Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan at Rockefeller Center in New Stance Studios. Not joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, who is stuck in traffic on the beautiful Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx here in New York City. For those of you that don't know, like the Bruckner Boulevard is one of our main hellhole thoroughfares, and it ranks right up there with the Cross Bronx Expressway, uh the BQE, uh, and the FDR Drive and portions of the West Side Highway as uh X the most unpleasant places. Actually, West Side Highway is not so bad.
The view is okay on the West Side Highway, even when you're in traffic. FDR somehow manages to spoil even the view of the East River, but there's some of the most unpleasant places in New York City, and so Nastasia's enjoying the view from there on her way in, should be here shortly. Uh John is also uh not here today. He had to attend to some family business. So uh I'll have to do all the Patreon stuff.
If you uh if you're listening live on the Patreon, call your questions in to 917-410-1507. That's 917-410-1507. Uh, and if you don't know what Patreon is and you want to be able to listen live and call in and um all those nice stuff, and we have all kinds of fun things like books that only you can get, like uh maybe we have a very rare Boston Monstro Runroe uh Strauss uh pie book that is not available on the internet that we have only for our Patreon people. Maybe we do. You'd have to check out the Patreon and find out.
Uh Patreon uh forward slash cooking issues. We do have Joe Hazenrock in the panels here in New York. How you doing, Joe? I'm doing great, man. Thanks for coming in today.
So someone's keeping the lights on, Joe. Uh, you have anything interesting happened to you this week? No, that's a little Father's Day, a little Juneteenth. Oh, yeah. First Father's Day.
Yeah, first Father Day. First father. Thank you very much. Yeah. Uh it was quite enjoyable.
Uh not too much again with the food. I I'm so excited to get back into the kitchen and do some some serious cooking. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, yeah. Is it uh look that everything changes now?
You know, everything changes every every like three years, everything changes. Is the kid on solids yet? How does that work these days? What are they saying? He is on solids um every day.
It's mostly just to figure out for allergens. Uh we've gone through, you know, the broccoli, avocados. He's really into bananas. Um, he's eating bananas with his hands, which is great. The whole, you know, about a half a banana.
Yeah. Um that's fun to clean up. Butternut squash, the uh sweet potatoes. Um, so we've been doing a lot of that type of preparation for the week. Unholy mess at Joe's house.
Oh, absolutely. Uh so like uh when I when I when I had kids, uh was unfortunately the height of uh when all of the doctors were saying it amazes me how uh every you know number of years doctors don't mind changing the behavior of millions of people. So when I when I was uh you know having kids, they were like, oh yeah, you gotta keep them clear of all of the things that may cause allergens. And then about 10 years later, they're like, oh no, you gotta feed them all of those things, otherwise they're gonna be allergic to it later in life. So where are they now?
Where how have they messed with your generation of children, Joe? I'm not sure, man. Hey, I love you, doctors. My whole family's doctors. I love you.
I love you. I I think there's someone on the phone. Who's that? Let them roll in. Hi, this is Andy.
Oh, hey, how you doing? Good. This is the first time we've ever had a caller. This is the first time we've ever had a caller before I even introduced Jackie Molecules who's on the okay, carbonation question. Go.
Yeah. So I've got a soda stream, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. But I hate the little gas cylinders. You know why? Because they're a rip off.
Yeah, it's a rip-off. Yeah. Yeah. And so I've been looking around online and I've seen a bunch of kits that give you a hose that connects a regular 10 or 20 pound CO2 tank to the soda stream. Go 20.
But 20. None of them are actually Okay, 20. Yeah. If you have the room. Yeah.
So none of them are actually labeled. The kits are actually labeled food grade. And in the Amazon reviews, most of them have at least some complaints talking about them adding bad taste to the water. Uh huh. Well, uh I'm gonna go ahead and file under highly doubt.
Uh so here's the here's the thing. So a conversion kit uh consists there's two ways you can you can do this, right? Uh I'm assuming that most of the conversion kits go uh there's a high pressure hose and it's a little thin, it's a little thin uh like like over braided, very strong hose. And the reason it's thin is because the thinner the hose, the easier it is to withstand the 800 to uh thousand PSI depending on the temperature that the CO2 is gonna reach, right? So thinner hoses equal easier than to not burst.
Okay. A little thin black hose and uh a CGA, I forget the CGA number, I think it's uh 310 or something like this, 320. And you're gonna go from the CO2 uh tank to to uh to a soda stream uh uh converter like uh nozzle. Now gas is the only thing passing through that. The liquid never touches it.
Uh if you're getting bad taste or bad stuff, uh if you have improperly purged uh tanks, that can happen. So, like uh I sh I shouldn't uh uh uh later if at the end of this story, if it remind me, guys, if we have time, which I doubt we will. Did I already tell the story, Joe, about the exploding tanks on the air? Uh I can't remember, man. Well, you would have remembered exploding CO2 tanks, no?
No, I don't remember that. All right. So at the end of the show, I can talk if we have time about exploding uh CO2 tanks. And it's and by the way, CO2 tank people, you're like, oh, it was the aluminum ones because the fatigue, right? It's the fatigue and the aluminum, the aluminum.
Nope. Steel. Steel. Steel CO2 tanks exploding. I can talk about it later.
Uh, but I don't have the time to get into it now. Hopefully I will later. But I highly doubt taste does transfer through liquid lines very, very easily. But I've not had a case where taste is transferred through a gas line due to the line, due to the gas, perhaps, not to the line. And uh memory serves, memory's typically bad, but uh uh none of the CO2 and it doesn't have a regulator.
So like if you have a regulator with uh oil in it, sometimes that can transfer uh flavors and aromas, but uh I'm assuming that this doesn't have a regulator. Does it have a regulator or is it just an on-off uh no needle valve? On off needle, like a transfer hose? Yeah, just a valve. Yeah, I highly doubt it.
I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go with highly doubt. I would say don't worry about it. What I would say is There were a couple of comments about it being the washer. Uh well the washer uh is is is a white plastic. The the washer is a white plastic.
I believe it's feels like polyethylene. I don't uh uh HDPE. Uh there's a standard uh CGA washer for uh CO2. If you're using a crappy rubber washer, throw that away and get yourself uh uh, you know, the good white, completely inert. You can suck on them like a lifesaver and there's no flavor.
Uh do not trust the built-in rubber washer on the CGA fitting on the tank, uh, in my opinion. Don't trust that one as your sole leak leak thing. And um if you can store your excess outside or in the basement just in case you get a leak or whatnot, you don't want your place filling with CO2, although that's never happened to me. Or anyone I know. All of the deaths with CO2 uh have to do with people piping multiple tanks together and doing liquid transfer through lines.
A line bursts fills the uh room with CO2 and kills them. No one's ever, as I people have died from kegs exploding, people have died from CO2 tanks exploding, but not in bar, restaurant, or household situation. To my knowledge, happy to be corrected. This answer your question. I I would be happier if no one could correct you, but you know, we'll see.
Again, listen, things happen over time. People mess things up, people die constantly for different reasons. So it's hard to stay current on industrial deaths. I mean, that's a full-time job. Yeah.
So do you think I can get that correct washer from air gas or the wherever I would go to the water. You can walk into any welding shop and just ask them for the white CO2 washer, the white plastic washer. If they try to give you something else, be like, no, the white one, the white plastic one. And they'll be like, fine. And then if they charge you more than like 20 cents, it's a rip-off.
They're basically free. They they're they they they they they fall from the from the sky like snowflakes. All right. Awesome. All right.
It'll work for him. It'll work for him, people. It'll work. Jackie Molecules, how you doing? I'm doing good.
How's it good? California. California, California? California. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Delightful here. All right. All right. Uh so I'm assuming that you you would have told me if you had done something interested in food, but I'm gonna because I'm gonna ask you now and embarrass you. Have you done any anything interesting in the food space in the past week?
Uh yeah, I'm cooking back through my my Thai food books, the Pac Pac book and the night market book. Uh during COVID, I got on a real pick. Like I went extreme, like the I think I did the entire PacPak book. So I'm making my way back through some of that. Since you live in LA, you can cook something from the night market book and then go to night market and see whether you did a good job.
Yeah, well, night market actually, I live right across the street from it here in Silver Lake, and they had a fire, and they just reopened and it's a really limited menu. So I actually can't have that many things there. Well, I hope I wish them all the best luck getting back in gear. I did not know that. Again, just it's a full-time job keeping up with this stuff.
Yeah. Uh that's right. So, Mr. Molecules, did you know we have an actual molecules man in the studio with us today? Not that you're not an actual uh Jack.
Jack, I didn't mean it that way. It's not that you're not an you're always you're always Jackie Molecules to me, my friend. Always. Uh but uh today we have Bob Florence from Maromi uh with Showyu Company in Mystic Connecticut. How you doing?
Great, how you doing? Doing all right. Who is believe it or not, a polymer chemist. In like in a f in a former incarnation of career polymer chemist, true or false? True.
Now, before we get into what you do now, I hear that you're from Syracuse, New York. I am from Syracuse, New York. So my brother and sister went to Syracuse. Oh, great. Yeah.
And uh when in the sometime in the two thousands, right? And uh like you know, mid two thousands or something like this. And uh I never went because I'm a I'm a bad brother. I'm a bad brother. So uh, but my son Dax is looking at Syracuse now, so I just went through there, and you know what I didn't have a chance to do as I was going through?
What's that? Have a speedy sandwich. You didn't have a speedy, I didn't have a speed. Will you describe for people who've never been in the uh in in this well, Syracuse, what's more Binghamton? Syracuse, you're in between the Binghamton and the hot dogs from Rochester, right?
Like you're in between those two. Where do you shade more on on in Syracuse? More speedy, more hot dog. You know what I shade toward is Italian subs. Is that what the Syracuse?
Well, it's from the State Fair. So if you were a kid growing up at Syracuse, she went to the State Fair every late summer, almost, yeah, a couple months from now. And uh my favorite thing was just going and getting an Italian sub. So it was just an Italian sausage on the grill, peppers, onions, plenty of salt and pepper, and that's it. Slapped on a great piece of bread.
You know, I love uh I love uh as we call them down here, the sausage and pep, but uh I I can't have them anymore. I make them at home, but I got traumatized. There's a terrible festival in New York called the San Gennaro Festival. I don't know if you ever heard of it. It's a it's uh it's it's kind of my worst nightmare because one of my favorite stores in the whole world, DiPalo's, is right in the middle of it.
And so I have to fight my way through it. And I used to have to commute when I taught at the French Culinary Institute. I would have to commute from the French culinary to my apartment through the San Genaro Festival, and people would be like wasted in the middle of the daytime and step right in front of my bike. And they'd be laughing, they'd be laughing. They're like, uh, I'm like, I almost killed you.
Why are you laughing? You know what I mean? Like it's funny. It's funny. You almost died.
Yeah. Anywho, so uh, yeah, so like uh they would poison me, and then I I went there once and uh the guy was making the sausage and peppers, and he pulled up his shirt and did that thing where he makes his stomach do the rolling wave belly dance thing. Oh yeah, yeah. And I haven't had a sausage and pepper since then. That would make you lose your appetite.
Yeah. Definitely. It's over. So in Syracuse, uh like how small of the sausage cut for this sausage. Are they left whole with the pebbles?
Yeah, yeah. They're whole. Here, I'm pretty sure they're hacked up. Joe, right here in New York, they're hacked up. Absolutely.
Yeah. I have to say something about New York City for one second before we get into what we actually came to talk about. The more I go outside of New York City, which isn't enough, right? The more I realize how uh crappy our hot dogs are compared to the rest of the world and how people think that we're known for our hot dogs. You go to Connecticut, you got Hummel.
Yeah. Right. You go uh to Rochester, you got uh whatever it is, Weigels, whatever. You go to you go to uh uh Buffalo, you got Solens. Everyone's got a good hot dog but us.
You know what I mean? Our hot dogs just aren't that good. They really aren't. Everyone's got Nathan's, right? Yeah, which are fine.
Fine hot dog. Fine. Uh Sheller and Weber is good, but like most people don't don't carry it. Like people make these like small but like everyone outside of New York, like they make the skinless ones for for for people, I don't know why, but they make them. You know what I mean?
But then they everyone has a good real uh hot dog with snap. You gotta have the snap. Gotta have the snap. Do you like Hummels or are you more of an upstate New York y uh have you been in Connecticut long enough? You know, I grew up in Liverpool outside of Syracuse, and we had a place called Hyde's Hot Dogs.
And I don't know what I don't know what the brand of hot dog was. They're still there. But it was uh when I was a kid, they took uh bucket of mustard with a paint stirrer and you slapped it on your hot dog, and it was just a wonderful dog. I love it. A little bit of char on it, a little bit of burn on it.
Oh yeah, yeah. Absolutely delicious. Upstate New York loves the char. Upstate New York loves the char. Maybe that's why they had better hot dogs.
And we're joined by Nastasia De Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stash? I'm okay. I was describing to uh before you showed up that you were on uh one of everyone's favorite places, the Bruckner. I left my house at 10.
Like, yeah. Two hours. Well, the by the way, uh this is like Gilligan's Island. Nastasia lives an hour away from here. So she was in, she got to spend an extra hour on beautiful.
Imagine this, people. So this actually makes a little bit so Moromi's in Mystic, Connecticut. Correct. And Mystic, Connecticut is right up on the end of Connecticut, like right before Rhode Island, right? And uh for those of you that don't know like uh geography out here, 99.9% of uh Connecticut's coastline is shielded by Long Island.
It's called the Long Island Sound. Looks like the ocean is not the ocean. Not the ocean. Not the ocean. However, at the very tippity tip, in fact, right where uh Moromey is, between Mystic, so we've if you ever go to Mystic, and I go to Mystic all the time because my in-laws are from Mystic.
I was married at Mystic at the Union Baptist Baptist Church uh 27 years ago with my anniversary uh uh this weekend. Congratulations. Oh thanks. Uh so like right there, like right there, you're like Mystic Connecticut is kind of an agglomeration of two places, Groton, where the sub base is, and Stonington on the other side, right? So you're like, you're from Mystic go, Stonington or the Groton side, right?
I mean pretty much. So when you're on the Stonington side, you're looking at the ocean. But when you're on the Groton side, you're looking at Montauk. Is that pretty accurate from uh from a geography standpoint? Yeah, pretty much.
Pretty much. Yeah. So you're on the Stonington side, so you're like real. Well, I guess you're shielded by the Fishers Island. You know, I actually live on the Groton side.
Oh, you did. And I was so confused when we moved there 10 years ago, or like people are asking us, we live in Mystic, and they go, Stoning 10 or Groton side? And we're like, what the hell are you talking about? We have no idea. So it's it took us a while to figure out, oh, we're right on the border.
So we're out actually on the crotten side of the Mystic River. Oh, nice. All right. So we'll get we'll get back to Mystic because I love Mystic. And for those of uh, for those of people who have never been to Mystic Connecticut, since I've was a kid, they have a place called the Mystic Seaport there.
So it's always been like kind of a location for kind of fun and interesting people. And over the past formative place in my life, too. Really? Oh, yeah. You used to go there, Jack?
Oh, yeah. As a kid, yeah. Yeah, yeah. My dad took me there. It was formative.
Yeah, we used to go all the way from Jersey, which is like a forever drive. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? Uh, but I loved it. You know what I mean?
And it's still going. And and they have uh um Caesar Pelley, famous now dead Connecticut architect, did the uh aquarium, which is also a great aquarium. Beautiful aquarium there. Uh they got a good jellyfish tank. Who doesn't like it?
Actually, my nephew doesn't enjoy a jellyfish tank anymore. He used to love jellyfish tanks. And then one day he was like, it's just a sensory overload, like watching those jellies just kind of like do their weird alien space thing. Sensory overload, that's it. They get me hungry because they're delicious.
Oh, you like it? You like a jellyfish? Jellyfish is delicious. Like like you dry them and then cook them in something else. Or what do you do?
No, no, they're they're they're actually cut up. We had them when we lived in Shanghai, we used to eat them for like an appetizer. So they're served cold with like sesame oil and soy sauce and uh probably a little bit of chili oil on them. They're delicious. It's still served as a cold appetizer.
But like uh the preparation like wipes out the sting, apparently. Apparently. I think they're probably stingless, as far as I know. Like moon jellies, that kind of thing. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Whenever I see them floating in the water styles, you see those suckers outside your uh door sometimes, right? That's a no-fly zone for you. Yeah, yeah.
The jellies. No. And also, I've been told, not that I know anything about it, that if you see a whole bunch of jellyfish where you didn't before, that means big problems with the environment. Probably. So you gotta start eating those suckers now.
Although that's that's like uh you're you're you're just curing the symptom, not the not the problem, right? By eating the jellyfish, you're you're not actually solving the problem. I can't eat fast enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh all right.
So Mystic over the past uh I would say 10, 15 years, has also really blossomed as a place where people are making things. Uh a lot of food. You have uh olive oil companies, you have salt companies, you have uh, you know, great bakeries, you just have like this explosion of uh people who are interested in um the like small smaller holding food production. And uh and um you're the first person actually that we've had from that group of people on, so uh I'm super super excited. Well excited to be here.
Yeah, yeah. So let's go back in time. So you started as a polymer chemist. Now, I'm assuming I'm assuming that your name and my name are roughly similar like levels of there's a million of us out there. So I'm hoping that I got the right you because I'm assuming that uh there's only one of you that worked for GE back in the day.
But did you get your start uh looking at instrument panels for uh cars and making better plastics for instrument panels and cars? Yeah, for GE. Yeah. So here's something I didn't know that I believe it or not, our listeners are probably interested in. So uh Lexan, right, is a polycarbonate uh polymer, uh poly well, polycarbonate, right?
Uh uh that is uh everyone knows it, right? But what I didn't know until I read your paper on new processes for uh instrument panels, uh, I didn't realize, first of all, that the that the knee size, the lower part of the instrument panel, needed a much lower temperature rating than the upper part. I mean, it makes sense as soon as you read it, but it's like it's like a big difference in temperature requirement. Yeah, like 30 degrees Fahrenheit difference between the upper and lower because of that freaking sun. Uh but what I didn't realize it now, so if you look at this paper, now remember, uh Bob worked for GE at the time, people, so uh it's very little surprise that when he was presenting to the Society of Automotive Engineers uh in the very late 80s.
It's no surprise that the GE branded product, Lexan, uh filled and unfilled, by the way, people, you don't necessarily need to reinforce fill your Lexan to have it perform uh in a much superior manner to uh regular polycarbonate or polycarbonate ABS blends. But what I didn't realize was that there was such a huge difference between uh branched uh branched uh polycarbonate, lexan, and what we call just polycarbonate. Because I think the average person when they're building something is like, oh, polycarbon is polycarbonate. Lexan is the same as polycarbonate, but no, it turns out much better material properties out of Lexan. There's a lot of different varieties of polymers out there.
So yeah, so we were going for safety. So when you build an instrument panel, if you get in an accident, there's actually built-in safety features in the materials of construction for those things. And that's what I did for a living. Yeah, yeah. Well, what's interesting is like early this is early, right?
Early, early. Uh so you had just moved past the point you just started using new polymers, and if any of you have ever bought a car from the 70s, the instrument panel cracks, like it like it cracks, it's done, right? It doesn't last. Right. Right.
So you were in a new era of polymers uh at that point, but you hadn't yet decided what was better for the fracture mechanics. Do you want it to be brittle and fracture easily, or do you want it to be more like Lexan where it's tough? And then you decided in the paper you came down no small shards? Mm-hmm. That was relatively new knowledge at the time, right?
People were just started thinking about it. Huh? Yeah. So how long did you do that for GE? Because then I have you later with get this, I'm assuming this is also you, a patent for you ready, people?
Oleaginous micro uh microbial biomass is subjected to pyrolysis to make microbial pyrolysis oil for use as a fuel or otherwise formed into combustible products for the generations of heat and/or light. That is me. Yeah. So that's a I mean, I know it sounds very different. Uh yeah, yeah.
Well, first of all, for those of you that for those people that don't know, so growing like uh an algae, right? So yeah, so we grew algae, and that was actually the start of my fermentation career. I worked for a startup in San Francisco called Solzyme where we grew uh algae in industrial fermentation tanks. And these are big tanks, and we fed them sugar. So if you overfeed anything like humans or algae, we get fat.
And so you just store all that excess energy as oil in the case of a plant or fat in the case of an animal. And so the technology that we were working on was to feed algae a lot of sugar, and they'd convert all that sugar into oil. It's basically um it's like sunflower oil. And then we'd extract that oil, and then downstream you could take that oil and you can turn it into fuel, you could turn it into chemicals, or you could just use it as food, because it's it's basically vegetable oil. Um so that was the technology, and that's what that patent speaks to.
Right. Well, you were doing it in a way that I think people don't, and here's the thing again that I didn't know. I learned a bunch this morning when I was researching your former life, that apparently if you heat up uh this like uh biomass at very high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, the oil doesn't actually break down. It just vaporizes and then you can separate it easily that way. Was that the was that one of the main parts of the patent was figuring out that separation?
That was uh key part of the technology was trying to figure out well, how do you get high yields out of the algae after you try once you grow the algae, you're trying to extract the oil and you're trying to get as much out as possible. So yeah, that patent is all around. Well, how do you optimize that process? Yeah. But then I read in just a an interview where they probably don't care about these things that you're like, yeah, but oil got so cheap with fracking that that actually did happen.
Yeah. So yeah, so when we started the company back in uh I joined them in 2010, oil was trading around, I think around $140 a barrel, similar to what it is today. And um and then after Belkin sh you know, Belkin was found in tar sands up in Alberta, oil prices really came down. They came down to like forty dollars uh a barrel. And all of us in that biofuels industry sat around looking at each other and going, well, this doesn't make much economic sense anymore.
What else are we gonna do for a living? Right, right, right, right. But I like the fermentation, so that really got me hooked on fermentation, which kind of led me to where I am today. So how so how did you end up then in Connecticut from California? So um after we after I left Solzheim, which was a startup company I mentioned with algae fermentation, uh I went to work in private equity, which is basically resuscitating dead companies.
So you take a company that's gone through bankruptcy, take them out of bankruptcy, and restructure the company so that it's in uh new profitable form and shape. So I I was responsible for helping to take uh industrial uh equipment company in Connecticut out of bankruptcy and make them profitable again. So did it did it work? It did work. And Debbie and I, my wife Debbie and I, we decided we really like the place and we stayed.
So when we moved there, we moved from the Bay Area, San Francisco to Mystic, Connecticut, sleepy little town, and we're driving down from the airport in Rhode Island. Driving down the road, and there's like trees all around us, and there's like nothing. And we're looking at like green and trees and green and trees, and I said, Where is everything? There's nothing here. We're in the middle of the woods.
And it was really, you know, even though I grew up in central New York, which has a lot of trees too. I was so used to living in cities as an adult, it was really a strange feeling. Particularly for Debbie because she grew up in LA. It's like, wow, what are we gonna do here? Well, Mystic's a great town.
It's also like an easy, it's easy to get up to Providence, Boston, down to New York. It's right on the Amtrak line. Yeah. I think it's also it's got a good mix of people. It's not all like it's not all like one kind of person there, you know what I mean?
It's uh different different walks of life. I learned how to drive comfortably at 25 miles an hour. And in a relaxed mode. It's just like, okay, this is it. I'll never get there.
So for those of you that don't know, when you're going to Mystic, uh one of the main exits for Mystic is you get off of it going a billion miles an hour off of I-95 because you finally punch through traffic. Like once you're up there, the traffic is boom, you're gone, right? And you get a little bit bent because because I-95 is incredibly for those of you that live in places with properly designed highways, I-95 through Connecticut is the worst design in the world. Stas, back me up on this. No yeah.
Yeah. Every once in a while, it's like some some uh civil engineer, which is what my grandpa was, he's like, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna get rid of a lane. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And then we're gonna merge another lane in in like, you know, 250 feet.
Just keep the lane. Just keep the lane. So like you'll have like right up near Mystic, there's a place that there's a lot of accidents because the highway narrows and then instantly opens up again for the exit to go to Mystic. You come off that exit going a billion miles an hour, and then instantly it gets down to 25 mile an hour, and there's often a cop there waiting to t uh to tag outsiders who don't know to slow down to 25 mile an hour. True or false.
True. True. Yeah, uh anyway, I love Mystic. Mystic's a good place. Uh so let's talk about your your partner.
So you go to Mystic, you start from well, you start fermenting first, not a business, just at home. Just at home. So what do you what do you start with? So um actually I started with cheese. Um so after I got out of the Soulzyme algae fermentation, I was looking at fermentation technologies and I was playing around with cheese and cheese technology, and I decided very quickly with Connecticut laws and how they handled milk, and you couldn't make raw milk cheese without owning a cow and owning a farm, and I was like, Well, I don't want to mess around with that.
That's a level, yeah. So I quickly kind of dumped that as a as a career path and said, Um, what else are we looking at? And I was looking at casting a wide net on fermentation at large and said, okay, well, there's this technology of show you soy sauce manufacturing. And what was interesting to me is is quite complex, although the the technology is like really old, the complexity of it is really challenging. So I thought from just from a curiosity standpoint, it was just really interesting challenge.
So I started making um soy sauce at home, and I started buying cultures from a company up in Washington called Gem Cultures, sells Koji spores. And they've got a little packet that has instructions, and I was making like gallon quantities of Koji. And I built a incubator in my dining room uh out of wood and had little trays in it, and I was steaming beans on a pressure cooker on the stove, and I was making roasting wheat in the oven and grinding wheat on a kitchen aid. So I had all the components together, and I'm putting it in my little incubator, which was heated by a light bulb and had a humidifier in it. It was yeah, it was pretty old school.
But it it worked. And so I was making um easy baked koji. It was absolutely absolutely and I still have that machine and it works great. Um I was like babysitting this thing every night. I'm like checking the temperature every hour, and I was like obsessed with how to grow koji.
And um, so I was growing a lot of koji, learned how to do that and did batch after batch after batch, and I'd be getting up in the middle of the night, going down and checking the what's the temperature of my koji now? Is it too hot? Is it too cold? Is it too wet? Is it too dry?
And so you you kind of get all it koji's pretty picky, it doesn't just grow. Um well, maybe in the right absolutely ambient environment, like in Japan or Southeast Asia, but uh Mystic Connecticut's not that. So you have to keep it warm, you have to not keep it too hot. Once it starts growing, it generates a lot of heat, and it actually can kill itself because it'll generate so much heat through metabolization that it'll just burn itself out. And then it doesn't like to be too moist, like wet water, like raining on it, uh, but it doesn't want to be too dry.
So it's got this really, really sweet Goldilocks zone that you can grow it in. And so I was obsessing over well, how do I make that happen and how do I make it happen repeatedly? And what year is this? And this is uh like 2017, 2016, 2017. So that's right around the time, but really kind of just before when kind of uh the do do-it-yourself PID controller was everywhere.
It was like at the cusp of the case. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exact exactly. So this is the same thing. We don't need to get into it.
But yeah, but I like PID. Yeah, PID is really works great. Yeah, but like prior to that, in the early uh in the early early 2000s, early even teens, you know, you had to really know what you were doing. You know, you'd go get a Watlow or an equivalent controller, and you know, you had to have some industrial background to but now like you know, they're almost free. You don't even need to go on eBay, you can just buy one for like 15 bucks.
They're not that expensive at all. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so so that's what I started. So I started making soy sauce.
And I was just making soy sauce batch after batch after batch, making the same thing. And so I made some soy sauce that I thought tasted pretty reasonable. It was like, yeah, this is this is pretty good stuff. And so Instagram was kind of I guess it'd been around for a while by then, but I had got on it and I had contacted a local chef, James Weyman, um, who was working over at Oyster Club. He was the executive chef at Oyster Club at the time.
And I said, Hey James, I'm I'm making soy sauce over here. Would you be willing to give it a shot? And he's like, sure, sure, bring it on down. So you were a customer? You were a guest?
You you were a regular? Yeah, I was a regular. Yeah, yeah, people. Don't underestimate the uh relationship between regulars and the restaurants. So true.
So uh so anyway, I I brought in my little, I was so proud of it, brought in my little bottle. It's a little like five ounce woozy bottle, like a hot sauce bottle. I brought it down there and uh gave it to James and kind of sat there like, is he gonna taste it? Is he gonna taste it? Uh wonder what his reaction is.
I'm kind of staring at him, wondering what he thinks of it. And he he tries it and he's like, hey, this is you know, it's pretty good. It's pretty good stuff. And so uh so that that was the beginning of a relationship, and I really have to hand it to James just for taking a uh flyer on a guy who's just making soy sauce in his daughter's bedroom. And um, so I so I made some batches of soy sauce, and uh I think I was getting better at making koji, which is really the basis for making good soy sauce.
You don't make good koji, you don't make good soy sauce. So I had made um some soy sauce, and I'm like, okay, so here we are. I've got a lot of experience working in Asia. Uh back to my instrument panel days. I used to go to Asia and sell the Honda and Toyota and those guys.
Oh, nice, nice. So that was the beginning of my my love of of working in Japan and in Asia. And of course, Debbie and I lived in Shanghai, and I had an office in Tokyo, one in Bangalore, one in Shanghai, and one in Seoul. So I kind of tooled around Asia for years. How many of those languages can you speak?
I saw that video. Probably a quarter of several, but not two languages. So I'm like fluent in 1.5 languages. There you go. All right.
If you add them all up. So I'm presuming that you can speak or something. Some, some very, very rudimentary. What what they call taxi Japanese or um anyway. Um, so I I had made soy sauce, thought it was pretty respectable.
So I wrote to 15 CEOs of Japanese soy sauce company. So um I sent out letters, I researched soy sauce makers in Japan, found out who the CEOs were, wrote him a nice note and said, Hey, I'm Bob, I make soy sauce in Connecticut, and uh wondering if you'd be willing to meet with me when I'm in Japan next and uh try my soy sauce. And so 15 letters went out, emails went out, and uh got responses from three of the CEOs and said, Sure, come on over. I was like, Oh, oh okay. So I bought a sort of thing.
That's very surprising to me. It's very nice. So uh so I got on a plane and went over to Japan with samples of soy sauce, and I met with um uh Yamaki uh Ogura soy sauce and chiba, Yamaki and um uh outside of Tokyo and Chiba Shoyu in Chiba, Japan. And that's the video you're referring to. So that the president and um he's like the fifth generation owner president of Chiba Shoyu Idesan, uh has really taken me under his wing.
Uh so I went over there, I gave my samples of soy sauce, and he's like this is pretty good for an American. That checks out, that checks out with one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was but it was uh it was good. And then we spent we spent an hour talking about salt.
And it you know, one of the things when you make soy sauce, it's two stage fermentation. So you make koji, and that takes two days, and then you put it in a barrel with salt water, and that takes six months to a year to ferment it in a in a barrel, and then you press it, extract it, and bottle it. And so my question was all around well, how much salt do you use? And how do you calculate a percentage of salt? And you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to translate between salt content.
Like you think 16% salt's pretty easy. Is it 16% by weight, by volume? Right, weight and volume, or like is it is it before you add the materials? Is it after you add the material? So we had a long conversation because I'm not fluent in Japan and Japanese, and they're not quite fluent in English.
And so we spent a lot of time just talking about salt. We spent the first hour of our relationship was just salt and salt water and baking salt. And so then Do you know who would have hated that? This one behind me, Nastasia would have commanded the stuzz. Imagine that, that.
That's like a I know. You would have been beating your head. You know what though? You would have been beating your head against some of the most beautiful fermentation barrels I've ever seen in my whole life. This company, you gotta go on the website, go on Maromi's website and look at the video, and and even if you don't understand anything that's being said, as I didn't, because I don't understand anything.
Uh when you see those barrels, oh my god, how beautiful are those barrels from like the eighteen fifties? They're old, they're like a hundred he said eighteen forty-nine, I think, in the video. So he said around they were built at the time of the gold rush in America. Around Levi Strauss. But they're makes a joke about that.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he holds up a sign that says we love Levi Strauss, and that's that's the connection. Good info. But like these barrels are like amazing. Like, what is what are the like so they have steel reinforcement duh because otherwise they'll get blown apart, but they have these old woven like what is that?
Those are bamboo. So it's woven bamboo. And um what it what it it's woven wet and then it dries and it constricts as it dries and it it holds the the wood slats together. And do they have to redo that every once in a while? That bamboo?
Those those barrels aren't really made anymore. There's a f there's like a couple of barrel makers that are trying to get back in the business, but the issue isn't making the barrels so much as finding the wood to make the barrels. Because those old barrels are made out of very ancient wood that had zero knots in it. So you can imagine that if you have a knot, they they leak. Right, right.
So you have to have this super clean wood to start with to make the staves that go into the barrels, and today there aren't the trees around to really make those anymore. So it's it's a it's a dying art, and the old barrels are slowly like deteriorating to the point where they're being taken out of production. So most soy sauce today is made in concrete pits. So while you'll always see pictures of wood barrels, the this the reality is is these things are made in concrete pits. Yeah.
That are well these barrels in this in this one for to give you guys a size reference they're of a similar size as you would see like uh wart brewing in um in like uh a distillery they're big yeah they're big they're big big so yeah I had a chance to uh to go with the owners of these soy sauce makers and and actually taste soy sauce at different um process areas or stages in the process rather and so we're tasting maromi maromi is the mash so that's the name of my company but um maromi generically means mash like if you were to make whiskey you'd make maromi mash if you make sake you make sake mash um sake maromi so anyway we went around we were tasting that maromi from the directly from the barrels I'm like this stuff's delicious it's like why do you bother squeezing it it's like just delicious just like it is what they say well that's what we do. That's yeah yeah yeah and tradition important so let's before we get any further let's go through the actual process for for people like how ja Japanese uh do you want to go through like the the rough kinds you're not interested you want us go through your process we can go through the process I think all right so you're so as you say you started with you start growing the the Koji from and you're buying the spores right yes because don't want weird as well you don't want weird stuff growing so having a real pure culture to start with is really important. Right so they're all aspergillus which is a kind of mold, but the the the kind that you normally grows on bread, the green stuff, flavus will poison you because it can poison you. Aflatoxin can, doesn't always, doesn't need to poison you. Can can be not encouraged, right?
Right, right. And then the uh the and I can never pronounce them, so I'll have you pronounce the one that means that it goes on rice, because I can never pronounce that. Or or as I or is I print or as I yeah. So there's that one as and then the the two common ones, and then there's the one that's for uh soy sauce, which also uh I wrote it down, but I I never can remember its name either. Sojay.
So is that what you use or so? So use uh I actually use a combination of those um varieties. So the idea between by the what's called Koji tanny, which is a spore, is you want for soy sauces, you want something that's going to digest protein really efficiently. So you want um uh mold that's going to create a lot of protease enzymes, and those protease enzymes then digest the proteins and turn them into amino acids. And the aminos are what tastes really good.
And so that's really what we're after. So the whole idea of um making koji is really you're an enzyme farmer. Um but it's similar to what's happening with malt. So if you're if you're using malt, you actually you sprout barley and you're creating enzymes, and the enzymes are then used to break down the sugars in the substrate. And so with with um koji mold, you're doing the same thing, but you're using a substrate that's a combination of soybeans and wheat.
And so we start with soybeans, we steam them at high pressure, um, we roast wheat, and then we crack the wheat. Um combination of wheat and soybeans together is then inoculated with koji, and then you grow the koji on that substrate. And what's happening then is the koji as it's growing, it's injecting enzymes into there to digest its food basically. And how how do you determine for you the uh how do you determine for you the ratio of uh wheat to to soy? So there's a broad range of ratios in soy sauce.
But the major um soy sauce that's sold worldwide is is a variety called koikuchi, which is essentially 50 percent wheat, 50 percent soybeans, or variations that are very close to that. And that combination is a very traditional type of soy sauce. In fact, this the showy that I make is is about 50-50 soy and wheat. Um and so that koji then goes into a barrel of salt water and then it ferments in that barrel. So that's a barrel fermentation that occurs over time in a very, very um salty environment.
And uh so very salty, how salty? Um soy sauce is on the shelf for most soy products that are of koikuchi variety are around 16 percent salt total. So it's uh on the order of 900 milligrams of sodium. And when people say that uh, like for instance, that some of the higher wheat varieties taste saltier, they just taste saltier, right? They're not actually saltier?
I don't think so. I think it's a matter of how you perceive things, and a lot of your perception has to do with what you've eaten um and what time of day it is. So your body is actually metabolizing and you've got a lot of microbes in your mouth that behave differently at different times of the day. So your perception changes over time. So if you were to taste something in the morning or taste something after night after lunch or taste something before dinner or after dinner, you might have uh different perception as to the saltiness of that, yes.
Huh. So 15%, yeah. You know, I used to have to do uh I'll do calculations later. I should have done my calculations before I showed up because uh I'm not good at math on the fly. Uh okay.
So how long then is it is it aging in this for free? In other words, like let's say somebody wants to start doing this at home. What's a reasonable size? Gallon at a time? Yeah, I think so.
I think starting off at a gallon size, so you're you're gonna be making about um five kilograms of koji to make about a gallon or two of soy sauce. Okay, so roughly. So five, so five I like how we're going to be a few. Five kilograms of metric imperial cell. Roughly ten pounds.
Okay, so yeah, yeah. Uh to make uh one gallon to eight pounds of. So you get less soy sauce than you start with co koji. Yeah. By by weight.
Right, right. Right. Okay. So now now do you mash the stuff up or do you leave the beans whole? Um, so that's an interesting question.
So if you look at an industrial soy sauces today, are made mostly from soy grits. And so when soy soybeans are harvested, they're pressed and the oil's extracted. The oil goes into cooking oil markets or industrial markets. What's left over are grits? And the grits are used to make most industrial soy sauces are using grits, not a few.
Like a kick them in red. Right, yeah. And Yamasa as well, or um there are there are different grades in each, every manufacturer has different grades. What I'm making is what's called whole bean soy sauce. And so you're using the oil that it's in there as well.
So you're not throwing out like half the components of the soybean when you're making soy sauce. And what that does is it allows you to have more raw materials to create flavor components. So if you throw out the oil, you're throwing out all the fatty acids. All those fatty acids get converted into esters and ketones and really tasty things. Those flavors, like you like Harold McGee, he he describes those flavors as being flowery components of flowery notes when you're when you're having a a taste of an ester or taste of ketones and esters and in acids and combinations.
They're really nice flavor components. And so if you don't use them to start with, you'll never have them in your soy sauce. And so what I'm trying to do with my soy sauce is have a soy sauce that's not just a single note, which is the umami or amino component, but it's really like a cord. You get a beginning, middle, and an end, you get that whole flavor profile out of it because you're using whole soybeans to start with. Now, how do you prevent, or maybe you can't, or you know, it's protein breakdown can sometimes result in very bitter polypeptides, right?
But you don't get that much bitterness out of most soy sauces. Like, what is it that's controlling? Is it just because the breakdown is more complete, or is does does soy sauce go through a more bitter point? And I know that certain soy sauces have like we were talking earlier before the show, kind of a bitter acrid note. Or for instance, lipid breakdown products can sometimes be very reactive on the tongue, and like they make so if I eat certain cheeses that are high, I can tell if cheese, an aged cheese is high in fat because it pops my taste buds out.
Like I have this like crazy reaction to like lipid breakdown products. Um soy sauces depending on the stuff that's going in? You know, that's a good question, Dave, because I I did when I had you know tens and tens of barrels up in my daughter's bedroom when I was first making this. I made a lot of mistakes. So I made a lot of stuff that went into the compost pile that really wasn't suitable for human consumption human consumption.
And and a lot of those are like, well, the koji didn't really go in the right direction. So if you don't make koji the right way, you're probably making bacillus, and if you're making bacillus, you're making like stinky cheeses like orange wash rind cheeses. Those are bacillus-based bacteria. So the built bacillus will outcompete the other organisms like yeast that are gentler on the taste buds. And so some of the bitterness that you have in there can be result of just having really bad koji to start with.
And that's so that's one issue that you have there. The other issue is you barrel ferment things. Um those barrels need to be maintained. They need to be stirred. So I stir every barrel I have gets stirred once a week.
So it seems like a lot because there's a lot of barrels, but it's good for my upper body workout. So I'm okay. So but if you were to just make koji throw it in a barrel and just leave it alone for a year and don't maintain it, you're gonna get this stratification where you get layers of um like almost like a pellicle, like if you're making vinegar. So the pelical layers like layer upon layer upon layer of different organisms that survive in different environments until you get to the koji, and those create different chemical components that can create um ammonia, can create some of those off-flavors, can create some of the bitter flavors. And so a lot of it is how you is really in the craft of making soy sauce, and that can get lost on um sort of hobbyist if you're just making it and you and you don't have the ability to maintain that um meromi over time.
You could probably run into that, yeah. All right, so let's say I've got my 10 gallon paint bucket. Right. I've got uh what'd you say, five kilos of koji in it, and how much 15% water uh so uh saline water am I adding to that? It's almost like a half and half.
So you're not half of Koji component, half of the salt water. Okay, so I'm adding another five kilos. So I'm at I'm at 10 kilos right now, 22 pounds. Okay. So and divide by eight, and that's how many gallons?
So it fits in a five-gallon bucket, fine. Yeah, yeah, okay. Absolutely. Uh now, even room to foam, if it does, I don't know. No, it doesn't.
Good, nice. So then uh you're stirring it, right? I mean, you leave them whole, and then you're stirring it uh what do you say once every week. Okay, for how long? It depends.
So I I used to say that I'd made stuff and I'd age it until it tasted good. And I still do that. So and there's a little and there's little differences in terms of each batch I try and maintain as much control over what I'm doing as possible. But even with that, there's some slight variation. So I taste as I go along, and it's like that's really tasty at this point, and I'm gonna extract it.
So typically that's like six months to a year, and you can get to get to a year, you can get to after you. I've had 18 months, I've had 24 months. And what happens if you go too long? Is it a little bit more than a little bit? You know, I haven't gone too long yet.
No. Doesn't lose anything, it doesn't like die. I have yet to have gone too long. So you decide it's ready, it's done, then what do you do? Okay, so once it's done, then I press it.
And so pressing it, I have uh what is um an apple cider press. And so you make uh what's called a cheese, which is a layer of uh filter cloth, a platin press, another layer, another layer. So you make like 10 layers of of uh cake, and then press it, and you extract the raw soy sauce, and the raw soy sauce then goes into a pasteurizer. And unlike milk, it's really healthy to pasteurize soy sauce because it drives myard reactions. So now you've got a lot of um aminos and you've got a lot of sugar from the wheat, and the combination of sugar and proteins, as you know, over time or with heat, create these myard components, which are really tasty.
And that contributes to what is the darkness and the dark uh color of soy sauce. And so pasteurizing for soy sauce is better for flavor, versus with milk, you actually denature proteins and you make it worse. But with soy sauce heating, it actually makes it better. I would love to try before and after. Maybe someday we can visit.
Yeah, I know John really wanted to visit now. Anyway, I would love to visit too. I would love to taste before before and after that. Oh, that'd be cool. Now, once you okay, so you you press it, so you're getting out of that 10 kilos, you're getting uh eight divided by you're getting like four, a little under four kilos of product out out of ten.
So what are you doing with the how much of it evaporated over that time? Like how much is actually left when you're done? So um evaporation I control because I add back water. So whatever the head space is on that barrel, it's gonna maintain that over time. Right, because otherwise your salt would be way out of battle.
Yeah, the salt content gets too high and it kills everything. So you want to maintain um microbiome environment that's healthy and stable. And so if you let it evaporate too much, you're gonna have salt concentration, so absolutely nothing will live in there. Um whereas at the salt levels that you're making soy sauce at, you you want certain yeast bacteria to thrive in there that are continuing the work to convert proteins into aminos and starches into sugars. So when you're pressing it in the cider press, by the way, you've been to Clyde Cider Mill?
I have. Love Clyde Cider milling. Same thing. My my press is just a small version of that, and I love their cider donuts. Oh, yeah.
For those of you that don't know, Clyde Cider Mill is uh still operating pre-prohibition cider press. Uh it's either in or right outside of mystic. Yeah. And uh they have this like the I don't forget, they might have converted the motor, but all the old belt-dry stuff is still there, and they have this giant press and they just wheel in the apple palm as and you hear that in the big press comes down and squeezes it, and you can see the juice shoot around the outside. That's a fun that's a fun trip.
Yeah. I once asked like uh they used to just lie during prohibition, basically. You know, they stayed around during prohibition when a lot of cider uh mills went kind of defunct, and they claimed that they were making uh vinegar for liniment for horses. You know what I mean? And they were doing pressing a lot of other people's apples.
Yeah. People like because the nice thing about apple juice is you press the cider, it's not alcoholic yet. I mean, it's not my job to stop it from coming alcoholic. That's how Welch has made all their money figuring out how to stop alcoholic fermentation. Anyway, I digress.
So uh the first stuff that comes off the press versus the last squeeze. What's the taste difference? The first stuff that comes off versus the last stuff that comes off. You know how like it's pretty homogenous. Really?
It's pretty homogenous. It really is, yeah. There's not a huge and I taste, I have guests come in, we taste, and honestly, it's all really good. It first straw for the first time. First trip last trip.
Somebody said that before. Yeah, all right. Now what do you do with the with with the uh whatever it is, uh six. Yeah. So the lees um goes into certain preparations.
So my partner James, uh as you as I mentioned, is uh executive chef. He owns Nanas in Westerly, Nanas Mystic. Um so he's constantly playing with different formulations that use all the ferments that we do, whether it's koji, whether it's soy sauce, whether it's our miso, our show use leaves. So we've come up with some creative uses for that, um, culinary uses for the lees. Um, I'm looking for other uses and other outlets as well, and we're toying around with some ideas with that.
What does it tasting? It tastes like soy sauce, it tastes like dry soy sauce. So it's like a um it would it's like a seasoning. Um so I think it's really good. I think it's got a lot of applications.
In Japan, a lot of it goes into agricultural feed. Um, but uh but I look at it as potentially another seasoning. If you dehydrate it and powder it, like uh what's it texture like? Yeah, what's the texture like? Um it's like a really fine coffee grounds.
Super fine coffee grounds. Like Turkish? Yeah. But does it feel grit? In other words, it doesn't dissolve, right?
So that is that the issue with it, is that it doesn't like dissolve on the side. No, it does not dissolve. So you can't use it like a salt. Yeah. Yeah.
But you could use it for like a spice rub. You could, and we do. And I do. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's it's really delicious.
So I think I think it's an underutilized asset um that could have a lot of applications, so we're playing around with that. But again, my main focus is making really super good soy sauce. So the show you leaves is is a whole nother exploration that needs to happen. For the future. But the soy sauce is like that's gotta be right.
All right, so so someone that gets is getting into it, right? They can go buy uh Rich uh She and Jeremy Umansky's book, uh Koji Alchemy to get started. Sure. And uh they can start making a gallon batches, but let's just go piece by piece. So you started making Koji and you said uh, you know, you had good results clearly from the beginning, or you wouldn't have continued.
That's the sad truth about most most of us. I mean maybe you're not. Yeah, yeah. If you if you don't have at least some initial success, it's a kind of a disincentive to continue, right? Right, right.
Uh but how long until you really felt like you knew before you again, every every day I go into the kitchen I realize how little I know, but like how long did it take before you felt you kind of got a handle on it? So I was about um it was a couple of years into the process that I started thinking about breaking out into a space. And in Mystic isn't known for its industrial spaces and so I spent actually a couple of years after I figured out that I wanted to do this to find a space that was big enough tough enough industrial enough to make soy sauce in. There's that there was that old gas station on Route 1. Remember that place that old gas station but enough infrastructure I mean you know Mystic's a tourist town right so you know we've got great restaurants we've got all this but we don't have a lot of factories.
Right right and so finding a place to make something is good. And I found a really great um sports facility that was uh had a batting cage is like 4,000 square feet of batting cage with astro turf on the floor and I ripped all that up I designed and engineered a building that would house a Koji room um all the packaging equipment uh pressure cookers um roasting machine like for the wheat it's like a big coffee roaster and then all of the downstream area for barrel fermentation and then packaging who knows you get you need a lot of room for packaging it's amazing yeah you got to put stuff in stuff so what's your current batch size? Current batch size is uh sixty gallons per batch six sixty gallons of meromi so I make about six hundred bottles of six hundred of these babies a batch. So is that a custom barrel size or is that like no it's a you can buy them commercially commercially it's it's pretty like it if you look like uh like a oak barrel like a bourbon barrel or something like that they're about six and you're all in wood I've seen pictures right I'm in both. I'm in wood and I'm in plastic barrel.
And what's the difference in taste between the two? So um in blind taste testing, uh the plastic barrels actually edge out the wood slight ever so slightly. I mean you'd really have to just you'd have to taste a lot of soy sauce to tell the difference. But I think what's happening is that the microbiome stability is a little bit more in the plastic because they don't evaporate so quickly, whereas the wood tends to have a little bit more um uh evaporation and change and variability over time. They're they're both really tasty.
I mean, it's like splitting hairs in my view. All right, Stas, come over here. We've got to do a tasting while I'm asking the Patreon questions, or I'm gonna get killed. And by the way, tamari isn't actually just a wheatless soy sauce. It's the it's the leftovers from your miso production, correct?
And that's why it's there's so little of it and it's cost so much. Tamari is um it's interesting, is because tamari is sort of a predecessor of soy sauce. So it's a if you make if you make miso, you're gonna have a puddle on top, which is tamari. And soy sauce actually optimized making of tamari. Um so historically there was a little bit of liquid, and the Japanese turned it into mostly liquid.
But your stuff isn't is it's miso. So I make I make Shiro miso, which is white miso, and we have a little bit of tamari at the top, and I collect that, and it's very precious, very nice. All right, Jordan writes in have you done side-by-side comparisons of different Koji starters? Uh Nastas, what if you guys tasty? We've got we've got to crush this all in.
Have you done side by side comparisons of different koji starters and making sure you end our miso? I know some strains are known to have more protease activity, but is it really that noticeable in in the final product in your experience? I think most people, most hobbyists would probably not know the difference. And unless you've got like GC mass spec and you can go analyze all that stuff, you probably won't notice as a hobbyist, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. All right.
And on a similar note, uh Jordan always hears that protease production is favored when grown at lower temps, upper 70s, while amylase is favored at higher temps, 80s to 90s. Is this something you've actually noticed in your experience? Have you tried growing koji under different temperature profiles to see its effect on the final product? I have. And Jordan's uh was asking also about what happens after you uh strain it with the solids and uh they bury them in vegetables with great results, but is there anything else you recommend?
You're working on it, you say. You're working on it. Yeah, I think like spice rubs is certainly an area of exploration. All right. Uh Science Slut wants to know tips and guides for getting started at home with fermenting with Koji making soy or shoyu.
We hit that a little bit, right? Yeah, we did. Uh are there good sources or strains of Koji in North America? Do you still recommend gems? I think Gem Cultures is a great starter place, yeah, absolutely.
Right. And guides for uh to choose for which application would you go to Koji Alchemy or like what other websites? What about uh Koji Alchemy is good? I think um Does Shirtleaf still update uh they have a wonderful body of knowledge as well. The Soy Institute or whatever it's called?
Yeah. Uh what are you most excited for in this space now? Seeing a ton of people on Instagram and others experimenting with Koji and Miso in North America. I'm curious if you see any super exciting areas of development or research or areas that need to be explored in the future. I think I think this is kind of like on the cusp of uh craft industry, similar to what the beer industry was at for 40 years ago, 30 years ago, when you started breaking out of very generic uh beer.
And so I think it's exciting that people are looking at different types of fermentation and different types of shoyus and different additives and showyus. And we've got a different variety here that we've got variety, rye. Oh, that's so delicious. I tried that though. Yeah, yeah.
The rye showyu is uh that's something different. That was a mistake, by the way. But what do you mean? You accidentally you're like you can't tell rye from wheat when you're looking at it. What do you mean?
No. Um no, I actually didn't. I picked up a bag of rye. Um James said, hey, there's there's some wheat over in the farmhouse, go grab a bag. And I went and grabbed a bag and I'm like, this is the weirdest looking wheat.
But I made it anyway. I was like, oh, what the hell? I'll just make it. And then it was rye. Was it problematic?
Was it we like physically was it problematic? No, it handled the same way. It didn't roast quite as quickly, but um but the pentazans didn't mess you up, you didn't get like weird, like ropey or bubbly or anything like that. It is delicious. People, if you get a chance to go on uh Moromi Webb's, is it still on the website?
The rye, because like everything I've had is delicious, and we're gonna taste them in one second. Uh but the rye is something that uh you've never had it before. You ever gonna do fish sauce by the way? Like in a Shiri style, Japanese fish sauce? No, I have made fish sauce, but I'm gonna focus on soy sauce.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do one thing, yeah. Uh Memphis Leak wants to know uh have you noticed uh any differences uh in terms of s uh soybeans, the quality of the sources of the variety in terms of the result. And go for wheat too. Like what kind of wheat?
Do you use a hard wheat, a soft wheat? Does it matter? Hard red wheat uh has a higher protein content, so you want as much protein as you can, so you're gonna pack in more protein with hard red wheat than soft white. So, yeah, definitely. Um, and you want to use uh kind of a medium size yellow organic soybeans, a good place to start.
But do you notice a huge quality with like harvest time or any of this stuff or you know I I I got into some soybeans that I wasn't happy with. Um it's there's so many variabilities in agriculture, it's hard to put your finger on is it the variety of soybean or is it the way they were harvested? Is it the way they were grown? Is it was it the weather? There's just too many variables to s to pin it on one single thing.
Um, you have a supplier you trust now. And is it possible to find a supplier that you trust? I've got several. And the other thing is we're trying to develop local supply. So I've got uh now three growers of soybeans locally in Connecticut and Vermont, and I've got local wheat being grown.
And the kelp you use is local. It's in Stonington. Do they make combo style kelp or just like they make sugar kelp? Um again, we incorporate that into a soy sauce, which we have here as well. All right, and then before we taste, which we taste, we're gonna taste on the way out.
Uh someone wrote in 910 uh 910 AG, I guess, uh a while ago, has a chemistry degree, wants to get into food more on the flavor side. What about has being a chemist helped you in what you're doing? I think it's helped me in terms of understanding variability in a process. So it's like I only wanted to make one thing, so it's make soy sauce in how to make great soy sauce. So if you're if you've got something that has like 20 different variables to it, and you understand that you can screw things up like a million different ways with 20 variables, I think having a science background helps you in terms of being just disciplined in terms of how you do things and how you document things and how you write things down.
So I have lab notebooks on everything that I've ever made in terms of what I made, how I made it, what it's put together with, what raw materials I use, what process I use, the whole nine yards. So yeah, absolutely helps. Yeah, cook should keep notes, especially about anomalies. Uh let's taste. Let's taste before we run out.
Okay, so this is uh we start off with a standard show you. And so this is uh, as I said, it's a koikucci style showyu. It's uh 50 50 wheat soybeans. And this forms the basis for everything you're gonna taste. So uh again, it's a based on a whole soybean.
Yes, it's delicious. Let mean get that roundness of flavor. How long would you say this stuff will how after you open it, how much is it gonna change in the bottle over time? Like what what's your feeling on that? It won't stay in the bottle, you'll use it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but theoretically, like it it it really won't change that much um over time. I think I think you're good for something like six months in a bottle like that as you kind of dribble it off. But hopefully you'll use it faster than that. Yeah, yeah.
This is one of our latest, it's chanterelle. No, but I haven't tried this one. My partner James um is an avid forager, and so last year, um your hot sauce is quite nice too, actually. Thank you. Last year you went out foraging, for some chanterelle mushrooms, which we incorporated into this.
And when does the chanterelle get added to the process? Um, pretty much right after we start with the people. That's some nice product there, too. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's chanterelle. And I want to uh before we run out of time, I want you to try Susie's um sugar kelp here. And so this is uh right on fish. Made with stoning sugar kilp, huh? Stonington kelp company sugar kelp.
Oh yeah. And the kelp is also going in with the water. It's going in right at the beginning of the maromi, right? Yeah. So in fact, we just made a bunch of batches because kelp season was last month, so we had a chance to oh yeah, you can get fresh kelp through June from them, right?
No, I think the season, it's a really short season, it's like six weeks. Kelp's so weird because it grows from the top down. What a weird process. And so they go from Oh my god, so money. And that's that's the rye, yeah.
That's so money, people. You gotta go get like for a product that is, and that's what yeah, actually, like your buddy at Chiba was like, wants to send an engineer to talk to you because you're allowed to go outside of the bounds of normal products. He doesn't do any of this stuff, yeah. So he can't, right? He says it's not part of his.
You do a very good job, actually, of calling out your suppliers with like pictures of the individual like stores, specialty stores you can go to. So buy from the website or buy from one of those stores, support those. Uh check out Nana's in uh Westerly and in Mystic from uh James Wayman, who's by the way, very well-known chef in the Mystic area. Love Mystic. And also, uh, the other partner, uh Debbie Michiko Florence is a well-known author of young adult uh like novels and books.
Check out Jasmine Tegucci Mochi Queen. Well, thanks, Dave. And keep it together, Keiko Carter. Are the two titles that I really kind of buzzed in on. Uh Audrey and Jenna were causing real problems for Keiko.
Real problems. You know what I mean? They think they're best friends. They come back from the summer, boyfriend problems, man. It just gets rough to be in middle school.
Don't I remember that? I hated it. Uh worst time of life, middle school for me. Uh well, thank you for coming on, Bob. I really appreciate it, Dave.
All right, cooking issues. Thank you so much.
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