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Adventures with Koji


deangold

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Judging by the number of YouTube vids on the subject, I am late to the shiokoji bandwagon. WHole I have yet to try and make my own koji {anyone with a dehydrator that holds a reliable 84 degrees and not using it?} I bought some koji rice on Amazon. Koji is rice that has been innoculated with aspergillus oryzae and allowed to grow for a few days until the rice is quite visibly moldy and in fairly large pieces that crumble back to individual grains easily. 

To make shiokoji {salt koji} you break up the koji into individual grains, add a bunch of salt and enough water to cover, then you let it sit on your counter for 1 to 2 weeks and stir it every day. The salt should be 10 to 30% by weight. I used 25 grams sea salt to 100 grams koji. I put it in a pint Ball jar and covered it loosely with a top.  I also tasted as it went from tasting like rice with salt, to very salty rice, to a bit tangy, to winey, to almost bready. The rice is still distinct but is wet and very soft.

Here is a YouTube video from one of my favorite cooking video chanels, Just One Cookbook

So far, I have used it in my still fermenting grainy mustard {along with brine from lacto-fermented sauerkraut, and giardinara plus a splash or two of sherry wine vinegar and some Braggs vinegar,}  I put some in the whey from making lebne and left it on the counter overnight and then used it in soup the next day, added it to quick Japanese pickles {turnip and radish greens, shredded kelp, sesame oil, tamari}

Tonight I have a vacuum bag sealed with local skirt steak and about 1/3 cup of shio koji. I am hoping the vecumn bag helps infuse the meat with the shiokoji flavor. I am starting with a 2 hour marination and we will grill it on an indoor Iwatani grill over a butane burner. Our new landlords do not allow open flame on the balcony {may be a Fairfax county thing!} I will post a reply to describe it when we have cooked it. I should have left one of the three pieces out of the shio koji to get a comparison test.

By the way, the Iwatani is so much fun. It is as close to grilling over charcoal without the charcoal.  

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The steak wound up marinating for more like 4 hours. I think I used too much shiokoji and next time I will marinate it overnight using half the amount, then rinse off the shiokoji and put on a rack in the fridge to dry the outside for better browning.

This is the second skirt steak I've cooked from the same batch. This one was frozen and shiokoji marinated. It turned out significanly fattier tasting/mouthfeel.

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I bought my second batch of koji rice. This time the grains are separate and the mold is finer and more powdery. I believe this means the rice was stirred more during the incubation time. In any case, the koji rice has a more luxurious, softer texture and the grains were individual so I did not need to break up the dried rice like with the last brand. My limited intuition says this is going to be a good batch. 

From my chicken stock project, I have 4 breasts. 2 I am marinating in shio koji on the counter {2 or 3 hours total depending on when we decide to eat.} I took some of the koji rice and powdered it in my spice grinder. I then coated 2 of the breasts in the koji powder and put them on a rack in the fridge. I will turn them each day and see what happens. I am shooting for 3 days and then will pan fry them in cast iron or carbon steel. 

Having made too much powder, I decided to try a batch of shio koji made with the powder and salt. I used about 27 or 28% salt and covered the koji rice powder & salt mixture in water. I have no idea of this will work or how long it will take. I suspect that if I didn't kill most of the koji mold by grinding it, it will ferment faster. As a control, I took another batch and used about the same salt % but left the rice whole as usual. The rice takes a week to two weeks to ferment. 

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The first half of the experiment was a rousing success. 3 hours of shio koji marination .Just before cooking, I sprinkled toasted black cumin seed and cracked black pepper on. The chicken breasts were boneless breasts from the Amish chicken from Huntsman Game. 

I then sauteed in carbon steel without washing the shio koji off. The shio koji itself scorched and stuck to the pan but the chicken itself was super. The benefit was that the char flavor transferred tot eh chicken and the breasts themselves did not scorch. I drizzled some golden sesame oil on as the breasts cooked. Salt and pepper applied at the table. 

A little sweet funk and amazing tender-firm texture. The flavor was more apparent at the thin end of the breast so next time I plan on splitting the breast horizontally to get two evenly thick pieces {1 will be smaller than the other. And with 4 pieces I can experiment on washing vs not washing the shio koji rice off.

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We took the other [air of the chicken brests and buried them in powdered koji rice {In a spice grinder} and put htem on a rack on a sheet pan in the fridge for 4 days. I should have turned them daily but I forgot. When it came time to cook, I washed off the koji rice powder. The breasts had lost about 25% of their size by eyeball. Cooked them to 148 degrees in black carbon steel. 

They had an amazing texture, but hard to describe. There was no sense of the fibers in the breast, just a smooth texture throughout; softer than ordinary chicken breast without being mushy or unpleasantly soft. The flavor has a slight sweet edge but less than with shiokoji. The funk was there but again, more integrated. This was seriously good chicken breast. I don't think a day or two more would have been ill advised. 

Covering with koji rice powder is a good technique if you are not in a hurry.

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Tonight I am starting a shio koji chicken thigh test. We will marinate the skin-on boneless thigh for three different times: 24 hours, 12 hours, 3 hours. I should leave one unmarinated for a control. I think I packed them 5 or 6 to the freezer bag so I should have plenty to play with. 

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The test came out deliciously.  I put 2 chicken thighs to marinade in Shiokoji last night right after dinner. This morning, at the crack of dawn aka 10am I put one thigh on. I also took the overnight thighs and added a bit more shio koji which dilutes the value of the trial. Then at about 4.00 I put the last two thigs on with shiokoji.  Each got marinated in a zip lock bag with the air squeezed out. I used about 1.5 tablespoons of shio koji per thigh. I marinated everything in the fridge until about 2 hours before dinner. I scrapes most of the rice off the thighs before grilling them on flat cast iron. They did scorch black but even the black parts and the very crispy skin were delicious. All the chicken was cooked to 155/160. 

The somewhere between three and four hour and the overnight chicken was clearly the best.

The 3 hour had more of a regular chicken texture and a very nice koji sweetness. really outstanding.

The overnight chicken has a smoother texture: a bit cured and very toothy. Not at all mushy. The flavors were more complex but the thigh was less juicy. The drawback was its slight saltiness. What is funny is we had a wasabi, mustard, sesame oil, vinegar, mirin & soy dip that by itself is salty; which the 24 hour chicken it seemed to counteract the saltiness of the thigh and made it really good. If you do the 24 hour koji, your chicken will need a sauce so I am going to revisit this on our next trial: 24 hours, then serve with salsa verde, a tomato based sauce and the wasabi/soy.}  

Not much is being said about the thigh that wound up being marinated for 8 or 9 hours. That is because it was bland and had no discernable koji character. So it seems that 3 or 4 hours is great, then the chicken goes bland, then at 24 hours you get something really great as well. 

Next time I do thighs, I am going to do the following:

24 hours with only one dose of koji / 4 hours / control with just salt & pepper
Rinse or clean the thighs with a wet towel to remove more of the rice residue from the shiokoji
Serve with at least 3 dipping sauces as above.
Use the raised side of the griddle to minimize the contact surface area between the shiokoji and the cast iron, & use a lower heat. 

We just took out a skirt steak and are going to do a trial with that. I expect to do that Sunday night. 

 

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My first batch of koji rice was this
 

The second koji rice is this 

I can't read Kanji and Google picture translate only got me so far. In any case, the first batch was dry and in crumbly chunks. The second individual grains. The second seems to be fermenting longer and with a deeper flavor. And to recap, I have mostly made shio koji with one foray into ground koji rice from the second bag. I had a bit of this left over and I decided to shio koji it as well as make another batch of regular shio koji. Both were made with 5% salt and enough water to cover. You need to add more water if the rice absorbs all the water. I have since read a source that calls for 5 parts water, 4 parts rice, 1 part salt which is more water and less salt that I currently use. 

So tonight's trial is skirt steak. We have a well marbled skirt steak from Shenandoah Beef Coop which is grass fed and hen finished on a whole plant diet with silage, grain, and roughage like ground up corn stalks etc. I cut the skirt stek into 4 pieces and each one got a different marination.

30 hour shio koji made from whole rice grain {both our favorite}

30 hour shio koji made from the ground koji rice {too funky, last place for both of us}

2.5 hour shio koji made from whole rice grain {Kay's #2, my #3}

2.5 hour shio koji made from the ground koji rice {My #2, Kay's #3}

I first rinsed and then cooked them all on the cast iron raised grill which really made the scorching and sticking problems I had with the black carbon steel go away. 

The best was clearly the 30 hour whole grain. It has a distinctly funky flavor, a slight sweetness {a byproduct of the enzymatic changes koji induces in proteins} and the smooth texture I am now associating with long shio koji marination. 

Next, for me, was the 2.5 hour with the ground rice, although Kay liked the 2.5 hour whole grain shio koji better. In any case, the ground rice shio made for an overly funky, softer texture in the 30 hour marination. But to keep it in perspective, it was still a nice piece of meat and we happily finished it. It's just the others were better. 

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@deangold I discovered shiokoji when I discovered Miyoko's products. I was making a mushroom pate for Thanksgiving, and wanted it to be vegan for my SIL. I was thrilled to find the cream cheese and butter products from Miyoko were very tasty. And that I also was able to eat them, due to no soy!  I just started to look on all the options on Amazon, so glad to know what works and does not work for you. I may be asking for more detailed instructions if I try to replicate some of your efforts 😁

 

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Two trials running....

Shio Koji with 5-4-1 and 5-4-2 proportions: 5 parts water, 4 parts Koji rice, 1 or 2 parts salt. This trial inspired by Serious Eats. 

 

Shenandoah Beef Coop Tri Tip {this beef is available at Organic Butcher in McLean}

Tomorrow we are going to have a few cubes of trim from the tri tip. It is in shiokoji made from powdered koji rice

Tuesday or Wednesday we will have a three way trial between tri tip marinated in:

Koji Rice powder mixed into water to form a loose paste {h/t 2 guys and a cooler YouTube channel}

Shiokoji made from kojirice powder

Shio Koji made from whole koji rice

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The Koji trials are not going well because I needed to add water an I over watered both jars, first one, then the other to make them even. So far they are at the purely salty stage so I don't know if its just rice falling apart in water or a true fermentation.  The proportions now are 10 water to 4 rice to the 1 or 2 parts salt. I will need to start over as I need to have some shio koji shortly as my current batch is almost dine. 

The Tri Tip trials were a huge success. All the meats wer marinated for 48 hours and easily could ahe gone more.

Shiokoji from rice powder: this had the most developed koji flavor and a great texture. I'm pretty sure that this is because the powder lets the koji work quicker.

Shiokoji from whole grain rice was superb but a little tougher than the first. This one had more kiji funk but less of the transformative texture thing going on. 24 more hours would probably have been spectacular.

The Koji rice rubbed were incredible. They were beefy to an extreme. This method is usually referred to as a 2 day dry age but I don't think that is fair. It isn't as funky as dry age but it intensifies the beefy flavor. Super. Again, I would not hesitate to go 3 days or even up to 5. 

 

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The Koji experiments that wound up with too much water are history. One developed mold and the other smelled funky. I put up a batch tonight using my usual method with 40% of the koji rice weight as salt, water to cover.

While I had koji rice out, I ground a little to use for koji rice marinated pork loin. They are thin so 2 or 3 days of sitting is all they will need. 

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We tried koji rice cured pork. There are a number of YouTube vids where koji rice aging is characterized as 2 or 3 days dry aging. I think it is not at all like dry aging but it is a wonderful process on its own. I start by grinding koji rice in a spice mill. I have used a powder and a more coarse grinded, like barely cracked black peppercorn. I think that a middle ground will be best.

I put the meat on a rack on a sheet pan and coat both sides heavily, hen place uncovered in the refrigerator uncovered. I turn the meat every 24 hours. After the first day, the rice becomes caked to meat as it wicks moisture out of the meat. The entire time, the koji is interacting with the proteins in the meat. 

We cooked the meat on our yaki niku grill which workes great with any kiji mediated meat {koji rice or shio koji,} as koji treatments results in meats that scorch easily because of the breakdown of proteins and the resultant sugars and protease and amylase. With its indirect heat, occasional flame and lightweight wire grid, there is just less scorching than in carbon steel or on a cast iron griddle and the cleanup is far simpler.  

Next pork loin slice experiement will be a middle ground koji rice, maistened for faster interaction with the other style being shio koji.

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I put up 2 batches of water kimchi using Korean daikon with greens. I only used 5 of the 6 roots and had a shootton of greens leftover. So I sliced the one daikon root into rounds and then quartered them. For the greens, I separated the stems from the leaves and chopped the leaves roughly and cut the stems in 1/2" pieces. I had leftover soy sauce brine so I used that to cover a quart jar of veggies.

This left a pint jar of veggies {root & green} to which I added  3 tablespoons of shiokoji and about the same of ume vinegar. I have shaken the jar several times and tasted them this morning and they, so far, are amazing. The shiokoji results in a sweet and tangy pickle with lots of crunch, but a definitely softer texture. The sweet is not a sugar sweet but the same kind of sweet you get with great brewed soy or tamari. 

This is one of the better ShioKoji experiments so far.  

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7 hours ago, deangold said:

This left a pint jar of veggies {root & green} to which I added  3 tablespoons of shiokoji and about the same of ume vinegar. I have shaken the jar several times and tasted them this morning and they, so far, are amazing. The shiokoji results in a sweet and tangy pickle with lots of crunch, but a definitely softer texture. The sweet is not a sugar sweet but the same kind of sweet you get with great brewed soy or tamari. 

This is one of the better ShioKoji experiments so far.  

Today, the radish is nicely pickled in a sort of tsuekemono style: tangy and vibrant but with the unmistakable funky sweet of the ShioKoji. We ate half and the other half will be consumed tomorrow. I probably could have used less shiokiji. 

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Friday we had some skirt steak and pork belly in yuzu kosho. I marinated the other half in shio koji and thai fish sauce 50/50 in a plastic bag in the fridge. I flipped it after 24 hours.

Tonight, we had it cooked yaki nuku style. It was really good although the fish sauce was a touch strong. I love this combo and will try it again soon. But maybe less fish sauce or maybe a shorter marination.

 

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