David Zilber, amazake ice cream, spores
KojiCon Liveblog Day 2
Hi! This post is part of a series that pays homage to two of my favourite things: KojiCon and Megan Boyle’s Liveblog. If I don’t burn out, it’ll be daily till March 3rd.
Here is the intro post icymi. Here is yesterday’s post should you wish to catch up.
So far, I’m sending the email in the morning, and you can check the website for further updates during the day. That may change.
If you don’t want to receive daily emails about mold-based ferments for two weeks (??) you can unsubscribe to just these emails in your settings by clicking on The World According To Tausch and un-clicking KojiCon Liveblog 2024. I won’t be offended, both mold and barrages of largely unedited sentences can be polarizing. Okay!
9:50: Reporting to you live from Creed’s Coffee Bar in Toronto where I co-write with my pal Fiona most Tuesday mornings. We chose Creed’s because it has amazingly high ceilings and decent-seeming ventilation which calms my covid-cautious heart. But it’s a funny place because it’s also a fancy dry-cleaner that’s been a Toronto institution since 1921 apparently?
My first job out of university was doing admin and communications at a very small non-profit and one of the Creeds (it’s a real family) was on the Board. I sat at the reception desk, and the first time I met this particular Creed, she strode into the office in a rich woman’s sweat suit, barely looked at me, and said, “Hi, do you have any cheese?” I was impressed. “This is how a rich person acts,” I thought to myself. I don’t think I was wrong.
Anyway! Waiting, for another famous Torontonian to kick off KojiCon Day 2 — David Zilber himself! I’m pumped!
10:02: Resisting the urge to be like “Toronto, represent!” in the YouTube chat as David Zilber is introduced. I am pretty not into any kind of patriotism, you know? But still, I feel weirdly proud that this master fermenter is from the same city as me? And not only that, but the same suburb, haha!
10:11: Zilber is talking today about his recent trip to Japan through the Hakko Lab fermentation tour series. It’s interesting…but I have to say I never really get what he’s on about.
10:20: Okay, I get what he’s on about this time!
11:02: Here’s me asking one of my typically weenie questions about the possibilities of death and illness at the hands of mold, lolll.
Zilber was talking about how a few hundred years back, when Japanese koji makers were breeding and selecting strains for their various flavour-making abilities, they tested them by making products like miso and so on, rather than just growing on a petri dish and lab testing or something. Which is cool! But, like, seems dangerous? His answer was lengthy and I’ll go back to it, but basically sounds like yeah, probably some people got sick over time ingesting mycotoxins. But he doesn’t think there’s many aspergilli who could kill you in one shot. Anyway, this is why we order these carefully bred and protected spores from Japan even though it def seems more rock n’ roll to cultivate my own spores as some people do.
11:18: Yow, Zilber is still going, which is amazing, but I had to leave the stream because I’m STILL not done editing those twenty pages of novel, and I really want to get there so I can spend more time getting weird in the kitchen in the coming days. I’m gonna let his talk tumble around in my brain for a bit and say more about it later. It was cool, man. He’s cool.
1:22: MY SPORES CAME!
1:38: Slid in late to Leslie Merinoff’s presentation, but she was just talking about honeynut squash amazake ice cream when I did, and I got so excited because I had made strawberry amazake ice cream in the summer, which was so good and an amazing texture for vegan ice cream. Amazake is a very lightly alcoholic, sweet koji-rice beverage in case you’re not familiar. It’s super easy to make once you have rice koji, and it’s delicious.
I think I already bragged about that a little in this newsletter, but here’s a pic anyway. It stayed so beautifully creamy in the freezer for a long time prob because of the alcohol, and it needed no extra sugar beyond what was produced by the koji enzymes working on the rice starch and the strawberries themselves.
4:56: Hoo-wee, rough day for live-blogging I’m afraid. I had so much in my head I wanted to share with you and so many emails I had to write for work instead. But! I did listen to the guys of Brooklyn Kura Sake’s talk while I did some data entry type stuff, and it was lovely and there was a big shout-out to sake kasu which I used yesterday to make my pickles, so I got excited about that. I was also reminded that people use it for skin care a lot, so maybe I’ll do a face mask with some of my remaining kasu, why not?
8:30: I have more respect than ever for Megan Boyle who liveblogs so much of the day in spite of her job that is way more challenging than mine. It’s hard, man! I’m tired now! I’m scared if I’m too tired my sentences will be garbage and you’ll all think I’m terrible and leave me forever! But I’ve poured myself a little glass of nice sake which I bought for a KojiCon treat and I’m going to just tell you a couple more things:
Very nice presentation from Momoko Nakamura at 7:00 that I watched while I cooked (big-ass beans in a garlic wine sauce (umeboshi and kelp assist) with kale and rice) about the 72 micro seasons in Japanese culture. Kind of mind-blowing actually, like if you think about seasons as only five days in length, and pay attention to them as such, how does everything change? A lot I bet! She has a prompt journal to help notice things like this that I think she’s going to share in the slack maybe? I missed what exactly she said. I’ll probably be too tired to journal the micro seasons in this year of our lord, 2024, but I like the thought of it.
I said I’d say more about the Zilber talk. Well. It was sort of about the push-pull of tech and artisanal processes and how when he went to Japan he visited these incredibly cool old school mirin and sake and shoyu breweries, but also went deeper into the history of how this artisanal koji knowledge spawned biotechnical innovations in Japan post World War Two. How chemically-made soy sauce was developed that could utilize waste to make this essential flavouring, and it was cheap and abundant, and definitely not as good as artisanal soy sauce, but still there and accessible and made the wide proliferation of soy sauce possible. I feel like I need to think it through more, and I’m looking forward to a panel later this week with Zilber and Maya Hay and some other folks that’ll get more into the food tech push-pull that I actually think about all the time. It’s a big topic of discussion when it comes to vegan cheese and meats and precision fermentation and ALL THAT JAZZ. I’m sorry if I’m being very vague and hazy here, that’s a bit how I feel, but I enjoyed the talk, it lit me up and made me want to think more.
I didn’t start any ferments today, I’m feeling bummed about that, I had wanted to do a little something every day of the Con. But it’s all right, still getting my sea legs. Now that my spores are here I can really think through how I want to use the days ahead, what I want to grow mold on, yes yes!
Except! It’s possible my spores arrived yesterday and sat in the mailbox in my vestibule for over 24 hours, and if the sun is shining and the heat is on it can get SUPER hot in there and I’m nervous my spores will be dead! So please. Prayers up for my spores. Good night!