Funky beans, face-tempeh, apricoboshi paste
KojiCon Liveblog Day 3
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.
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!
Here is the intro post icymi. Here is yesterday’s post should you wish to catch up.
Today I’m going to try sending the email at night when the blog is all done, but I’m still updating in real time on the the website so you can check there in the day if you prefer.
8:14: Sitting in my bed watching Chef Julian Otero of Mugaritz (a fine dining restaurant in Spain) talk about how they use mold-based ferments in their dishes. These guys are serving straight mold in ways I’ve never seen! Like, straight up moldy bread! She’s wearing penicillium roqueforti, which is…what bread always grows when it gets moldy. I’m not trying to be judgy, you know I like mold, I was just surprised! But then again, that mold is the same as the one in blue cheese, which I did love before I went vegan and do want to work with in my nut or bean cheeses one of these days…it’s actually kind of weird now that I think about it that intentionally blue-molded foods aren’t more of a thing by now?
9:12: Around 8:30 I heaved myself out of my bed and into the kitchen and decided to finally “harvest” my apricoboshi that I started in August of 2022!
These are not a koji ferment, but a Japanese pickle nonetheless, so I thought it would still fit the theme. Also one of the reasons I like KojiCon so much is it gets me off my ass and making some of the projects that linger on my list, and in this case actually finishing a project that’s been languishing in my fridge.
If you know me, you know I am the number one umeboshi stan forever, and especially use umeboshi paste constantly, for example when I want to replace anchovies (my vegan anchovy recipe here!). When I made these apricoboshi (inspired by very cool KojiCon stalwart, Marika Groen who will be presenting a “mystery talk” on the final day), I was thrilled with the prospect of making my own version of the condiment that has become so essential to my cooking over the years. But umeboshi-style pickles last forever, and pitting the cured apricots and chopping them and blending them to a paste would take, you know, fifteen minutes of my life, and it feels like it’s never quite the right time, and what if it wasn’t any good and then I had a bunch of salty apricot mush that I wanted to pitch but felt bad about? So I just let them hang in the fridge, reassuring myself that the aging would do them good. Maybe it did?
Anyway, today was the day buddies! While Chef Otero presented us with a video of a person with a psyllium husk tempeh sheet draped creepily over his face (!!), I pitted, chopped, blended, and tasted, and my paste was…not bad! But as I’d feared, it lacked the citric acid hit that the ume plum brings to the table. I had already sprinkled a little powdered citric acid into the brine sometime in 2023 in hopes of upping the oomph, but clearly that wasn’t the ticket. I was a bit bummed, the salty mush thing had kind of happened, I went to the bathroom and upon the toilet, no word of a lie, the answer appeared: sumac! Sumac has tons of citric and malic acid, that’s what makes it so good! And it’s red, which would blend nicely with the paste (I also lacked the red shiso that gives umeboshi paste its vibrant rosie look). I added 3/4 tsp to my 6 blended apricots, and honestly? It’s so great now! I’m so goddamned pleased!
10:01: I was doing some other work, reflecting on this morning’s presentation. I don’t really know what to think about it honestly. I don’t have any big thoughts about fine dining that other people don’t have more fully: it’s art, but it’s also exploitative, yadayada. I think it’s…neat to make a tempeh sheet out of psyllium husk that somehow evokes lambskin? I do! Forget it, I have nothing to say, I’m still thinking.
2:13: Just watched Soirée Leon’s presentation on Natto and Funky Beans. Basically bacillus subtilis ferments using beans. Leon is such a joy and so creative. Just really quick so I don’t forget before I dive back into work: she made these disks of dried fermented beans and seasonings and scraps of old ferments and things. She presses the mix into disks using a tortilla press, then dried them, and then used that dried mixture as bouillon powder. Cool as hell! I wish I was one of these people who is always up-cycling their food scraps in cool ways. I probably never will be, it takes so much organization of a type I don’t excel in, but it thrills me that people do it.
7:51: Yow, these days are getting away from me, man. I wanted to just mention one more thing I got really jazzed about while watching Soirée Leon and that is that she showed us some dawa dawa, which is a West African locust bean ferment I’ve been interested in trying out. It sounds like it could be another good ferment to have in my vegan umami arsenal. It’s made with the same bacteria as natto, and I just got spores to make that, so I was hoping that Leon would tell us more about how to use spores to make it. But she is a wild fermenter to the end, I should have known, she’s just harnessing the power of the b subtilis that’s all over beans to begin with as is traditionally done. I am too much of a wiener to do that, but I’m not really ashamed. I’m always interested in peoples’ different levels of risk tolerance in the fermentation world. Mine is pretty low, and I’m sure that’s not very shocking to you.
8:10: Just realized I said nothing about the 4:00 presentation, which was a lovely family of rice farmers from Arkansas who fell into growing the very first sake-grade rice in America back in the eighties I think? I listened while doing the dishes, and it seemed wholesome. I don’t really know much about sake, and my first Con I skipped the presentations about it, but…why would I ever skip the chance to hear people nerd about about something esoteric???
Hoping to set up a little suite of shio kojis tomorrow, stay tuned!
I am loving your KOJICON Liveblog! Keep it coming!
Well, great ideas can come to us, either on the toilet or while sleeping. Here's to great Ideas, coming however they may!