Chickpea Miso

My wife is allergic to all of the normal ingredients used to produce miso (Soy and Barley). Recently I decided to make some miso from scratch from Chickpeas so that I can have another tool in my pantry if you will. Started the process on Saturday, will let you know how it goes in around 6 months!

My next move is to make "Soy Sauce" without wheat or soy... Should be interesting...

[Robin Garr]

Fascinating! Even though I'm not allergic, I'm always interested in playing with food. I'll look forward to hearing your report, Kasey!

[Jenise]

How do you start the fermentation?

For this I purchased some rice covered in a Koji. I plan on fermenting my own Koji for future experiments, but wanted to get this going quickly as it will take 6 months. I'm currently working on building a chamber to grow Koji and a few other molds, just got too busy working on the yard, and house so it got put on the back burner...

[Jenise]

That's interesting! Was just reading about using raw Koji rice on raw beef to accelerate/mimic, say, 45 day aging in like a week. The koji brings extra flavor to the dessicant. If you have more, that might be an interesting experiment.

I have some put aside to try this over the weekend. I will let you know how it turns out

[Jenise]

Cool!

So on Sunday we had the steaks which had been marinating in a Koji mix since Friday and I must say I was very impressed! They were extremely tender. From what I was reading it is supposed to remind people of dry aged steaks. I will say it was not the same as dry aging, but did greatly improve the texture. I was afraid that with it becoming more tender it would also take on a mealy texture, but this was not the case. For improving the texture this worked very well.

As for flavor it also adds some depth which I very much enjoyed, almost a slightly fermented flavor that's hard to describe. The flavor is very umami and while I enjoyed it I could easily see how others may not.

The product I used is meant to be a marinade which includes salt, Koji and alcohol, Marukome Nama Shio Koji. It is not pure Koji spores, which is what I am going to try next time.

If you haven't tried beef marinated in a koji mix it is worth trying...

[Jenise]

Thanks for the report. I really look forward to trying this. I'm impressed by how much difference only 48 hours made. Where did you buy your Koji rice? I probably don't have a hope in heck of finding it in the Ham.

I had a problem finding it here in Utah so I ordered it off of Amazon.

[Jenise]

Kasey, as I have to do here for 'odd' things.

Btw, in the book Mission Chinese, I was intrigued that Danny Bowien uses it in combination with cheap beer (yes, he specifically calls for cheap beer, why waste the good stuff) for a 24 hour marinade for riblets (specifically from the part cut away to square off a pork rib rack for St. Louis style) which are then dried and stir-fried (with chiles in a recipe from the parts of China where everything is hot) as a way of advancing umami flavor. I suppose there's a textural benefit along the way, but he doesn't mention that.