Starting Again

KojiCon Liveblog Days 5 & 6

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 about 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!

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Feb 24th, 9:11: I didn’t update yesterday, I needed a day off. To be honest, I was hoping this live-blogging attempt would beget fresh writing energy, would push me into the sort of hyper realm of my brain where words and ideas are careening around, crashing into one another, exploding into unique new territory delighting both my readers and myself. Not dissimilar, of course, to the way microbes and enzymes careen around, snacking on starches, breaking amino acid chains into delicious esters and aldehydes I guess? I think that’s how it works. That’s how I hoped it would work. But alas I also took on extra hours at work this month to do a big project. The project was supposed to be done by KojiCon — of course I factored that in! — but has now gone over schedule through no fault of my own, and the flow-y, ferment-y feeling I’d aimed to cultivate for these two weeks is simply not taking hold. Instead, I feel irritable and haggard a lot of the time, grinding through the day job stuff, and stirring up my ferments with a sort of rueful, duty-driven love. I want to say to them: you deserve more than this from me. You deserve my full flow state, babies. Instead, I have to give that up right now to LinkedIn copy and poster design. But you know what? The ferments understand. Or at least it seems they do. They have not, so far, refused to bubble.

9:34: I will say more about the actual events of KojiCon soon, just wanted to tell you that yesterday’s daily ferment was getting a sourdough starter going! It may seem weird to you that I fuck with mold but don’t even have a starter in my fridge. It’s weird to me, too, and a source of constant low-grade ambient shame. I had one, once, in 2012, named Cathy. She even moved with me from Toronto to Hamilton when my partner David did his Master’s degree there. But in Hamilton, Cathy passed away. I don’t remember quite how or why. Maybe I just didn’t have time amid moving and job hunting in a new city to make bread. But she turned gray and smelly and I had to throw her out.

Since, I’ve held back on making a new starter simply because, as ferments go, they’re kind of labour intensive at the beginning. Lactofermented vegetables? Set it and forget it! Shio koji? Give it a daily stir, it’s happy. A starter? Measure out the flour and the water, stir, stress about the temperature…Idk. It can feel like a lot. Plus I did try to start one at the height of the pandy like everybody and it failed. It turned into nail polish remover and never went back. I’ve been gun shy.

Reading my internet friend

Andrew Janjigian

's incredible bread blog,

Wordloaf

, though has reignited my desire to make bread. And while sourdough isn’t a koji ferment, you can make bread with koji in it, and you can make misos and shio kojis with bread in them. And I want to taste those things! Plus, though I’m irritable and haggard, I am still pressing on with my daily ferment goals, so I’m already stirring my shio koji friends each morning. Feeding some starter at the same time will just get added to that routine. I actually like the morning ritual of caring for my little guys once they’re up and running. Also I’m trying Andrew’s Quarantiny Starter 2.0 recipe, which doesn’t require a ton of flour, so if I fuck up I won’t feel like I wasted too much.

Not-Quite-So-Tiny Starter

So here she was yesterday on Day 1 of her life, my new as-yet-nameless starter. She bubbled overnight, I fed her this morning after I stirred my shio kojis, I’m drinking coffee and the words are careening a bit? Saturdays are good. We’re all doing all right.

My apartment has radiators, so it’s typically either 35 degrees C or cold. So I’m keeping the starter in my bread proofer for now in hopes of giving her some consistency in her young life.

12:00: I just finished watching Alice Jun of Hana Makgeolli present on nuruk, which is the starter culture for Makgeolli, a Korean rice wine. In Korea, wild fermented starters are used more, so you’re not getting pure aspergillus oryzae (the mold koji mostly refers to) but a whole mix of microbes that do the magic. I’ve never tried makgeolli, and the only one I can find in the liquor store here has aspartame, which I typically don’t like. I asked Jun if aspartame was commonly added, and she explained that it’s a rather beloved flavour in Korea in spite of the fact that it’s a known carcinogen. So now that I know it’s actually a legit type that Korean people drink, maybe I’ll go buy some later. David Zilber once said “Humans can have a little poison, for a treat.” That stays with me.

While I watched Jun’s presentation, I mixed up today’s ferment. I’m only going to tell you what I did, not what it’s going to turn into, so I can do a Big Reveal tomorrow. What I did was I stirred up some fava and soybean flours, some pureed butternut-squash/cabbage kraut, a little koji flour (just rice koji I blasted in the blender), a little soymilk and some salt. I'll let it sit overnight. What will happen?? Watch this space! Are you pumped?? Let’s get pumped!

12:18: After I wrote “let’s get pumped!” up there, I realized I was feeling a little sad because it feels like this year people aren’t quite as pumped at KojiCon as they have been in year’s past. Like, there’s not as many posts in the Slack, there’s less people showing up to watch the presentations live. I know there’s over 500 people registered…where are they all? It could just be that after four years of nerding out, people are just less hyper about it. I also know that a lot of my KojiCon friends hang out in the Crock of Time discord throughout the year, so they probably aren’t fiending for mold chat as hard as I am at KojiCon time. I have a brain that can really only go super hard on one thing at once, so when it’s not KojiCon, I try to keep fermenting relatively chill, otherwise I’d never work on my novel. That’s why I don’t hang out in the discord. If I did, I might get over-inspired. This may sound really silly to some, but believe me, I have learned the hard way many times that I am who I am. Ol’ one-thing-at-a-time-Tausch.

It also maybe seems like people are simply busier in their normal lives, just on the whole. I am so lucky to have this work-from-home email job so I can watch KojiCon sessions whenever even if I’m multitasking with something else. But not everyone can do that. Anyway! That being said, I think the conference remains pretty stellar.

Okay, I wanted to briefly tell you about sessions I’ve so far said nothing about:

• Yesterday morning there was a panel with absolute legends Mara King, Maya Hey, and David Zilber, and Lily Wen of the Rukai people, who are one of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. The panel was about “Bridging Tradition and Technology.” I have to tell you I have such a hard time distilling this kind of heady, philosophical stuff into quick summary…I tend to need years to figure out what I think about things and to speak opinions out loud, which is why I write novels and am eternally confounded by twitter. There was some good talk about learning from indigenous knowledge, crediting indigenous knowledge, and the tendency of science to maybe depend on — and inevitably cede to — the chaos of place-based and people-based nuance in spite of its best efforts to avoid such messes. I liked listening to this a lot.

• This morning’s presentation was from Tiffany Lay and Zo Lin of Weed Day, which is a kind of urban foraging/art collective in Taipei. Cool, right? The presentation was a bit chaotic and I was super tired because it was 8AM and I’d stayed up late watching movies and doing some much-needed zoning out, but I enjoyed tidying the kitchen and doing the above-mentioned care for my fermies-in-progress while these gals told me about homemade shampoo made from foraged soap berries and whatnot.

Lay and Lin showing us their lactofermented clothing dye made from a foraged root.

3:23: Breaking news, Andrew Janjigian dm’d me to tell me he just put a new and improved sourdough starter recipe up for his testing group for his upcoming book Breaducation. I was planning to join the testing group anyway if I could get this starter off the ground. But since he needs testers for a starter, I’m joining now! Meant to be! I feel bad to chuck what I’ve done so far, but it’s really only a couple of tablespoons of flour, and Andrew says the new recipe is more foolproof, better flavour, more vigorous — he’s got me sold. I can’t share that one on here obviously, but I’ll show you a picture once I’ve made it.

The KojiCon slack had a bit of action this aft — some koji pals have reported on:

• chanterelle miso

• fava and quinoa soy sauce

• fermented ginger soda

• masa harina and cocoa amazake

• oat koji used in shio koji, amazake, and toasted and ground for bread

• pizza miso (!!)

• black bean miso with chipotles, onions, tomatoes, and garlic; used in posole

INJECT IT STRAIGHT INTO MY VEINS, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?

3:37: There’s no more sessions today, and I doubt I’ll ferment anything further, so I’m sending this now and heading for Dollarama to source some vessels for tempeh containment, bye!