KojiCon LiveBlog 2024
Let's go!
KojiCon starts today! In case by some miracle you don’t already know, KojiCon is a two-week online fermentation conference presented by Rich Shih and The Yellow Farmhouse. It happens every year around this time. I missed the first one, which I remain bummed about, but caught the rest, and it's always a mind-blowing delight.
And what the hell is koji? I’m so glad you asked! Koji is the Japanese catch-all term for certain strains of aspergillus molds — most often aspergillus oryzae — as well as grains and beans with said molds grown upon them (referred to herein as “rice koji,” “soybean koji,” etc. for ease).
And why on god’s green earth would one build a whole “Con” around moldy grains? Well, ever heard of soy sauce? The starter culture is soybean koji! Ever heard of miso? The starter culture is (often) rice koji! Sake? Koji! Gochujang and doenjang? Traditionally, a combination of wild yeasts, bacteria, and molds including aspergilli; commercially? Koji!
As mentioned, koji is the Japanese word for this mold, and it was in Japan that it was sort of worked on and codified and bred to perform certain duties. One can order specific strains of koji spores from Japan, where they are safely grown and packaged for home use. However, aspergillus molds are all around us, and have been used in fermentation across Asia forever. In China, it’s more often referred to as qu. Aspergillus for sure plays a role in some of the wild-cultured West African ferments like dawa dawa and ogiri as well. There is way more to the story, and I won’t be covering that here right now. If you want to know more, check out KojiCon! And so many books I will make a list of if I have time!
For the sake of ease, I’ll probably mostly refer to this mold herein as koji, and I definitely will be using the professionally grown stuff — propagating your own spores can lead to all kinds of trouble I don’t have time or additional lives for. But please know that I know there’s a whole world of aspergillus use out there.
More recently, koji made its way into fine dining spheres, probably most famously at Copenhagen’s Noma. There, they used it to do cool shit with local ingredients, which became a building block of what’s now known as the New Nordic cuisine. Noma, of course, is notoriously garbage to work at, they don’t pay half their staff, etc etc, but they did do some neat things with squash and peas and mushrooms? Whatever! Again, no comprehensive, hard hitting historiography here, just know that when then-fermentation director, Toronto’s own David Zilber dropped the Noma Guide to Fermentation, working with koji became a real thing among food nerds; spawned a whole new generation of koji bros (am I a koji bro?? I think yes) and led to people doing all kinds of crazy-ass shit with the mold, from growing it on top of meats a la Jeremy Umansky, to fellow KojiCon stan Cory Hughart making miso out of a friend’s wedding cake and gifting it to them a year later (apparently it was good!)
So why do I care about koji so much that I attend a two week conference about it every year? In short, it’s the ticket to vegan flavour town. In my humble opinion, it’s really pretty hard to have a super-satisfying vegan diet without Koji-powered ferments bringing the umami and the funk. Yes, you can just buy soy sauce and miso, and mostly I do. But I love to do a few big fermentation projects per year, and I love to know how things work, and I love to commune with other weird nerds, and it’s frankly just so goddamn fun to know about.
Every year I think “I’m gonna pitch a big story on KojiCon and interview everybody and do a real oral history and honour the thing like I did with Vegan Cheese Summer Camp back in 2021. But between my novel and my day job and my need to spend a bit of time each day at the end of February watching Love Is Blind in a supine position, I just never get around to it. Maybe one day I will!
But this year I thought what I’ll attempt instead is to pay homage to two of my very favourite things at once: KojiCon and Megan Boyle’s liveblog (which I’ve mentioned here a million times, read it, live it, love it). I’ve never attempted live-blogging, but Boyle says she likes when people try it, and I’m going to. I may peter out, it’s a pretty busy time, but I’m hopeful that live-blogging KojiCon will be fun; will help me to remember things about it better; will beget more actual ferments from my kitchen that I will then describe to you, dear reader, with glee; etc? We’ll see! I’m reserving the right to ditch at any time.
Anyway, KojiCon kicks off in three minutes, so I shoving this intro out under the wire, completely unedited, which is completely unlike me, but whatever, this is the year, baby, I want to publicly talk about molds! Till I can’t any more!
Thank you forever for reading, see you again real soon!