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Hello and welcome to coding issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you.

Recording on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. gotten the Stasi to hammer Lopez chillin in Stanford at her house. How you doing stuff? Good. Yeah, we got Matt in his in his little hidey hole COVID booth up in Rhode Island. How're you doing?

I'm good, except I'm actually back in Brooklyn.

Why? Oh, what?

Who comes back to New York?

We should not waste precious minutes on this.

Alright. And, of course, you know, PDX VTX, you know, newcomer extraordinaire, John, who will also there. And he's going to play a big part because he is a huge fan of the guests that we have on today. John, how you doing? You're chilling in the Upper East right there. Yeah. Murray Hill. Yep. Wait, so Murray Hill, you really think that Murray Hill has a distinct thing going on? As opposed to I guess it's kind of it's not the Upper East for sure. And it's definitely

not up race. I could Yeah, like it could be very lower Midtown. But what else would you call it?

What's the difference between a turtle? What's the difference between a turtle Eclipse and a Murray Hill? What's the difference between all of these things? Who was MERS really

small neighbor? I don't know. But to stick with Matt, what Matt was saying earlier, we should probably focus on the show.

Anyway, and then we have two very special guests. today. We have a Richie from you might know him as our cook quest on both Twitter and Instagram. And he lives up in Boston. I've known him for a long time. He's helped out the Museum of food and drink on many occasions with his engineering skills. But over the rich How many years have you been? Well, well, and Jeremy Umansky from Larter and Cleveland, and other things, and they have come together and written a new book, which is out at the end of the week called koji alchemy. And it is the very, very first book solely devoted to using koji in the English language. So if you don't know what koji is, just wait because you actually do know what koji is, and you've been eating And koji related things since forever. And, you know, even if you do know what koji is, I guarantee you have not yet unless you are one of like, unless they have asked you to be a contributor in their book, you have not used koji the way they have used koji. So, you know, you stick around and let's listen to what's going on. But why don't you to each Richie go first, maybe? Why don't you tell us kind of how long you've been coaching around, and then like how you guys got together to do the book.

Alright, um, so yeah, it's a pleasure to be on the show, Dave. I don't remember exactly. When I first started playing with koji Bose. It's probably on the order of several years now. It was just one of those things that I happen upon when I was hanging out with a chef friend of mine who was interested in learning how to make koji for a particular presentation. And he knew my technical aptitude for just figuring things out, did a little bit of research, found Brandon Byers, his handbook on fermentation reached out to him and he helped me figure out a very simple koji rig, just to get started making it and then I just started investigating ideas on basically looking at starches proteins, in whatever fashion and marrying them together to leverage the enzymes to create crazy flavors that I really enjoyed just figuring out and then as I was going through this process, you know, on on social media, as I always have with all my creations and ideas and interest in learning, I shared what I was doing and happened upon Jeremy and his, his adventurous ideas of curing meat with Goji. And we just struck up, struck up this, you know, friendship, through sharing ideas and enthusiasm and continuing to grow together and learn more and interact with everybody who is excited about this product and the possibilities. And that's how we kind of came to have the idea of writing this book together.

In Jeremy, how long have you been on the koji train?

It seems like forever. But I want to see it's 2014 Yeah, yeah, I was asked to make some miso. And at that point, I had already been fermenting and meat curing and all that lovely stuff. And, and, you know, thinking that I knew I could just go ahead and make some miso like it was any other fermented food. I knew that wasn't the case. And I just totally fell down the kkog rabbit hole completely.

You know, I have this thing with rabbit holes. Because in my mind, I've been thinking, like, honestly, like for like, a like a month. Anytime someone says to me that they've gone down the rabbit hole. In my mind. I'm thinking, Are you sure? It's not a rat's nest? Are you sure there's a

careful date. Sometimes there's a honey badger.

Yeah, right. I mean, like, dude, if you live out near a forest, right, so big weird things dig holes in the ground. It's people let me tell you it is not probably it is not a rabbit down that hole. I'm just telling you that right now. If you're just be careful.

Last Story, lat last summer. Sean Terrell and Chris. Yeah. And totally stuck my hand in a rabbit hole. A yellow jacket nest.

Oh, Jesus.

I've got like 10 pounds of chanterelles on my back on like, you know, moving stuff around and picks and more. In the yellow jackets not start getting stung. I tripped over a log next to me and fall into a patch of nettles.

Oh man, I love your luck, man. You have the best luck. You have the best luck. I've only ever once like really pissed off a Yellow Jacket nest. But unfortunately, I was in full chainsaw gear. So like I didn't know I had done it until I saw them inside of my face mask. And that's when I started getting stung. And I was like, listen, honestly do things that are on the ground like holes in the ground. Beware there's a reason that people since time immemorial have been afraid of holes in the ground. It is probably not a rabbit. Just saying that. So you know who knows? I mean, anyways,

where were you? Where were you talking? Oh, yeah.

So listen before we go too far, but when you're starting on me so like Who did you have to go to at that at that time? Were you were you using the shirt leaf? Miso book, like what was there for you to go to it? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's essentially what it was someone brought me a copy of the book, the book of neato, and was like, Hey, can you make some miso using chickpeas? and handed me the book? And I said, Sure. And then, you know, I realized that I need this mold, and I got to order spores and where do I get them. And you know, all the things that a lot of people getting into working with Koji, who aren't familiar with, they go through. And it took me It probably took me longer to figure out where to get everything I needed to get and what to get, than it actually took me to like, incubate that first batch of Koji, and then like mix the miso.

Yeah, well, the book of miso is a great book. I mean, we've talked about both that book and the book of tofu. But they were printed quite a long time ago. And they're not really written from a chef, or even really a cooks perspective, they're more of a save the world kind of perspective, and they're great. So I don't want to take anything away from them. But there's definitely a need out there for more information than just Jeremy, I don't know if you know, Anastasia no rich does already. But anytime you can say the word Spore, your posse is inner core. And so you should try to say spore as much as possible. And if you can do it, like this

spooler if you can just say it like,

like that will like really make my life better. There's a term that, you know, friends of mine, Anastasia and Peter cam, who is the, you know, was running the Museum of food and drink and was the show's favorite punching bag. I don't know if he talked about this. We talked about the term you came up with on air. The punching bag? Not I don't know, the term, the term that you came up with just for oh, yeah, I

think so. Yeah. Well, I'll

mention it again. It's called okay, you're everyone's familiar with SHODAN Froyo. Right. Shot in Freud is the German term for getting pleasure out of other. It's like, pain, pleasure. So the pleasure you get out of other people's kind of pain shot in Freud. So Peter coined stars and froideur, which is specifically the joy that Anastasia gets when other people are going through troubling times. But it's, it's specifically the joy that she gets out of it. Because for her it's fuel for life. Like, like, I've had bad things happen to me over the course of the years. That one bad thing happens to me. And that is fuel for her to continue living for like, two months. It's amazing. That's not true. I don't get hurt. Anyways,

but two months seems like such a long time.

Yeah, well, it has to be really good. It doesn't have to be physical hurt either. In fact, she prefers emotional hurt.

Oh, yeah. She Yeah, she. What? emotional or physical? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

I mean, she's, you know, she's, what's it called? She's an evolved individual, like emotional pain is always greater than physical pain, right? through physical pain, you can forget, that's why people have more than one baby. But pain, you can scar people for life? I mean, yes. So to go back, so, Jeremy, since you were the last person here to talk about koji I've, we're remissed. Why don't you describe using the word spore as much as possible? Because I think that I think that it's, people get confused with koji because in general, like we, we here in the US, anyway, use it to refer to the mold, the mold grown on a substrate, and the process of doing all of that, and then anything that has any of those things in it. It's kind of like the word Smurf. You just use it for all of these different things. But I feel if you just give a little short explanation, and part of your book is talking about this, maybe you can help people understand more what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. So So first, you got to keep in mind this is a this is a mold. This is a fungus. I mean, whether you got a picture of a cremini or an oyster mushroom in your head, or you've got a picture of those those crazy leftovers in the back of your fridge. This is kind of related to all those and these also they all start off with a spoon for you. It's interesting too, so fungi are a separate kingdom of life from Austin from plants. And if we go back far enough in the evolutionary history of all this, we actually see two that we are more closely related to fungi than plants are. Most people see, you know, we use mushrooms culinarily as we use a vegetable. So based on that a lot of people associate them as, as being more closely related, but the state that you're cooking the mushrooms with is more closely related, and we are more closely related. So the spooler is actually akin to like our, our sermon, our egg,

you're really doing it to Anastasia now NASA.

A zygote that it is the sperm and the egg just before they they they meet in bliss. What happens is they they the spore, it lands on a substrate and it starts to grow. Now for all intensive purposes of kinda like translating from a highly codified way of doing things and culture surrounding koji. You know, in the book, we kind of we break this down, we say, Listen, in, in all these other cultures, whether it's the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, the parts of India, Burma, wherever it is that they use these molds, they all have their own languages for these. And that's where as us as outsiders and newcomers do, you know, anywhere from nine to 2000 years late to the party, we kind of need more of a condensed version of what they're talking about, because there's so far ahead of us. So, you know, to kind of touch on what you said Dave, like, Koji can mean these so many, many things. And in English, we kind of rely on the context of what we're talking about, in general, to determine what koji actually means. If I'm using the word spore in the sentence, then I'm talking about like these spores, these seeds of koji. If I am talking about making an amino paste something like a miso. And I say, take your koji and mix it with your beans, then we want people to be able to infer through their working knowledge that we're talking about a grain, a starch that's been cultured with the spores, and the mold has grown. So, you know, we have a whole section of the book, I believe, it's called Creating a common koji language. And the purpose of this is to kind of as newcomers come into the fold, we have something we can all commonly talk about and commonly relate with. And then as each of us gets further into our excellent exploration with this mold and its uses, then we can like full outright, like honor tradition, talk about these, these molds and their applications and the foods that are made with them within specific context. But just getting your feet wet, there's so much out there, it's so confusing. We just needed an initial, you know, condensation or cohesiveness, that that allowed people to work with it and talk with it and understand what everybody's talking about.

Right? So let me see if I get this. See if I get this right. And kind of what the presentation of the of the book is. We'll talk more about the structure of the book in a second. So, so fundamentally, we're like when when you're talking about Koji, you're talking about one of several different strains of are they are they all Aspergillus, or is there just one other that you use? It's not an Aspergillus, but they're all Aspergillus strains. Right? And, yeah, what? Yeah, for the most part, right.

Yeah, we can lump like, the temporary molds in there, like rhizopus, you know? Yeah. So yeah, any of these filamentous molds,

right, so there's these molds. And what's funny about them funny is that many of them do are toxic. In other words, not themselves toxic, but they produce what's called mycotoxins, which are, you know, or I forget whether they might go or they actually I forget which one they do. But anyway, so they produce toxins, not the ones that we use in cooking, right, but other wild ones. But somehow, for 1000s of years, people have inoculated or they've created the environments where these ones that are beneficial to flavor and to the longevity of preserve product can thrive. And for whatever reason, you know, thank goodness maybe that's why everyone's still alive but for whatever reason, the evil ones tend not to grow on these kind of on the substrates when they're treated in a particular way. Would you say that's accurate?

pretty it's pretty damn close. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So what happens is, is you grow this you grow this mold on a substrate let's just choose one starchy substrate with you know, with some protein and whatever other sugars stuff in it, let's say rice, and then a or soy, and then you that will change the substrate you're growing on. But more importantly, it is a source of enzymes that can then do further reaction. It's those enzymes and it's the broad spectrum of So, we so the most important things ever right or in terms of this kind of in terms of our so the books called koji alchemy but other alchemical things, you got your yeast, you got your acetyl factor, you got your you got your amylase enzymes from things like barley and what else is is even close to being as important worldwide as koji anything. We were talking about this before. Rich what else was what else is on that list?

Oh, lactobacillus. Yeah,

like Yeah, lab. Yeah. Lactobacillus. What else? Yeah. That's it, though, right? Pretty much. Yeah. So like in the in the West, where we had like a boat ton of barley sitting around and we figured out malting barley pretty early. A lot of our starch conversion of the enzyme we were using was amylase enzyme, enzymes that turned starch into sugar so that we can then ferment it, like that was an important enzyme, whereas in places where koji was kind of, you know, the most important thing, you have amylase enzymes there. But unlike amylase, enzymes from barley malt, let's say koji has a shotgun spray of crazy enzymes, right. And also a there's they're very few byproducts of barley malt enzymes. In other words, it takes starch, Buster starch down into smaller into smaller dextrins and sugar whereas, because koji is a is a mold as fungus, it is producing its own byproducts of being alive, which are flavors. And then in addition produces enzymes, which continue to act on the product, even past their own life cycle. So it's kind of like a wham wham. It's like a hammer, Hammer. And wham, there's like a lot of stuff going on with koji. So there's a lot of complexity in I don't know whether you want to call them you want to confirm it. What do you want to call them? Koji recipes, there's a lot of complexity built into them. That isn't necessarily built into a straight enzyme action, like, like you get into barley malt, or even what we would call a straight like yeast action, right? Because the what happens in a fermentation in a wine, let's say with yeast is extremely complicated. And there's lots of yeast byproducts and the breakdowns of flavor precursors and whatnot in grapes, and whatever else is super nuanced, and super important. But nowhere near the broad spectrum, kind of, you know, fistfight of what's going on in a cozy situation. You agree?

Oh, yeah. And you know, maybe Rachel wants to touch on this a little more. But we had this discussion intensively when it comes to like this term catalysis, like this enzymatic breakdown of things, which is often associated with decomposition. You know, what do we call like you said koji barrages with enzymes, and then the coach is dead, but the enzymes are in the food. What do we call it, then?

Yeah, I don't know. What do you call it?

We just we in the book, we use the word autolysis. Like we had, we had to make a decision of like, what what do we call it? You know,

you for those paying attention. autolysis is not what Vladimir Putin is or is doing is when it is when something contains the products within itself to break itself down over time. Would you agree?

Yeah, like think think decomposition thinks something dies, like the enzymes in your cells and break apart things. You know, there's also you know, black soldier flies and fungi and stuff that fall in but internally decomposition is an automatic reaction. Koji does something and other fungi do something called extracellular digestion, where they grow on something and they just like, lick it and smear it and make it moist with all their enzymes that are producing, they're coming from an external source. But like I said, like what happens when the code is dead, and we're left with these enzymes that aren't enzymes from inside the bean, per se, or inside the rice? They're smattered on by the koji? And it's still working, they're still breaking things down. They're, you know, you know, in the book, we decided to use the term autolysis to also encompass that,

right. By the way, you're really I don't know Anastasia may never use soy sauce again.

I don't even know why it's so disturbing. The use of Likud smear it make it moist really put us on top

Yeah, I mean, like I'm now I'm doing a video in my head like a like a like a choco Rhone style video where it's like, it's just those words are going in the background. You know what I mean? We can get that guy. What's his name? Oh Chombo what was it? We gotta get that guy we'll do a video about smearing and licking anyway so before we get into kind of buying coaching and where it is another so and for those of you that like you know still have no idea what we're talking about this thing behind sock a it's the thing behind any kind of like, shows you shows you it's, it's behind me so but everything right like what else like just name some stuff that good coaches behind

chain means you? Yeah, I mean it basically we can say like 95% of the alcohol come out of Asia and Southeast Asia are made with us anything that's like a soy sauce. Show you a Tomari any of that stuff. Me Sue goes houzhang Do CI rich, you got the more

is the mold on a katsuobushi a koji or not?

It is it is I believe that's Aspergillus reference or glaucous. But it is.

Yeah, cloud gets the bad guy from Flash Gordon. is merciless is generals?

Well, yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, I think so. But glaucous itself, too is like we can it's really hard to get in the United States. It's a controlled substance.

Can you scrape it off a Costco, Ibushi. And culture it?

I'm sure you can. And I'm willing to bet that's where a lot of people have gotten it.

So all right. So let's, let's talk about that for one for one second thing, because you know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, you could go to kind of your local Japanese market. And and if you ask really nicely, and if they paid attention to you, they had one or two packets of stuff, and there was no choice, there was only one thing you could get. And that's that was it. That was all, but now that the state is different, right? People where people can people go to get into this?

Yeah, in terms of the actual spores. So to buy the spores, we typically recommend that people will go to jump cultures, they've been around for a very long time, if you look at their website, it's fairly, you know, archaic, probably something that you would see you know, around the late 80s In terms of a website, but it's an you also what you do is you basically email them and they send you a PayPal based on your order. So it's it's the easiest way that we've found to be able to get a direct source retailing from from Japan. And they have different you know, they have all the very basic you know, types of spores that are a cut that are customized for each specific make so if you wanted to make, say pickles or Amazake a there's a specific one called light red Misa light rice miso, I'm sorry, like white rice Koji, or if you wanted to get one for soy sauce or show you or miso so there's they have very specific categories for whatever it is that you want to make. But essentially, we like to recommend that people just buy the light race me so late race, Koji option to be able to start with whatever they want, because it functionally it has plenty of protease enzymes. If you want to just FICO

your st you're saying that, although there's vast differences between the cozies it's better to learn how to use one and then and then later branch out if you feel like you want a specifically different thing right out of anything. Because like, isn't that what you said in the book? Yeah, that's

the light rice miso spores from gem cultures. It's like a broad spectrum. So whether you want to do an amino paste or you want to do pack a or Amazake whatever it is, you've got enough amylase production and in produce production and pretty much make any food you want at at an acceptable and delicious level.

So but let's talk a little bit about so you want to start with the white rice koji and as it's a good place and I always say to people, like with hydrocolloid is even which is, you know, far simpler because this stuff happens much faster. Choose one, use it a lot, get to know it, and then if you feel like you need to branch out branch out, right.

Yeah. And that's really throughout the whole book.

Yeah. And also because a lot of this book, a lot of the book in the beginning parts especially. And John, you've read the book, right. Yeah. is about is about trying to get you over that. hump of worrying about it right trying to simplify doing it. Because for any of you that like have like reg spiels on things like soy sauce, you're like, Oh my God, or like hacia Lisa, you're like, oh my god, like, I gotta aged two years, I got aged a year, three years if it goes wrong, but by no mean. And so a lot of the first part of the book is trying to get over that hump of worrying about it. And I think part of that is worrying about kind of which culture that you're going to use, which which strain you're going to use. But on the other hand, I had a question in from I had a question and I can't figure out who it's from. But the question was, what about people using koji for cocktails? And I know, you know, you know, my partner had existing conditions. Don Lee before we had to close for COVID. He was experimenting, I know, he was talking to you rich a lot about koji and cocktails. And he was using a lot of the kind of Stranger Cochise because in cocktails, when we he wasn't doing kind of long age things, he was doing things that were relatively short age, and were like the strain, the flavor of the strain of koji itself was an important background note or note. So for instance, like the koji that produces a boat ton of citric acid and when, for those of you either don't know like production of acid, like which strain is it, that does the acid production, guys.

Yeah, and the specific one that I gave Don was the our Mari, the Okinawan version, so that's a black sport koji.

And that so so for those of you that are keeping track, it's Okinawa and koji in the hole, I have to correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea is, is that you wanted it to be a high acid because the acid was a preservative on the ferment prior to distillation. So because you were going to distill it, the acid wasn't going to come through to the final distilled product. But the acid was very helpful in preserving the product in the very hot Okinawan environment prior to distillation true or false?

Well, yes, that's true, but it's twofold. It's also it helps retard lactobacillus contamination. Right, right. Right, which can actually must be flavors and whatnot, you know, in an alcohol, right? That would that would have to be dank and dark versus like lightning, Chris.

Right? So and so people. So if you get the conditions, right, though, what's interesting is, is it because if you tell me, I'm going to grow a, for instance, if you say to someone, hey, I'm going to I'm going to add malt, or amylase enzyme to something like sweet potato, which Don did to clear out the starch with Koji, right? But if you're going to do something like that, like I have sweets are going to be right, because there's only X amount of, there's only X amount of byproducts in there, it's only going to get X amount. Sweet. And x usually isn't that high. So I thought in my head, I was like thinking the same thing with the acid. I was like, how high an acid are you actually going to get? And the answer is much more acidic than you would think that you would get because it's not a breakdown product. Like it's actually producing the citric acid. And it is real, you can make very, very, very tart things with it varied if

you eat like the black Koji, or the brown coated these species of Lucentis, like grown on a medium if you just eat the raw koji. It tastes like you're eating sour patch kids.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. And for cocktail applications, I think it's quite interesting. So while it might be challenging to use in a food application, I think the application to I'm only going to use a half an ounce of this, or I'm only going to use you know, whatever I think is pretty interesting. You know, I know Don thinks it's interesting, and that's why he's been kind of experimenting with it. Yeah, yeah. So

and I think you have with cocktails, you've got both. So you've got like the short term use of like, yeah, you can make an Amazon key out of the black koji. That's like got all these great koji notes and like, the, you know, the honeysuckle and the, like mushroom flavors and all that stuff, plus the acid, but like, for example, we did over a year ago, I made this Shio koji using cucumber water and it

was like she had like too quick.

So she'll koji is like inoculated grain with mold, mixed with water and salt and it's allowed to ferment out and it's used as like a short term quick way to enhance the flavor of something whether it's sauteed vegetables or like a grilled steak. So I made one very diluted one that kept the salt at around 3% used. I'm sorry, it wasn't cucumber, it was watermelon. We had used a bunch and we were making watermelon pickles and all this stuff. So all the all the residual liquid from there, and the black koji rice. At first it was kind of gross, but it sat for a year and it was fantastic. And there's this great bartender here in Cleveland Well, Hollingsworth of the spotted owl gave him a bunch and he was doing some crazy leg gin fizzes with flag this black watermelon Shio koji liquid that he said we're we're bringing,

since you brought up the shield koji in the water in the salt. Another huge section of the book is trying to categorize different kinds of different kinds of products and different kinds of reactions, right? So you have, so it's like, the question is how long so you like the things you talk about are? Because you're saying, Hey, listen, when you're starting, start with a particular strain, like the white rice Koji, start with there, boom. Now, the question is, what do you want to have happen? And so it's controlling how much liquid is present. Right? How much salt is present, right? And you choose those things, and you choose what kind of flavors are going to develop and over what timescale? And so, you know, you talk about PACE versus application to solids, things that are soaked, and it's just breaking down, basically thinking about it, trying to try to make for the reader trying to turn koji into part of their toolkit and having them think about it in terms of how am I looking what am I looking for short term effect or long term effect this episode is brought to you by vendor table a monthly food subscription service for avid home cooks focused on delicious and sustainable pantry items. Here I am open up my box. Let me see here. It comes with a delicacy is France. And an essentials. Oh, Red Five. Red Five is a week that is became famous a couple of years ago as one of the old heritage wheat varieties that was grown in the East Coast. And so I'm going to use this to make Sylvester Graham's actual brand bread because Eastern grown wheat much like red fife wheat was the wheat that Sylvester Graham used to make the original Graham breads which bear no relationship to graham crackers. So I'm excited to make some bread with the Red Five flour. Ooh, this dasya just burnt he's living your life here. I have a bag of pearled farro from Maine grains grown here and I know you do. You're the queen. You're the queen of Faro, right? Yeah, and yet, here it is in my house. Go to bend to table.com to start your own monthly subscription, use the discount code Hrn to get $20 off a new subscription, and bend the table will donate $10 to support cooking issues and all of HRM is programming. All right, we're back for real people. Now listen, during these times with COVID, everyone's turning to things like baking bread, which is why I've mentioned this before, you cannot buy a grain mill now. And I was at the farmers market and the supplier of artisanal wheats and grains at the farmers market was like we're out we have nothing because everyone is baking now and Anastasia. You hate the fact that not DAX? I'm not talking about that. But in general, like the increase in bed bread baking you dislike right? Yes. And what about we haven't talked about it? What about like the increase of people making pickles and whatnot also hate? No, you're okay with pickles. But not doing that? Yeah, yeah. Why? Because pig people don't post pictures of pickle on the internet. Is that why? I haven't seen a lot. But that's why. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Okay. But what I'm saying is, is that now is a perfect time to start doing koji based work. And if you get the book, what you'll learn is, is that there is not only like, you know, something, it takes two months, two years, whatever to do. There's a lot of things you can do with koji that can be done inside of a couple of

days. True or false, folks, that is very true.

Yeah. And so you take and, you know, when we had the internet kind of explosion over here, and so I don't know how much of that was caught before. Like, what I was saying is, is that a lot of the book is is is a lot of the beginning part of the book is about breaking down. Code, like koji work into different kinds of categories, a lot of it based on moisture, like how much water is present, and how much salt is present. Because by adjusting those two things, you're kind of adjusting, like which reactions happen and the rate at which reactions happen and kind of, you know, whether we're looking at like short term, more seasoning things more more protein breakdown going on. So you want to talk about talk about that a little bit or No,

yeah, of course. So one of the things that we have always practiced in terms of Koji, once we started playing with it, was its multiple multitude of uses just from the standpoint of its versatility. So on the front end, when you start doing things that are more sweet paste, you can easily gain sugars from pretty much any starch that you add it to. So not only adding it to grains, but if we're talking about say, some fruits that are less estern desirables you know, something you pick up at the grocery store that isn't all that great. And you really want something that tastes much better, all you have to do is just basically slap some koji on it, whether you vacuum bag it, or you just make a little slurry of Amazake, which is equal parts water and encourage you would, you know, some starch, and just let it let it sit for a couple days. And what's interesting is that you gain all this complexity as well as the, you know, the sugar, activity, sacrifice, duration, you know, and all these other flavor compounds that are going on, I mean, it's not, you know, total flavor balm, like the long term stuff that you do with a miso or soy sauce. But it's, you know, really interesting that you can just take, you know, a fruit or a vegetable and just marinate it and have these really interesting and awesome flavors. And that's some of the things that some of the stuff we cover in the book in terms of, you know, not only are you harnessing the starches from the ingredients that you apply it to, but you're also, you know, building up the sugar such that you can go through any sort of natural fermentation process that you want, whether it be, you know, building up some lacto, to be able to do crowds, or some yogurt or some culture butter, you can also, you know, just let it hang out longer, and, you know, add it to some kombucha, and then, you know, fire the sugar that way. So you can develop all these sugars, which is pretty amazing. And then also the on the other side of the coin, in terms of the the marinating side is that you have these protease enzymes that break down proteins fairly quickly into amino acids. And you can quickly yield a really delicious steak. We like to refer to using koji for marination, as you know, an automatic BBQ sauce because you're using the inherent starches of the grains, plus the inherent proteins of the actual ingredient, you end up matching the flavors, you know perfectly in terms of what you're adding, because you're not adding anything else. Because if you think about marinades, and the optimal marinade is the marinade that makes the base ingredient taste more like itself than any other ingredient. And this is what you can accomplish with koji. And these are the sorts of things that we talked about in terms of lowering the amount of solidity and adding more water such that you can get more, you know, infiltration and contact, to be able to create, you know, basically, these flavors in these larger mass pieces of food that you end up eating immediately. versus, you know, building a mash with lots of salt, and less less water to be able to go throughout a longer processing time to create more conflict flavors with waves of fermentation. So with Koji, you can pretty much make any ferment that you want. And in a lot of ways, it makes it more delicious, because of all the other things that come along for the road with all the enzymes that are happening. And then the natural progression of different ways of fermentation. Men.

Yeah, let's also because I know we're going to run out, I'm gonna talk more about specifically the structure of the book, because one of the things interesting about the book is, we have a couple things we're going to talk about. So I'm just going to tell you all the things we're going to talk about, and you guys can choose the order. The structure and the structure of the book, right is that you have a lot of people who are, who have kind of mini essays within the book, and you've chosen a lot of shots, some scientists, some writers, who have kind of put these micro essays in one of the things I think is interesting about these kinds of micro essays is that it's not that they contradict what you say, but you don't normalize everyone's opinion to your own. And so it's they really are sometimes different kinds of perspectives right on. And that was, that's kind of interesting. The other thing is, there's a section, which is very kind of apropos of today on cultural appropriation of this. And but that dovetails into kind of the more that the newer applications, for instance, Koji on fresh meat, which is, I think, a revelation. I know, John had some when he was out at Larner, and was super interested in talking about the koji aging on kind of fresh meat. And then there's, there's the controversy of because one of the other interesting things is in your book, you have at the end, a hasit plan about how to do dry cured meats, right, and how to incorporate koji into your dry cured meat program. But then we should talk about the fact that there's this the whole kind of koji on fresh meat is a brand new horizon really, that no one has kind of worked with. And I don't know that anyone's really kind of figured out that unless you have the kind of microbiology or the the proof of how that works, right? And then lastly, but not least, you cook your rice in the oven, in the oven, in the oven in the oven with water, and you say that you you listen to the way the French cook rice, the people who own all in all of Earth on the entire planet Earth, everyone agrees that the French do not know how to cook rice, it like everyone agrees that the French are the world's worst rice cooks. The world's worst rice cooks,

but you're not eating that rice. Okay. You're not eating it, you're making it you're using it as a medium to create koji. So, it doesn't matter what a in terms of edibility, write the code.

It's, I mean, I will describe it as a sentient living organism like it wants to live and wants to thrive and survive and reproduce. Like, it doesn't care how well the French cook rice or Japanese Greens do. It just wants gelatinous. Ouch.

Oh my god in it. So for those of you that don't know, here's what they do. They, they put all the rice in a hotel pan with water, throw it into the oven and walk away from it until it is quote unquote, done. And the stuff at the bottom. They're like, yeah, it's mushy, and livable. But the thing is, you still have to fluff it, right? Because for those of you that koji needs air to survive, it needs to be aerated to survive, right? It is an aerobic McGillicuddy. Is that not true? That is true. So I would think that this kind of French, like machine Stein way of cooking rice would make less air but what you're telling me is, is that you can fluff even this French rice, like you can fluff it up to enough of a degree that you get good aeration for the coach, I guess is what you're telling me?