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About two weeks prior to all this I bought a big bulk sack of soybeans. It was all going to be for a big mapo-tofu-inspired popup event. Now that my event this week is cancelled it’s just me and the beans.
I’m fortunate to have bean wealth. A recent venture into the grocery store yielded only evidence of panic-buying. The shelves were void of legumes and a box of expired minute-rice caused an argument between two shoppers.
It’s looking like quarantine is going to last a while, indicated by 100% event cancellation rate this summer. Although work and financial things are looking questionable, I’m privileged enough to be able to enjoy my introversion through foraging, planting, recipe testing, reading, and tackling some of the more time-consuming fermentation projects I’ve been avoiding.
Building wooden koji boxes is one of those projects. All the wooden boxes I see for koji are beautiful pieces of traditional Japanese woodworking with finely crafted groove joints. Mine are put together with a hand saw and an overabundance of screws. Not pretty, but I don’t think my pet koji beans have a good interior design sense anyways so this new home will do.
I’m running a successful mold daycare now, as the super shoddy craftsmanship of the warped and bent boxes ironically grow koji better due to the extra aeration through all the loose cracks in the wood. The soybeans have never been so full of life now that they’ve been soaked, boiled, inoculated, and mixed with brine and cracked toasted wheat to ferment into shoyu.
I’m running a successful mold daycare now, as the super shoddy craftsmanship of the warped and bent boxes ironically grow koji better due to the extra aeration through all the loose cracks in the wood. The soybeans have never been so full of life now that they’ve been soaked, boiled, inoculated, and mixed with brine and cracked toasted wheat to ferment into shoyu.
I’m up to a 5-gallon bucket of fermented beans now which means I’m down to the dregs of the dry beans. Since I don’t have enough to make more shoyu, I’m diversifying my bean portfolio and making some 豆豉, also known as fermented black soybeans, also known as douchi.
Douchi was one of my first journeys into fermentation. I remember trying to recreate Chicken with Black Bean Sauce from a beaten-up overdue Martin Yan cookbook. I don’t think Martin’s slogan “If Yan can do it, you can too” took my naivety combined with small town Wisconsin sourcing into consideration. Subbing fermented black soybeans with a can of Goya black beans in salsa transformed Yan’s Chicken with Black Bean Sauce into Chicken with Refried Bean Sauce. Without access to pre-prepared douchi, I ended up ordering qi starter balls and wrapping bags of beans with heating pads just to make this damn chicken. Swap out the heating pad for a built out fermentation chamber and I’ve basically come full-circle, fermenting the same stuff and watching the same pre-recorded public TV Yan Can Cook reruns.
Between the shoyu and douchi, my entire main stock of non-perishable sustenance has essentially been either fermented or made into a seasoning.
If our entire food distribution system collapsed overnight I’d be pretty screwed. Unless…douchi becomes the currency of our post-apocalyptic economy, in which case I’m making a wise investment.
I’ve decided to diversify my fermented bean investment portfolio even further with Noma’s coffee shoyu. My shoyu bucket’s looking lonely in the corner and needs a friend anyway.
I haven’t done too much besides fermenting stuff and picking mushrooms. I’ve accomplished maybe 10x less the past two months than I would have under normal circumstances. External time pressure of a schedule with events and dates proves to be a much better stimulant than coffee, yet I’m still indulging a few cups every morning. Even so, it’s not enough. Drinking coffee just for the spent grounds is a little backward, but that coffee ground bucket isn’t going to fill itself.
The spent ground bucket is full and my day is laughably bean-centric. Wake up, make stimulant bean tea, a.k.a. coffee. Make my mapo tofu lunch of bean curd with fermented black soybean and broad bean doubanjiang. My project for later in the day is to peel individual black turtle beans for a black bean jiang. Extra bean peeling attention means healthier and happier bean koji. Go to bed, wake up to a humidistat alarm every 4 hours to make sure my koji beans have enough water. Up again, make more bean tea, write an article about beans.
The spent ground bucket is full and my day is laughably bean-centric. Wake up, make stimulant bean tea, a.k.a. coffee. Make my mapo tofu lunch of bean curd with fermented black soybean and broad bean doubanjiang. My project for later in the day is to peel individual black turtle beans for a black bean jiang. Extra bean peeling attention means healthier and happier bean koji. Go to bed, wake up to a humidistat alarm every 4 hours to make sure my koji beans have enough water. Up again, make more bean tea, write an article about beans.
Sources:
Noma Guide To Fermentation
Encyclopedia of Food Microbiology
Raymond Pettibon / Six Pack EP Art
left to right shelf: 1-gallon morel shoyu, 1-gallon coffee-sorghum-corn shoyu, masa-goji mirin, lacto-fermented mustard greens, black quince vinegar left to right floor: 1-gallon wild rice-turkey garum, 5-gallon dryad’s saddle shoyu, 5-gallon soybean-toasted spelt shoyu quarantine ferments not pictured: elderflower vinegar, elderflower liqueur, fermented serviceberry liqueur, black raspberry liqueur, black bean douchi, dandelion-rhubarb wine, citric sumac amazake, lots of rhubarb trials, more bean trials
Sources:
Noma Guide To Fermentation
Encyclopedia of Food Microbiology
Raymond Pettibon / Six Pack EP Art
