KojiCon Liveblog Day 1

February 19th 2024

Feb 19, 2024

10:20: Just making some oatmeal while I watch the KojiCon kick-off session. It’s a holiday Monday here, “Family Day.” It was made up I think because we had no February holiday? Grateful for it tbh. Eric from the Yellow Farmhouse is talking right now. He’s one of the educators there and hosts a bunch of the sessions each year. He’s so kind and curious and sweet, and I feel like last year people started expressing how much they love him, which I was glad about because he rules. Right now he’s talking about “microbial terroir.” ❤️

10:28: eating my oats and stressing about how I’m gonna structure this thing, when I should send the emails out, if I should send the emails out. Idk. Also stressed because I had promised myself a couple of weeks ago that I couldn’t liveblog KojiCon unless I edited sixty pages of my novel into readable coherence, and I still have twenty pages to go. So. Idk if I can ferment anything today even though I wanted to. I had ordered some fresh spores a few weeks ago, but they haven’t arrived yet. But I have three pounds of rice koji in my freezer (if you’re in Toronto, you can get it at Sanko or the Izumi distillery). We’ll see!

10:35: I guess I feel like I’m not really “live-blogging” if I don’t publish pretty early each day and just update in real time? And you can check the website if you want to see updates? But I don’t really know! I think I’ll send this now. Let’s try it lol. I’m really leaning on Megan Boyle’s style of interrogating the rules of the liveblog within the liveblog, which is a thing I like about hers, so…I’ll do it too! Homage!

Also don’t worry, I won’t do an update every eight minutes typically. Just trying get a thing chugging along, you know?

10:39: Noticed I was absolutely not listening to the kick-off session due to spiralling about the liveblog lol. Now Eleni Michael is talking about wild ferments in India and I’m missing it!

Okay. Kinks to work out. It’s fine!

11:15: Okay, gonna work on my novel now, but I decided I’m going to defrost some sakekasu so it’s ready to work with when the next KojiCon session happens at 3pm with Peter Barrett. I’ll tell you more about sakekasu later though, gotta go edit sea creature dialogue!

2:49: I worked on my novel till, like, 1pm. I didn’t get all 20 pages fully coherent yet, but they’re getting there. I’ll work on them more later on, but now I’m getting ready for the Peter Barrett sesh by making a tea and pulling together my kasuzuke ingredients. During KojiCon, what I like to do when I’m able to is use the time I spend watching the sessions also making a ferment, so that I get extra bang for my buck, you know? But because I don’t have much time today, I’m going to do kasuzuke because it’s very easy. Zuke is the overall word for pickle in Japanese, and these guys are made with the aforementioned sakekasu. Basically it’s the waste product of sake production, the leftover mash of koji rice and yeast and stuff once the clear sake has been pressed out. As far as I understand it. If your town has a sake distillery, chances are you can get some. I got this kilogram of it during last year’s Con for ten bucks. That being said, it’s a bit old, and I hope it still “works.” How it “works” is it’s packed full of enzymes from the koji, and the enzymes chop up proteins and create new flavours. Man, I don’t feel cut out for explaining the science in this here liveblog, but it’s something along those lines.

While Peter Barrett tells us what he’s going to tell us, I’m going to make the pickling medium — kasudoko — from this recipe. I used it last year to make pickled radishes, carrots, cukes, eggplant, and tofu and they turned out rad. Also this lady is incredible.

3:07: Peter Barrett so far is giving us a very cool little slideshow of minimalist art and now he’s getting into how his love of that kind of work (Rothko, Agnes Martin, etc) resonates with his flow in the kitchen and THIS IS THE KIND OF NERDERY I LIVE FOR. He also just talked about “Inspiration from limitation” which is very similar to my fave phrase and writing ethos “liberating constraints.” Everyone in the chat seems super into it, art grads are revealing themselves, it’s nice-nice, oh oh, got that kojicon fever already. Okay, gonna make my kasudoko now!

3:18: Now he’s talking about growing koji on some sourdough rye bread that

Andrew Janjigian

had made (I like how so many neat food people know one another) and made a rye-bread koji infused olive oil, and that’s it. I’m going to bed. Jk. I’m pressing on with my pickles. I don’t mean to actually liveblog the whole presentation but…maybe I just wanted to give you a little taste of what this thing is all about? Like, it’s weird and fun guys. He puts his own homemade stale bread miso into his fresh loaves of bread. You know what I’m saying?

3:24: Okay. Mashing some sake into these sake lees, and it smells so good.

3:54: Peter Barrett’s ideas were super good, love it, gotta do something with bread this week, have been thinking about it for a long time. Meanwhile, I boiled some tofu slabs in salted water and salted some beautiful purple daikons I got at the farmer’s market to get them ready for pickling. I’m pressing the daikon in my tofu press for an hour or two before I bury everything in the kasudoko and forget about it for a few days.

4:10: I’m going back to my novel for a little bit. Above at 3:07 I said “Oh oh, got that kojicon fever already,” and what I mean by that is this thing tends to take over my entire life and brain once I get into a groove. Like, I fall asleep thinking about ferment ideas, I wake up thinking of same, I chat with my nerd pals in the slack community till late at night, I get woolly and wild. It’s an example of what we call hyperfocus in ADHD land (where I live) and it’s an extremely pleasant state of affairs in many ways, but can lead to the exclusion of, you know, everything else. So I’m trying to go slow, get this novel work done first (which I can get hyperfocused on, too, of course), stay out of the slack for the moment, and try to keep my brain from melding entirely with molds until at least a few days in. Wish me luck lol.

5:52: More novel in the can, and I’ve buried the radishes and tofu in the kasudoku.