Envy, magic, vegetable powders
KojiCon Liveblog Day 4
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.
I’ll send these by email when the blog is done for the day, but I’m updating in real time on the website so you can check there if you just can’t wait.
If you don’t want to receive daily emails mold-based ferments for the next week (??) 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!
8:56: Just finished watching Ozzy Hsieh’s presentation on Taiwanese sun fermented soy sauce (you can buy it here if you want to try; I’m scared to because what if then I can never go back to five dollar soy sauce??) He’s a very cool dude who’s been bringing this soy sauce method back, making it cool in Taiwan. He also tours around giving vegetarian dinners with all sorts of artisans through his org Future Dining Table. He’s super sweet and offered to host any of us and give us a proper sauce tasting should we ever visit. I want to! I would need to have a whole bottle of Ativan for a flight that long, but it’d probably be worth it. Taiwan looks amazing, I need to try stinky tofu before I die! But when?? I had forgotten this element of KojiCon that dogs me every time: I end up getting so envious of the presenters, and some of the attendees, too, who have risked it all and lead these wild fermented lives (iykyk, but in case you don’t, that was a shout-out to
who wrote a book of the same name).
Above is a pic of some of the big players of the fermentation world visiting Ozzy at his soy sauce brewery last year: Rich Shih, Mara King, Pao Liu, and of course the legendary Sandor Katz. I followed their tour of Taiwan on Insta with major interest, and I love this for them, and I know that the amount of travel they do and the level of hustle they must have to sustain themselves in the precarious lives of entrepreneurship, hospitality, course-giving, etc. are things I am simply not cut out for, otherwise I’d probably do them. But I find myself just aching with envy of their seemingly wild and free lives this morning; the familiar mid-KojiCon I shoulda been a fermenting nomad malaise. I’ll get over it. I love sitting in my cosy room and writing my lil book and I love the security of my office job pay cheque! Speaking of, off to write a million emails, see you later!
12:22: After I published the above, I had a nice little chat on Substack Notes with Julia Skinner, and discovered that she has a new book available for pre-order called The Fermentation Oracle about the magic of fermentation. Looks rad!
For my lunch break I took a little walk and while I was out, I was thinking about this idea of fermentation as magic, and I was thinking about how one of the themes of the novel I’m working on seems to be troubling the binary between magic and science, which may sound like it’s going to be a creepy anti-vaxxer book, but I ASSURE you that’s not what I mean! I mean more just, like. Sure, it’s just science, but when you pay attention to all the wild creatures around us and the fucked up things they can do and places they can thrive and stuff…Fermentation and microbes are a good example. They’re “simply” a scientific fact, but also the idea that when certain ones consume certain types of human food, the microbes produce waste products that taste more delicious and make things more digestible for humans, and no one ever asked them to do that, they just do? Like, it’s also magic?
And it made me think of this lecture I saw about a decade or so ago at a conference on animals that I still think about, by this prof Dr. Myra J. Hird who at the time was really into the idea of human life being dependent on the non-reciprocated gifts bacteria give us and, like, how they don’t have to. I feel like I never fully understood it, but something about it stuck with me. The presentation was called “Big Like Us,” which also stuck with me, in reference to the fact that sometimes when we talk about animals, we privilege the mammals and birds and reptiles, not the teeny tiny guys. Anyway! I felt excited as I thought about all this walking along, but not sure if it translates very well as a written ramble. That’s live-blogging, baby! I love to say “Baby!” these days.
6:20: At 1pm and 5pm there were two presentations by lovely Spanish academics, Curro Polo and Alejandra Touceda respectively. I have to go back and watch Polo’s again, it was pretty philosophical and I was trying to also flail away at a project in Canva while I listened, and my design skills suck, so I missed the nuances. I do know there was some breaking down of croissants into croissant syrup using koji and it tasted like a pure distillation of croissant flavours, and he also showed a short art video about that.
Touceda is doing a big amazake project, and she tried out some other non-koji bacteria to make amazake with that yielded buttery, cheesy flavours in the rice drink. I’ll tell you, that perked up my sleepy brain. “Sounds like big news for vegans!” I nerdily typed in the chat, and she was like “I think so.” So. Let’s stay tuned for it.
While I watched Touceda’s presentation, I set up my ferments of the day, which I’m very jazzed about actually! These are three little shio kojis that have some freeze-dried vegetable powders added: mushroom, tomato, and black olive. They smell good already! We'll see how they turn out.
I got super into the intensity of freeze-dried fruit during Cookie Week in December and the company I ordered from had a bunch of veggies available, too. So I’ve been thinking about trying this out since then. Excited to finally have done it! I just used store-bought rice koji for these that I got at Sanko, a Japanese shop here in Toronto. If you use pre-made koji, shio koji is a total cinch to make — just water, salt, rice koji, and any flavourings you might want to add. Boom. Let it sit around for a week or so while the enzymes in the koji do their thing, stir every day. I used about three parts water to koji because I like it saucy, but lots of people do 1 to 1. My fermentation pal Shaun (also a chef) is just telling me in the KojiCon Slack this second about how I’ll get more acidic flavours with more water because there’s more room for lactobacilli to get down. I’m into it! I love you microbes!
8:34: I was going to rewatch Polo’s presentation and tell you more about that while I enjoyed vegan sushi delivery like a decadent little b but then there was an Uber eats debacle and I’m on the bus bringing home Chinese dumplings and I’m done now, bye!
