge fan of the guests that we have on uh today. John, how you doing? You're chilling in the Upper East right there? Yeah? Murray Hill, yep.
Wait, so Murray Hill, you really think that Murray Hill has a distinct thing going on as opposed to just I guess it's kind of it's not the Upper East for sure. It's definitely not Upper East. It could, yeah. Like it could be very lower midtown, but what else would you call it? What's the difference between a turtle.
What's the difference between a turtle, a kips, and a, and a and a Murray Hill? What's the difference between all of these things? Who is Murray? It's a really small neighbor. I I don't know.
But to to stick with Matt, what Matt was saying earlier, we should probably refocus on the show. Alright, I'm just curious. Anyway, and then we have two very special uh guests on today. We have uh Rich She from uh you might know him as R CookQuest on both Twitter and uh Instagram, and uh he lives up in Boston. I've known him for a long time.
He's helped out the Museum of Food and Drink uh on many occasions with his uh engineering skills. But over the uh Rich, how many years have you been well and Jeremy Omansky from Larder in Cleveland and other things, and they have come together and written a new book which is out at the end of the week called Koji Alchemy, and it is the very, very first book solely devoted to using Koji in the English language. So if you don't know what Koji is, just wait because you actually do know what Koji is, and you've been eating Koji related things since forever. And um, you know, even if you do know what Koji is, I guarantee you you have not you, unless you're one of like unless they have asked you to be a contributor in their book, you have not used Koji the way they have used Koji. So, you know, you stick around and listen, listen to what's going on.
But why don't you two each Rich? You go first, maybe. Um, why don't you tell us kind of how long you've been Kojiing around and then like how you guys got together to do the book? All right, um, so yeah, it's a pleasure to be on the show, Dave. Um, I don't remember exactly when I first started playing with Koji, but it was it's probably on the order of several years now.
Um, it was just one of those things that I happened upon when I was hanging out with a chef friend of mine who was interested in learning how to make Koji for a particular presentation, and he uh knew my technical aptitude for just figuring things out. Did a little bit of research, uh found Brandon Byers, um his handbook on fermentation, reached out to him and he helped me figure out uh a very simple koji just to get started making it, and then I just started investigating ideas on uh basically looking at starches, proteins in whatever fashion and marrying them together to leverage the enzymes to create uh crazy flavors that I really enjoyed just figuring out. And then uh as I was going through this process, you know, on on social media as I always have with all my creations and ideas and interest in learning, I shared what I was doing and happened upon Jeremy and his his uh adventurous ideas of curing meat with Koji. And we just struck up uh struck up this um, you know, friendship through sharing ideas and enthusiasm and continuing to to grow together and learn more and interact with everybody who is excited about this product and the possibilities and that's how we kinda came to have the idea of writing this book together. And Jeremy, how long have you been on the Koji train?
Uh it seems like forever. Uh but uh I I wanna say uh 2014. Um yeah. You know, I was asked to make some miso. And at that point, I'd already been fermenting and meat curing and all that that lovely stuff.
And and uh, you know, thinking that I knew I could just go ahead and make some miso like it was any other fermented food, I I uh that wasn't the case. And uh just totally fell down the Koji rabbit hole completely. You know, I have this thing with rabbit holes because in my mind I've been thinking, like honestly, like for like um like a month. Anytime someone says to me that they've gone down the rabbit hole, in my mind I'm thinking, are you sure it's not a rat's nest? Are you sure there's a rabbit down there?
Oh you have to be careful, Dave. Sometimes there's a honey badger. Yeah, right. I mean, like, dude, if you live out near a forest, right? Some b big weird things dig holes in the ground.
It's people, let me tell you, it is not probably it is not a rabbit down that hole. I'm just telling you that right now. Dude, digging just be careful. You guys moving flash flash funny. Lat last summer scanned a bunch of chanterelles in the forest.
Yeah. And totally stuck my hand in a rabbit hole. I need a a yellow jacket nest. Oh Jesus! I've got like 10 pounds of chanterelles on my back.
I'm like, you know, moving stuff around and pick some more in the yellow jacket's nest, start getting stung. I trip over a log next to me and fall into a patch of nettles. Oh man. I love your luck, man. You have the best luck.
You have the best luck. I've only ever once like uh really pissed off a yellow jacket nest, but unfortunately, I was in full chainsaw gear, so like I didn't know I had done it until I saw them inside of my face mask. Oh my god. And that's when I started getting stung. And I was like, ah, yeah, listen, honestly, dude, things that are on the ground, like holes in the ground, beware.
There's a reason that people since time immemorial have been afraid of holes in the ground. It is probably not a rabbit. Just saying that. Um so um, you know, who knows? I mean, anyways, uh what were you talking about?
Oh, yeah, yeah. So listen, before we go uh too far, but when you're starting on Miso, like who did you have to go to at that at that time? Were you you were using the shirt leaf uh uh Miso book? Like, what was there for you to go to at the time? Yeah, that that's essentially what it was.
Someone brought me a copy of the book, um, the book of Miso, and was like, hey, can you make some Miso using chickpeas? And handed me the book, and I said, sure. Um, and then uh, you know, I realized I I need this mold and I gotta order scores and where do I get them? And you know, I all the things that a lot of people getting into working with Koji who aren't familiar with, they go through. Um, and it it took me, it probably took me longer to figure out where to get everything I needed to get and what to get than it actually took me to like incubate that first batch of Koji and then like mix the miso.
Yeah, well, and the Book of Miso is a great book. I mean, we've talked about both that book and the Book of Tofu, but they were printed quite a long time ago, and they're not really written from a chef or even really a cook's perspective. They're more of a save the world kind of perspective, and they're great, so I don't want to take anything away from them, but there's definitely a need out there for more information. Uh that is in it. Oh, and uh Jeremy, I don't know if you know Nastasi, I know Rich does already, but anytime you can say the word spore, you're hurting Nastasia's inner core, and so you should try to say spore as much as possible.
And if you can do it like this, spur. If you can just say it like spike that will like really make my life better. There's a term that you know, friends of mine and Nastasi and Peter Kim, who is the you know was running the Museum of Food and Drink and was this show's favorite punching bag. I don't know if we talked about this on air. Uh punching bag?
No, no, no, no. The the term the term that he came up with just for uh yeah, I think so, yeah. Well, I'll mention it again. It's called okay, you're from everyone's familiar with Schadenfreude, right? Schadenfreude is the German term for getting pleasure out of other, yeah.
It's like pain pleasure. So the pleasure you get out of other people's kind of pain, Schadenfreude. So Peter coined Stasenfreude, which is specifically the joy that Nastasia gets when other people are going through troubling times. But it's it's specifically the joy that she gets out of it because for her, it's fuel for life. Like I like I've had bad things happen to me over the course of the years that one bad thing happens to me, and that is fuel for her to continue living for like two months.
It's amazing. That's not true. I don't like it when you get hurt. Anyways, is there is it only but but two months seems like such a long time? Yeah, well, it has to be really good.
It doesn't have to be physical hurt either. In fact she prefers emotional hurt. Oh yeah. Yeah. She loves emotional hurt.
What? Emotional over physical? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Preferred come on, man. Yeah. I mean, she's, you know, she's uh what's it called? She's an evolved individual.
Like emotional pain is always greater than physical pain, right? True. Because physical pain you can forget. That's why people have more than one baby. But emotional pain, man, you can scar people for life.
Yes. Um I'm saying um so to go back, so Jeremy, uh since you were the last person here to talk about Koji, I've we're remiss. Why don't you describe using the word spore as much as possible? Because I think that I think that it's uh people get confused with Koji because in general like we we here in the US anyway use it to refer to the mold the uh the mold grown on a substrate and the process of doing all of that and then anything that has any of those things in it. It's kind of like the word smurf.
You just use it for all of these different things but I feel if you just give a little short explanation and part of your book is talking about this maybe you can help people understand more what's going on. Yeah, yeah so so first uh you gotta keep in mind this is a this is a mold, this is a fungus. I mean, whether you got a picture of a uh cremini or an oyster mushroom in your head, uh, or you've got a picture of those those cruddy leftovers in the back of your fridge, uh, this is kind of related to all those. And and these also, they they all start off with a spore. Yeah, yeah.
Uh it's it's interesting too. So fungi are a separate kingdom of life from us and from plants. And if we go back far enough in in the evolutionary history of all this, um, we actually see too that we are more closely related to fungi than plants are. Most people see, you know, we use mushrooms culinarily as we use a vegetable. Um, so based on that, a lot of people associate them as being more closely related.
But the steak that you're cooking the mushrooms with is more closely related, and we are more closely related. So the spore is actually akin to like our um uh our sperm and our egg. Uh you're really doing it to Nastasia now. No. That's kind of what it is.
It's not like the zygo, but it is like the sperm and the egg, just before they they they meet in bliss. Um what happens is um they they the spore it lands on a substrate and it starts to grow. Um now, for all intents and purposes of kind of like translating from a highly codified um way of doing things and and uh uh a culture surrounding Koji, you know, in the book, we kind of we break this down. We say, listen, in in all these other cultures, whether it's the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, uh parts of India, Burma, wherever it is that they use these molds, they all have their own languages for these. And that's whereas us as outsiders and newcomers, you know, uh anywhere from nine to two thousand years late to the party, um, we kind of need more of a uh condensed version of what they're talking about, uh, because they're so far ahead of us.
So, um, you know, to kind of touch on what you said, Dave, like koji can mean these so many, many things, and and in English, we kind of rely on the context of what we're talking about in general to determine what koji actually means. If I'm using the word spore in the sentence, then I'm talking about like these spores, these seeds of koji. Um, if I am talking about making uh an amino paste, something like a miso, and I say, take your koji and mix it with your beans, then we want people to be able to infer through their working knowledge that we're talking about a grain, a starch that's been cultured with these spores, and the mold has grown. Um, so you know, we we have a whole section in the book. I I believe it's called creating a common koji language.
And the purpose of this is to kind of as newcomers come into the fold, we have something we can all commonly talk about and commonly relate with. And then as each of us gets further into our explan exploration with this mold and its uses, then we can like full outright like honor tradition, talk about these these molds and their applications and the foods that are made with them within specific context. Um, but just getting your feet wet, there's so much out there. It's so confusing. We just needed an initial um you know condensation or or cohesiveness that that allowed people to to work with it and talk with it and understand what everybody's talking about.
Right so let me see if I get this let me see if I get this right and kind of what the presentation of the of the the book is we'll talk more about the structure of the book in a second. So so fundamentally we're like when you when you're talking about Koji you're talking about one of several different strains of uh are they are they all aspergillus or is there is there one other that you use that's not an aspergillus but they're all aspergillus strains right and yeah well yeah for the most part right yeah we can lump like the tempe molds in there like Rizopis you know um yeah so we yeah any of these filamentous molds right so there's these molds and what's funny about them funny is that many of them uh do are toxic in other words not themselves toxic but they produce what's called mycotoxins which are uh you know uh or I forget whether are they myco or they afh I forget which one they do but anyway so they produce toxins not the ones that we use in cooking right but other wild ones but somehow for thousands of years people have inoculated or they've created the environments where these ones that are beneficial to flavor and to the longevity of a preserved product can thrive and for whatever reason you know thank goodness maybe that's why everyone's still alive but for whatever reason the evil ones tend not to grow on these kind of on these substrates when they're treated in a in a particular way would you say that's accurate? Pretty it's pretty damn close. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
So what happens is is you grow this, uh, you grow this mold on uh a substrate. Let's just choose one, a starchy substrate with you know with some protein and whatever other sugar stuff in it, let's say rice, and then uh or soy, and then you that will change the substrate you're growing on, but more importantly, it is a source of enzymes that can then do further reaction. It's those enzymes and it's the broad spectrum of so we so the most important things ever, right, are in terms of this kind of in terms of so your books called Koji Alchemy, but other alchemical things, you got your yeast, you got your acetobacter, you got your um, you got your amylase enzymes from things like uh barley, and what else is is even close to being as important worldwide as Koji? Anything we were talking about this before, Rich. What else is what else is on that list?
Lactobacillus, you know, yeah, lactic, yeah, lap, yeah, lactobacillus. What else? Yeah. That's it though, right? Pretty much.
Yeah. So like in the in the West, where we had like a boat ton of barley sitting around, and we figured out malting barley pretty early, a lot of our starch conversion of the enzyme we were using was um amylase enzyme, the uh enzymes that turn starch into sugar so that we can then ferment it. Like that was an important uh enzyme. Whereas um in places where koji was kind of you know the the most important thing, you have amylase enzymes there, but unlike amylase enzymes from barley malt, let's say, Koji has a a shotgun spray of crazy enzymes, right? And also a there's there are very few byproducts of barley malt enzymes.
In other words, it takes starch, busts the starch down into smaller, uh into smaller dextrins and sugar. Whereas uh koji is a is a mold, it's fungus, it is producing its own byproducts of being alive, which are flavors, and then in addition produces enzymes which continue to act on the product even past their own life cycle. So it's kind of like a wham wham. It's like a wham wham wham wham. There's like a lot of stuff going on with koji.
So there's a lot of complexity in um, I don't know whether you want to call them, you want to call them ferments? What do you want to call them? Koji recipes. There's a lot of complexity built into them that isn't necessarily built into a straight enzyme action like um like you get in a barley malt, or even what we would call a straight uh like yeast action, right? Because what happens in a fermentation in a wine, let's say with yeast, is extremely complicated, and there's lots of yeast byproducts and the the the breakdowns of flavor precursors and whatnot in in grapes and whatever else is super nuanced and super important, but nowhere near the broad spectrum kind of you know, fist fight of what's going on in in a in a koji situation.
Would you agree? Oh, yeah. And you know, maybe Rich wants to touch on this a little more, but we had this discussion intensively when it comes to like this term autolysis, like this enzymatic breakdown of things, which is often associated with decomposition. Um, you know, what do we call, like you said, koji barrages with enzymes, and then the koji's dead, but the enzymes are in the food. What do we call it then?
Yeah, I don't know. What do you call it? We we just we in the book we use the word autolysis. Like we had a we had to make a decision of like what what do we call it, you know? Um for those paying attention, autolysis is not what Vladimir Putin is or is doing.
It is when it is when something contains the products within itself to break itself down over time. Would you agree? Yeah, like think decomposition. Think something dies, like the enzymes in your cells break apart things. Uh, you know, there's also you know, black soldier flies and fungi and stuff that fall in, but internally decomposition is an autolytic reaction.
Koji does something, and the other fungi do something called extracellular digestion, where they grow on something and they just like lick it and smear it and make it moist with all their enzymes they're producing. They're coming from an external source. But like I said, like what happens when the koji's dead and we're left with these enzymes that aren't enzymes from inside the bean per se, or inside the rice. They're smattered on by by the koji and it's still working, they're still breaking things down. There, you know, you know, in the book, we did we decided to use the term autolysis to also encompass that.
Right, right. Uh, by the way, you're really, I don't know if Nastasia may never use soy sauce again. I don't even know why I'm on this show. It's so disturbing. The use of lick it, smear it, make it moist really put us all at the top.
Yeah. I mean, like, I'm now I'm doing a video uh in my head, like uh like a like a chakrarone style video where like it's just those words are going in the background. You know what I mean? And we can get that guy. Uh what's his name?
El Chambo. What was it? We gotta get that guy. We'll do a video about smearing and licking. Anyway, um so before we get into kind of buying Koji and where it is.
Another so and for those of you that like you know still have no idea what we're talking about. Well, Dave, how this is the thing behind sake. It's the thing behind um any kind of uh like shoju shoshu, it's it's behind soy, it's behind miso, like everything, right? Like what else? Like just name some stuff that that the koji is behind.
Um yeah, I mean, it basically we can say like 95% of the alcohols that come out of Asia and Southeast Asia are made with this. Anything that's like a soy sauce, uh Shoyu or Tamari, any of that stuff, uh Misu, Goju Zheng, Duchi, um Rich, you got some more. Is the mold on a katsuabushi a koji or not? It is. It is.
I believe that's aspergellous reparins or glaucus, but it it it is yeah, isn't Glaucus the bad guy from Flash Gordon? Isn't he the one who made the merciless's generals? Well, yeah, and Glaucus is yeah, I think so, but Glaucus itself, too, is like we can't, it's really hard to get in the United States, it's a controlled substance. Can you scrape it off a Katsuabushi and uh culture it? I'm sure you can, and I'm I'm willing to bet that's where a lot of people have gotten it.
So, all right, so let's let's talk about that for one for one second, then because you know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, you could go to kind of your local Japanese market, and and if you asked really nicely and if they paid attention to you, they had one or two packets of stuff, and they there was no choice. There was only one thing you could get, and that's that was it. That was all. But now that the state is different, right? People where people can people go to get into this.
Yeah, in terms of buy the actual spores. Um so to buy the spores, um, we typically uh recommend that people go to Gem Cultures. Um they they've been around for a very long time. If you look at their website, it's fairly um you know archaic. Um, probably something that you would see um you know around the late 80s in terms of a website.
But it's and you also what you do is you basically email them and they send you um a PayPal based on your order. So it's it's the easiest way that we've found to be able to get a direct source um retailing uh from Japan. Uh and uh they have different, you know, they have all the very basic um you know types of spores that are uh a cut that are customized for each specific make. So if you wanted to make, say, pickles or amazake, there's a specific one called Light Red Miso, Light Rice Miso, uh sorry, light light rice koji, or if you wanted to get one for soy sauce or shoyu um or miso. So there's they have very specific categories for um whatever it is that you want to make.
Uh, but essentially we like to recommend that people just buy the light rice miso um light rice um koji option to be able to start um with whatever they want uh because it functionally it has plenty of protease enzymes. Uh if you want to just buy co-y code well you're saying you're saying that although there's vast differences between the Koji's, it's better to learn how to use one and then and then later branch out if you feel like you want a specifically different thing right out of any anything because like isn't isn't that what you said in the book yeah that's extra percent the the the the light rice miso spores from gem cultures um it's it's like a broad spectrum so whether you want to do an amino paste or you want to do sake or uh amazaki whatever it is you've got enough amylase production and enough protease production to pretty much make any food you want at at an acceptable and delicious level so but let's talk a little bit about so you you want to start with the the white rice koji and and it's a good place and I always say to people like with hydrocolloids even which is you know far simpler because the stuff happens much faster choose one use it a lot get to know it and then if you feel like you need to branch out branch out right yeah and that's our that's completely throughout the whole book. Yeah and also because a lot of this book a lot of the book i in the beginning parts especially and uh John you've read the book right yeah is about is about um trying to get you over that hump of worrying about it right trying to simplify doing it because for any of you that like have like read spiels on things like soy sauce you're like oh my god or like hacho miso you're like oh my god like I gotta age it two years, I gotta age it a year, three years. If it goes wrong, what? Blah blah blah, you know what I mean?
And so a lot of the first part of the book is trying to get over that hump of worrying about it. And I think part of that is worrying about kind of which culture that you you're gonna use, which which strain you're gonna use. But on the other hand, I had a question in from um I had a question in, I can't figure out who it who it's from. But the question was, what about people using koji for cocktails? And I know, you know, um, you know, my partner at existing conditions, Don Lee, before we had to close for COVID, he was experimenting, and I know he was talking to you, Rich, a lot about uh Koji and Cocktails, and he was using a lot of the kind of stranger kojies because in cocktails when we he wasn't doing kind of long-age things, he was doing things that were relatively short-aged and where like the strain, the flavor of the strain of koji itself was an important background note or note.
So, for instance, like the koji that produces a boat ton of citric acid. And when for those of you that don't know, like production of acid, like the what which strain is it that does the acid production, guys? Uh yeah, and uh the specific one that I gave Don was the Awamori, um, the Okinawan version. So that's a black sport koji. And that so for those of you that are keeping track, it's Okinawan Koji, and the whole I correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea is is that you wanted it to be a high acid because the acid was a preservative on the ferment prior to distillation.
So because you were gonna distill it, the acid wasn't going to come through to the final distilled product, but the acid was very helpful in preserving the product in the very hot Okinawan environment prior to distillation, true or false. Well, yes, that's true, but it's uh it's twofold. It's also it helps retard lactobacillus contamination. Right, right, right. Right.
Which can create must be flavors and whatnot, you know, in in an alcohol, right? That would that would have to be dank and dark versus like light and crisp. Right. So and then so people so if you get the conditions right though, what's interesting is because if you tell me I'm gonna grow a uh for instance, if you say someone, hey, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna add malt or amylase enzyme to something like sweet potato, which Don did to clear out the starch with Koji, right? But if you're gonna do something like that, you're like, how sweet's it gonna be, right?
Because there's only X amount of there's only X amount of byproduct in there, it's only gonna get X amount sweet, and X usually isn't that high. So I thought in my head, I was like thinking the same thing with the acid. I was like, how high an acid are you actually gonna get? And the answer is much more acidic than you would think that you would get because it's not a breakdown product, like it's actually producing the citric acid, and it is real. You can make very, very, very tart things with it.
Dude, if you eat like the black koji or the brown koji of these species of luciens, like grown on a medium, if you just eat the the raw koji, um it tastes like you're eating sour patch kids. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And and for cocktail applications, I think it's quite interesting. So while it might be challenging to use in a food application, I think the application to I'm only gonna use a half an ounce of this, or I'm only gonna use, you know, whatever, I think is is pretty interesting.
You know, I know Don thinks it's interesting, and that's why he's been kind of experimenting with it. Yeah, yeah. So and I think you have with cocktails, you've got both. So you've got like the short term use of like, yeah, you can make an amazaki out of the black koji that's like got all these great koji notes and like the you know, the the honeysuckle and the the light mushroom flavors and all that stuff, plus the acid. But like, for example, we did um uh over a year ago, I made this shiok koji using um uh cucumber water.
Um explain shiok quick. So uh shiokoji is like inoculated grain with a mold uh mixed with water and salt, and it's allowed to ferment out. Um and it's used as like a short-term quick way to enhance the flavor of something, whether it's sauteed vegetables or like a grilled steak. Um so I I made one, a very diluted one that kept the salt at around 3%. Uh used um uh I'm sorry, it wasn't cucumber, it was uh watermelon.
Uh we had juiced a bunch and we were making watermelon pickles and all this stuff. So all the all the residual liquid from there um and the black koji rice. Um at first it was kind of gross, but it sat for a year and it was fantastic. And and there's this great uh bartender here in Cleveland, Will Hollingsworth of the spotted owl, uh gave him a bunch, and he was doing some crazy like gin fizzes with like this black watermelon shio koji liquid um that he said we're we're banging. Since you brought up the shio koji and the water and the salt, another huge section of the book is trying to categorize different kinds of different kinds of products and different kinds of reactions, right?
So you have so it's like the question is how long so you like the things you talk about are because you're saying, hey, listen, when you're starting, start with a particular strain, like the you know, white rice koji. Start with there, boom. Now the question is, what do you want to have happen? And so it's controlling how much liquid is present, right? How much salt is present, right?
And you choose those things and you choose what kind of flavors are going to develop and over what time scale. And so, you know, you talk about pace versus application to solids, things that are are soaked, and it's just breaking down, basically thinking about it, trying to trying to make for the reader, trying to turn koji into part of their toolkit and having them think about it in terms of how am I looking what am I looking for? Short-term effect or long-term effect. This episode is brought to you by Bend a Table, a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. And here I am.
I'll open up my box. Let me see here. It comes with a uh a delicacies France and an essentials. Ooh, red fife. Red fife is a wheat that is became famous a couple of years ago as one of the old heritage wheat varieties that was grown in the East Coast.
And so I'm gonna use this to make Sylvester Graham's actual graham bread because eastern grown uh wheat, much like red fife uh wheat, was the wheat that Sylvester Graham uh used to make the original gram breads, which bear no relationship to graham crackers. So I'm excited to make some bread with the red fi flour. Ooh, Nastasia. This bird he's living your life here. I have a bag of pearled uh faro from Maine Grains, grown here in US.
I know you do. You're the queen, you're the queen of Faro, right? Yeah, and yet here it is in my house. Go to bendatable.com to start your own monthly subscription. Use the discount code HRN to get $20 off a new subscription, and Bend a Table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRM's programming.
All right, now we're back for real people. Now listen, uh, during these times of COVID, everyone's turning to things like baking bread, which is why I've mentioned this before. You cannot buy a grain mill now. And I was at the farmer's market, and the supplier of artisanal wheats and grains at the farmer's market was like, we're out, we have nothing. Because everyone is baking now.
And Nastasia, you hate the fact that not Dax, I'm not talking about that, but in general, like the increase in bed bread baking, you dislike, right? Yes. And what about we haven't talked about it? What about like the increase of people making pickles and whatnot? Also hate?
No. You're okay with pickles, but not bright? Yeah. Yeah. Why?
Because pick people don't post pictures of pickle on the internet. Is that why? I haven't seen a lot. But that's why. Yeah, I guess so, yeah.
Okay. But what I'm saying is that now is a perfect time to start doing uh koji-based work. And if you get the book, what you'll learn is is that there it's not only like uh, you know, something it takes two months, two years, whatever to do, there's a lot of things you can do with koji that can be done inside of a couple of days. True or false, folks. That is very true.
Yeah. And so you take, and you know, when we had the internet kind of explosion over here, and so I don't know how much of that was caught before. Like what I was saying is is that a lot of the book is is is about a lot of the beginning part of the book is about breaking down um code like Koji work into different kinds of categories, a lot of it based on uh moisture, uh like how much water is present and how much salt is present, because by adjusting those two things, you're kind of adjusting like which reactions happen and the rate at which reactions happen, and kind of uh, you know, whether we're looking at like short-term more seasoning things, more protein breakdown going on. So, you want to talk about talk about that a little bit or no? Yeah, of course.
Um, so one of the things that we have always practiced in terms of koji once we started playing with it, was its multiple multitude of uses just from the standpoint of its versatility. So on the front end, when you start doing things that are more uh sweet-based, you can easily gain sugars from pretty much any starch that you add it to. So not only adding it to grains, but um if we're talking about, say, some fruits that are less than uh desirables, you know, something you pick up at the grocery store that isn't all that great, and you really want something that um tastes much better, all you have to do is just basically slap some koji on it, whether you vacuum bag it or you just make a little slurry of amazake with just equal parts water and and koji with uh you know some starch uh and just let it let it sit for a couple days. And what's interesting is that you gain all this complexity as well as the you know, the sugar uh activity sacrification, um, you know, and all these other flavor compounds that are going on. I mean, it's not you know total flavor bomb like the long-term stuff that you do with a miso or soy sauce, but it's you know really interesting that you can just take um you know a fruit or a vegetable and just marinate it and have these really interesting and awesome flavors.
And that's some of the thing that's some of the stuff we cover in the book in terms of you know, not only are you harnessing the starches from the ingredients that you apply it to, but you're also building up the sugar such that you can go through any sort of natural fermentation process that you want, whether it be you know, building up some lacto, um, to be able to do kraut or some yogurt or some cultured butter. Um, you can also you know just let it hang out longer and you know, add it to some kombucha and then you know, fire the sugar that way. So you can develop all these sugars, which is pretty amazing. And then also the on the other side of the coin, in terms of the um the marinating side, is that you have these uh protease enzymes that break down proteins fairly quickly into amino acids, and you can quickly yield a really delicious steak. Um, we like to refer to you know using koji uh for marination as you know an automatic barbecue sauce because you're using the inherent starches of the grains plus the inherent uh proteins of the actual ingredient, you end up matching the flavors, you know, perfectly in terms of what you're adding because you're not adding anything else.
Because if you think about marinades, and the optimal marinade is the marinade that makes the base ingredient taste more like itself than any other ingredient, and this is what you can accomplish with Koji. And these are the sort of things that we talk about in terms of lowering the amount of salinity uh and adding more water such that you can get more you know infiltration and contact to be able to create, you know, basically these flavors and these larger mass pieces of food that that you end up um uh eating immediately, versus you know, building a mash with lots of salt and less less water to be able to go throughout a longer processing time to create more complex flavors with waves of fermentation. So with Koji, you can pretty much make any ferment that you want. And in a lot of ways, it makes it more delicious because of all the other things that come along for the ride with all the enzymes that are happening and then the natural progression of different waves of fermentation. Man.
Yeah, let's also, because I know we're gonna run out. I want to talk more about specifically the structure of the book, because one of the things that's interesting about the book is we have a couple things we've got to talk about. So I'm just gonna tell you all the things we're gonna talk about, and you guys can choose the order. Um the structure, the structure of the book, right, is that you have a lot of people who are um who have kind of mini essays within the book, and you've chosen a lot of um chefs, some scientists, uh, some writers who have kind of put these micro essays in. And one of the things I think is interesting about these kind of micro essays is that it's not that they contradict what you say, but you don't normalize everyone's opinion to your own.
And so it's they really are sometimes different kinds of perspectives, right? On and it that that was that's kind of interesting. The the other thing is there's a section which is very kind of apropos of today on cultural appropriation of this. Um but that dovetails into um kind of the more the the newer applications, for instance, koji on fresh meat, which is, I think, a revelation. I know John had some when he was out uh at LARDAR and was super interested in talking about the Koji aging on kind of fresh meat.
And then there's there's the controversy of because one of the other interesting things is in your book, you have at the end a hasset plan uh about how to do dry cured meats, right? And how to incorporate koji into your dry cured meat program. But then we should talk about the fact that there's this the whole kind of koji on fresh meat is a brand new horizon, really, that no one has kind of worked with. And I don't know that anyone's really kind of figured out that unless you have the kind of microbiology or the or the the proof of how that works, right? And then uh lastly but not least, you cook your rice in the oven in the oven.
In the oven in the oven with water, and and you say that you you listen to the way the French cook rice, the people who on all in all of Earth on the entire planet Earth, everyone agrees that the French do not know how to cook rice. It like everyone agrees that the French are the world's worst rice cooks. The world's worst rice cooks. But you're not eating that rice. Okay.
You're not eating it, you're making it, you're using it as a medium to to create koji. So it doesn't matter what it is. In terms of edibility. Right. The the Koji is a it's I mean, I will describe it as a sentient living organism.
Like it wants to live and wants to thrive and survive and reproduce. Like it doesn't care how well the French cook rice or how well the Japanese greens do. It just wants gelatinized college. Oh my god. So for those of you that don't know, here's what they do: they they put all the rice in a hotel pan with water, throw it into the oven and walk away from it until it is quote unquote done.
And the stuff at the bottom, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's mushy. But the thing is you still have to fluff it, right? Because for those of you that koji needs air to survive. It needs to be aerated to survive, right? It is an aerobic McGilla cutty.
Is that not true? That is true. So I would think that this kind of French like mushenstein way of cooking rice would make less air. But what you're telling me is that you can fluff even this French rice, like you can fluff it up to uh uh enough of a degree that you get good aeration for the koji, I guess is what you're telling me. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you totally do. And like, here's the whole thing like if you were a sake maker and your goal was to win every metal and be heralded as the best sake maker in the world, you wouldn't necessarily use this technique. But for large applications, like when we cook off this whole whole tail pan of rice and the bottom, you know, half inch to an inch is kind of it's clumped up, it's slightly mushy. Yeah, we're not talking, by the way, nice crispy bottom, like Tadig style stuff. We're not talking.
No, no, no, we're talking like, yeah, like it's it's mush. We're talking like you'd get at a French restaurant. Don't order rice at a French restaurant. You're you are most likely if if you're gonna make sake, you you're gonna make an amazake. Or if you're gonna marinate meat, you're gonna use a shio koji or that sort of thing.
So, like these overcooked rices are great. Like when you make an amazake and you take your inoculated rice um and you take some cooked rice, using that overcooked mushy stuff is the perfect application for that. Um it's already broken down, it's you know, it's its surface area is already already increased because it's broken down so much and all that. So it it gives you one cooking method that allows you then to be able to do multiple things um that you would essentially need to cook separately to achieve. Um, and and that's why we developed it.
And it came down to like, you know, with me working in restaurants and having my own restaurant, like there was a time I'd be like, you know, I'd need the dishwasher to do it. And I wasn't gonna get into like the ins and outs of like inoculation and all that and what's happening with them. I'd just be like, listen, get this rice cooked and I'll deal with it later. Um, and that's why we developed it. It was like at the base level, what's what's the best that could happen?
And then out of that too, Dave, which was super interesting, you know, we found out like, yeah, the koji will grow on overcooked, blown out, spent rice grains. It's not gonna be as as different. Um, we end up with different products then, like like our instant marin that we have in the book. That overcooked rice is perfect for it, or like the instant amazaki that we have. Uh, there you go.
It and it's got a use and it's got an application. And lo and behold, against everything, all the research we did and everything we were told about how the rice has to be perfect, we didn't see anything really noticeably suffering in enzymatic activity in terms of the end result of the product. So, while yes, you could run it through a lab and say, Well, yeah, no, your enzyme activity is 30% down from what it would have been if the grain was perfect and all this. But for the end result and the deliciousness of the food and the usability of the ingredient, that that 30% drop in enzyme is is imperceptible. When it comes down to like the real world application and use, it's it's not noticeable.
I mean, you know, if if you're if you're in a a restaurant or a maker that has the time, the money, the resources to like fully optimize all that to make things perfect, like sure, go ahead and do it. But for most of us out there, that's not realistic. That's not how we run our businesses, that's not how we cook our food. Well, also you're telling me you don't think it has an effect, so why do it? If it's if it's gonna, if it's gonna bork your if it's gonna bork your uh production and it's not gonna make it more delicious, why do it?
Well, I mean, that's that's part of it too. Like I mean, like you told me you you think it tastes just as good. And so if it tastes just as good, and you can now actually do it as opposed to not being able to do it, then do it, right? And that's that's a lot of the case we make in the book. Yeah.
Well, that's I thought I I had to bring it up because people are gonna know. I mean, I had to bring it up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, listen, Rich and I get this these this question all the time, and it's like, you know, if if you want to nerd out and get into the fun of it, like, sure, like optimize everything you can, have the strictest controls, throw all your resources at it. But at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, honestly, man, there isn't much of a difference.
What's more important is ingredient sourcing and how you care for the foods. So it's more important that you get, you know, if you want like the rice and the aroma of the rice and the nuttiness, all that to shine, get the best tasting, best quality rice you can start with. Same with your barley or your beans, you know. Um, come on, we all know like commodity pork up against like some heritage stirrock. Like there's a big difference in like the quality of the base ingredient, um, in terms of like the flavor and the texture and all these things.
Um, and you know, ethics are a whole nother thing with that too. So that's way more important than you know, some of these other things, because if you get a base level of enzymatic activity, you're really not going to notice much of a difference in the end result of the product. Like it's just in our opinion, it's just not there. Well, you know what else is interesting about this discussion, I feel, especially for like listeners of this program, is you know, we you know, we have people who are, you know, professionals, right? Although none of us are working now, but we have people who are professionals who are listeners, and then we also have people who are working at home and like kind of and I think we don't often talk enough about how those kind of things are different.
Like both want like quality, but the person who's at home like has the ability, because they're only making small quantities to completely nerd out to get like each individual grain of rice perfect, and then to kind of go on and do all those kind of micro micro controls where in a restaurant, you know, where you have to make X number of bazillion portions, and then you have to make it relatively consistent, not just today, but like tomorrow, next week, next year, and make it all at a reasonable price with the staff that you happen to have at the time, different kind of problem. But put both people interested in qualities, but like your drivers are very different. And I think we don't really, I think that's one of the things people don't talk about enough about the difference between cooking professionally versus like just experimentation at home. You know what I mean? Right.
And I I think part of our goal though is to like dispel that, right? Because you have like the restaurants on the world's 50 best list who are taking the same approach that the home cook is taking. Yet, you know, I run a quick service delicatessen. And we we can't take that approach. I don't have the time, I don't have the resources, I don't have the labor.
Um, you know, so it's it's about you know, you know, cost and and you know, all those things there. So um, you know, we we essentially our goal in writing this book was showing that whether you're a home cook or a professional cook, we all don't know much about this, and we're all trying to figure it out. So let's kind of all start at the same place. Figure out your own personal optimizations that are best for your individual needs and pursue those. Yeah.
And and that's exactly why. You want to talk next about what you say, Rich? Sorry. Um, and that's exactly why we um have so many perspectives in the book in terms of what you had talked about with people and their ideas speaking in their own voices and combining them together, is that we ourselves come from very different backgrounds in terms of what we grew up eating, what we started making, how we've developed our you know, culinary expertise. Um, and a lot of it, you know, in the in the more recent times of social media is as a result of collaborating with people who are also as enthusiastic about Koji and all the products that it makes, that we just started exchanging these ideas, and everybody comes at it from a different background, a different place, a different culture, different desires.
And it was important for us to be able to convey that in such a way that that's how we learned, that's how we shared, that's how we gained all this knowledge, is the result of a community working together. And we wanted to give people multiple voices because we may not be the right people to convey you know a specific piece of information that we might not know as much about, or that somebody really knows in depth. And that's that's why it was um that's why it's key for us to bring in all these voices and try to make it as cohesive as possible because we're we're not the sole experts, we all all it all are the experts. And that's that's what makes this beautiful about um you know this koji community, this fermentation community preservation. Um it's just um really amazing to be part of it.
And uh we want to show that there are we aren't the sole experts, that it's a matter of all of us working together to to gain knowledge and improve our skill set. Well, let's tackle this. Speaking of improving skill set and knowledge. Let's tackle this next section next. So, for those of you who already know something about Koji, right, you're probably thinking things like sake, things like Miso, things like soy sauce, um, maybe something like amazake.
But in the book, this kind of new wave of koji happening here in the US, that you know, that you two are you know, frankly leading the leading the pack on Koji in baked goods, koji in meat applications, koji in like regular kind of western dry salamis, like just like koji in basically koji in a very wide, like it's kind of like a koji taster. It's koji everywhere, right? So it's like it's like applying koji to places that you would never and products of koji to places that you wouldn't think. And kind of this book, I think is a lot about just opening up and showing that there's a whole huge range of things that you might not have thought of. And I think the application that um guy, I know Jeremy, you got a lot of press, getting a lot of press and a lot of just butt back buzz back in the in the pro world on is the koji, uh the koji aging of um whole like whole muscle meats that are intended to be cooked later, like for instance steaks.
I've never had one. John had one when he was out there in Cleveland and said it was delicious, correct, John? Yeah, yeah. Everything was very delicious over there. Yeah.
And so you want to talk about that like as a new kind of application, and then maybe from there we can go on to the section where you were talking about what appropriation means to you versus like a love and a love of a of a product and making new applications for it. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, with with using it this way in meat, and and you know, early on too, and in some of these workings with meat, we're actually growing the mold on the surface of raw meats and then cooking and eating them. You know, early on some people were like, well, that's not necessarily the best way to get the enzymatic activity into the food. Like shouldn't you inject it or vacuum marinate it or you know some of these things.
And we're like, yeah, but I don't always and and and a lot of uh even professional cooks don't have some don't have a vacuum machine. Um you know some don't have a realistic way to to properly inject it where it's where it's gonna be evenly dispersed and and work well. On top of that the culturing of the mold on the outside of meats or seafoods or whatever these proteins are um as long as you can pay attention to it it's a pretty straightforward and easy process and doesn't really uh require much of a specialized setup um you know is really just about ease of use and and why wouldn't this work and when when it started working and the controls that we're using to do it were refined um and we saw that it was delicious and that we were eating it ourselves and serving to other people and people weren't getting sick they were enjoying it like all the check marks were hitting um outside of like verified lab analysis and and long term verifiable study um we're like, something about this works. We're not a hundred percent sure why it's working, how it's working, but and you know, all the inner workings of what's happening, but we're proving anecdotally and through real-time usage that that it's it's working and it's delicious. Um it's really interesting too because when you when you do a side by side comparison of just you know, uh let's say you have three three steaks, three cuts, all the same cut, one just seasoned with salt, um, or even plain, one that's uh either marinated in amazaki or shiok, and then one where you've grown the mold on, there are drastic differences in flavor between all three of them.
Intensely drastic differences in flavor. And a lot of this testing, too, we paired up. I work really closely with the Austin folks at Certified Angus Beef. Um, uh Diana Clark, who's who's down there, she's a bovine anatomist, which is like one of the coolest jobs on the planet. Um, she is literally a meat scientist and a butcher all at the same time.
Um, you know, we did a lot of testing with like their brand stamped aged products, you know, aged and carried out by her, and at the time, Dr. Phil Bass, we were working with, um, compared to some of these koji products, and it was like, it was like, wait a second, this steak that you grew mold on, you held at 90 degrees and high humidity for two days, grew mold on it, we cooked it and ate it, was eating very, very similar. It's still a different product, but very, very similarly in texture and flavor to a 30-day dry aged, or even in some cases a 45-day dry aged. You know, as I said, we're not sure exactly what's going on, but we do know that it can be made safely, and we do know that it's super delicious, and you're getting a product comparable to these ultra-age products, which are very expensive because of the time invested in them in 36 hours. Um you know, it was just a huge revelation to us, and something that's like it's super fun, it's unique, it's delicious, it it hits all the check marks.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You know, I sp I've spoken to some scientists about it, and they're freaked out by it. Yeah, they're freaked out. Well, because the thing is like until something is like they hate anecdotal verification, right? Yeah, they they want verification, verification.
So, I mean, there's a lot of different, there's a lot of different uh what's it called? There's a lot of variables, right? So yeah. We all make the assumption in general, true or false. We we all make the assumption that the inside of whole muscle cuts is relatively okay and that nothing's gonna get in there, right?
So then we're assuming that like unless you stab it or something that we're relatively good. I've heard scientists get mad at me for that, right? Here's why I'm saying this is because like you think about if you're gonna cook the outside of a of a of a something, you're gonna cook kill most of the surface bacteria. I was interested because I was reading um I was reading some some work about um cultures that eat uh spoiled meats and like whether whether or not they get sick, like literally spoiled meats, right? Or like spoiled like hung high birds, things like this.
Um and you know, and so you know, with the the thing that food scientists are worried about are enterotoxins that are produced by bacteria that are not destroyed by heat, so that even the cooking process is not going to eliminate them. Uh and then right before we got on, so I didn't get a chance to finish it. I was reading where someone was writing an article on whether or not like you can get uh staph-based enterotoxin on raw meat and why it tends to only happen on already cooked meat, right? So there perhaps is some sort of internal safety mechanism provided by the growing koji and the natural, like the natural way that the meat is, right? But the thing is is that especially if it has an application like this where you're saying that there's an economic reason to do it, it seems like you should be able to go get big beef to shell out the the hundred grand to do the study, no?
Well, and that's that's in the works right now. I mean, that's that's something we've been working on for a number of years. And it's it's something that that um finally after after a few years of like really working hand in hand with them, like we're we're we're getting there. Like COVID's definitely gonna be throwing a wrench in some things. Um but that's that's the idea.
You know, there's there's a lot of moving parts to that too, right? Um were my numbers about right? Is it about a hundred grand? Uh it uh it could be considerably more than that. Really?
Oh, because there are they're gonna prove multiple things? We're look I there's a lot to prove there. Right. Um we're also looking at like long-term laboratory viability of this. Like I mean, we're we're potentially looking in millions, um, you know, course of a five or 10-year study, uh, looking at every variable involved in this.
And then on top of that, the development of foolproof, you know, HACC plans for large-scale production of funds along these lines. Um that that millions of dollars, that's also like organoleptic study, right? Not just safety study, then that's actually like process study. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's that's that's like going from essentially nothing lab verifiable to something on store shelves.
Right, right, right. Because you know, because in general, for people who don't know, like if you have a question and the the early one when we were dealing with dry, because dry cured meat has a plans, of which there's one in the back of the book, uh, you know, if you weren't following like the procedures, this is back in the day that the government wanted you to follow, you had to independently verify. And so what would happen is is that you would hire a lab, they would come in, they would take your raw product and inoculate it with nasty crap, put it through your process, and then verify that whatever process you were putting it through consistently killed said nasty crap. And that's how you would verify that your product was that your procedure was safe. Um, but I guess in this case, it's even a little more complicated because there it's just is your variant of something that we accept good versus this thing that we have no idea about, is it good in general, right?
I guess it's a slightly harder problem with Koji, right? Exactly, exactly. And one of the reasons is because like this direct culturing technique, because it's new. We just, you know, it's it's well, even though we've been working with this mold for thousands of years across the world, doing it in this way, um, as we've done, and keep in mind, we've done this with other molds for centuries or thousands of years. Uh, but this one particular hasn't been used in that way.
So we have we've just got to start at at zero point. And for those of you who are, you know, are keeping track of this argument and are gonna say something like, We do this all the time. We he we hang our sausages for like 48 hours, 98 degrees, a high humidity. No, no, no, listen, people. That is a that is an acid producing ferment, and you keep the high temperature and something like that so that the uh acidity uh the acidity rises, the pH drops, and that is in effect a preservative effect.
So like when you have like um, you know, uh Andy Ricker, whether or not it's legal, so I'm not saying he does it for his restaurant, but when he at home he's doing his fermented wings and his fermented ribs, that's an acid ferment where the pH is dropping. So you're increasing safety over time while you're keeping it at a high temperature. The koji that we're talking about here is not an acid ferment, and that's what makes it interesting as regards to safety, because the high temperature inoculation on the koji is not accompanied by a uh uh concomitant uh pH drop. Is that correct what I'm saying? Right, exactly.
And that's kind of like when developing the technique, like, you know, we we add salt and sugar to the meat before we we put um you know the rice flour and spore coating on there. Um, you know, we we we try to introduce other safety controls because we don't have that pH drop with this, and we're not looking for a pH drop with this, because this is meant to be eaten just like a a fresh steak would be. Good good by the way. Good good uh late in the show use of spore. I appreciate that.
Yeah, me too. Thank you. Uh and I have lost track of exactly how much time we have, but we're definitely over an hour. So we should on the way out, just why don't you talk about the the uh I know you were worried about it because you actually addressed it in the book. Why don't you just talk about appropriation and then we'll be out.
Oh, and can we can we also just really quick, I'll let Rich take appropriation. Um, but can we say uh, you know, there's many places people can get the book with COVID going on right now. I know my local bookstore here in Cleveland, Visible Voice Books, I can order through them just as I would Amazon or someplace else. And it keeps a local bookstore running and keeps money in my community. You can also get it directly from Chelsea Green, and they are fulfilling orders ten times faster than Amazon is at this point.
Uh people are ordering from Chelsea Green and getting the book two days later. Whereas we're hearing from from people who ordered it or pre-ordered from Amazon, there's a week or two week delay in some cases. Uh so you know, we just want to make sure that you know, contact your local business. Uh even some of them may be shut down, they still may be able to behind the scenes fulfill some some uh orders for you and get it shipped to you. All right, and with that, I'm gonna let Rich have the last word, but thanks to uh Jeremy and Rich for coming on.
The book is Koji Alchemy. It's out later this week. Uh as Jeremy said, uh try to get it from your your LBS, if possible. Um and uh yeah, Rich. So Rich is gonna talk about um about well, appropriation in general, what it means what it means to him and uh kind of how you address it in the book.
Uh so in terms of cultural uh appropriation, you know, we understand the concerns behind it, but it just comes down to we, you know, I I like to think about it in the way of you know, when you are developing a recipe, um, you know, even if it's back in the day when you have specific ingredients in a specific environment with whatever equipment you have, you develop a specific recipe based on what what you're just using at the at that point in time. And at some point it becomes delicious and it becomes well received. And you know, once these things are well received, people they gain popularity, there becomes a process, it becomes a standard, and then people start you know wanting it from all over the world. And in this day and age, we have whatever product you want, whatever equipment you want, and you know, whatever ingredients you want to add to it. And then our idea is that you know, with this accessibility, you can pretty much make whatever you want.
And with Koji, you have the enzymes, you have the fermentation starter, you have you know, all sorts of things, sweet or savory that you can do with no bounds. We just see it, we just see it as a way to make food more delicious. Um, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. As with every cook, as you go throughout your life, you learn from all sorts of people of all walks of life. Uh, and then you begin to you obviously respect the traditions and the precise, the precision of you know very specific ingredients and products, and you learn exactly how to make them.
And yes, you can learn you can you know spend your entire life to make the best soy sauce ever. Uh, but not of not all of us are tasked to do that. A lot of us are adventurous and want to be able to make whatever it is that we want. And we can do that, and that's the power of Koji. And you're specifically not putting yourself out in this book as the expert of the traditional techniques.
It's quite the opposite. Exactly. Quite the opposite. And keep in mind, no less than a dozen different cultures throughout Asia and Southeast Asia, like claim koji or whatever their native word for the mold is as their own. Um, so already before we even got, you know, the Western world even got hit.
Um, you know, you have it being used across cultures. Like it, it it's something that's universal, and that's what's so fantastic about it. All right, and we'll leave it with that. Thanks. Uh thanks folks for coming on.
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