Vegan cheeses, spent brains
KojiCon Liveblog Day 7
9:34: Just eating my breakfast and tidying the kitchen up before the mid-conference check-in session at 10AM and I wanted to share this breakfast with you because it is one of the first spoils of KojiCon that I am reaping. Remember on Day One when I made sakekasu pickles and tofu? I wiped off a piece of the tofu, sliced it up, and ate it on toast with olive oil and a little fancy salt and chili flakes. Chef’s kiss, guys! The tofu is creamier and subtly flavourful. I feel like the go-to vegan thing to say would be “it’s cheese!” and in some ways yes, obviously I’m eating it in that way, but it’s also it’s own thing. Really delicious! A little bit alcoholic from the sake. If you like the little jars of pungent Chinese fermented tofu (I do!!) but can’t handle it alone on toast (I barely can!), this tastes like a much subtler, milder version of that. Also not quite as creamy, but I’ll let the rest of my tofu slices go a few more days in the kasudoku and see what happens.
5:44: Wow, man, it’s been an action-packed day. This morning I finally finished editing the twenty pages I’d meant to edit before KojiCon started, and I can’t even tell you how elated I was. This is the last twenty of a sixty-five page chunk of the book I’ve been working on since mid-November — August if you count more rudimentary drafts — and I didn’t even realize how excited I was to move onto the next part till this one was done. Done! Yesssss! So now I’m either going to dive right into the next chunk with my precious writing time and leave this liveblog behind, or feel entitled to a week off to fully koji out. We’ll see. Gotta wait for endorphins to settle and stuff.
Either way, I went to all three of today’s KojiCon sessions, one of which was especially mind-boggling and incredible, and I spent the afternoon fermenting, but I’m mostly going to tell you in photos because my brain is a wee bit spent. The presenter who simply brought the house down was Melissa Hoffman of SHO Farm in Vermont, who I’ve been following for a while now due to her beautiful vegan cheeses. Also! She runs a duck sanctuary on her farm! Lucky! Anyway, there’s not always that much explicitly vegan stuff at KojiCon, so I was really pumped to see Hoffman on the schedule this year. I want to tell you more about the presentation, but again, spent head, so have a look at her Instagram if you want a preview. Below is one of the cheeses of which I speak, likely made from hazelnuts that grow wild on the land she lives on.
I finished up my fava and soybean project that I mentioned yesterday while I watched Hoffman’s presentation, and it felt right because…BIG REVEAL…it’s a cheese!
As a reminder, I mixed up some fava and soybean flours, pureed butternut-squash/cabbage kraut, a little koji flour (rice koji I blasted in the blender), a little soymilk and some salt. I let that sit on my counter for about six hours, then in the fridge overnight. This morning it smelled really funky and good. I think the inclusion of lactofermented cabbage actually really gets at cheese funk, you know?
I added some coconut oil to the mixture, and just a little pinch of good ol’ nutritional yeast to bring it all together, and steamed it a la Martine van Haperen’s Steamed Rice Cheese recipe which I’ve been riffing on for years. It’s only in the last month or so that I’ve been working on these fermented bean flour variations, though, and I really like them! My goal is to make vegan cheeses that are higher in protein than the commercially available oil/starch messes, but also less expensive and agriculturally intensive than nuts (alas I don’t have hazelnuts growing wild on my fire escape).
This is not, of course, a “real” cheese that continues to age due to live cultures — the steam kills them. But the flavour remains and sometimes that’s all I need. I’ll be trying other things with bean milks though, maybe even this week.
6:13: Just checked in on the other project I got going today, seems to be doing well in the jungle environment I created for it. But I’m so tired and need to make dinner and stuff, so I’m going to just put a pic and do a reveal later on. Fingers crossed this one works! Hint: I finally broke out MY SPORES 🎸!
6:17: I should say that Rich Shih, founder of KojiCon, true lovely weirdo, also presented today, and talked about the many mothers of his fermented heart (paraphrasing only lightly) and it was really, really nice.