Noma recipe ryeso, been away for months and developed this fuzz, not sure if koji or mold. There does appear to be a little bit of air between the rye and koji and the sides of the jar, probably didn’t grind it down enough before jarring. Can I simply eat around it or do I need to toss the whole jar?
It doesn't seem to be mold because it's growing on the surface of the liquid, but it's also not a surface film like kahm yeast. Even if I stir it, the spots come back after about three days.
It first appeared about a month ago, around three months after I started the fermentation.
Any ideas?
After reading for quite some while about the topic, I startet my first try. I should have probably started with a classic experiment, but whatever. My goal is, to create a substitute for classic soy sauce out of pumpkin seeds. Where I come from there is a similar product on the market, so I know that it has to work somehow.
Anyway, what I did was I soaked ground pumpkin seeds (I only have those ground seeds available as a byproduct) and then steamed it. Yesterday afternoon I broke up the chunks as good as possible, mixed with Aspergillus oryzae spores and put in trays not even an inch high. My Incubator broke and since I ran out of time I let the trays sit at room temperature (24°C), covered with a wet cloth in an insulated container. I planned to fix my incubator today. However when I came today the temperature within the mix was already at 39°C, the air in the box at 29°C. I was really suprised how fast it started at this temperature.
It already has a very good smell and visible growth, not even 24 hours after start. I planned to let it incubate until spores build, however since I believe that I have a strain with white spores, I'm not sure how exactly I can distinguish mycelium from spores.
I plan on updating soon. Let me know what you think about the experiment. I am aware that the whole setup and ingredients is far from ideal, however I really like to find good use for byproducts.
The foto is from about 20 hours after inoculation and before mixing it up.
Hi all. I started a batch of Nomas chicken garum a couple days ago using rice koji. I was using a slow cooker set at keep warm that has generally maintained 140f consistently in past testing as a heat source, but when I checked this morning (day3) it was 190f. My understanding is that the enzymes would be fully denatured at this point. Can I simply add a fresh batch of rice koji and an appropriate amount of additional salt to proceed with a better heat control?
Nomas recipe:
1600 g chicken stock
2000 g Roasted Chicken Wings
450 g rice koji (substituted for Pearl barley koji)
480 g salt (12% weight of non salt ingredients)
Would I add another fresh batch of 450 g koji + 54 g salt (12% weight of additional koji), or would I need to scale up the stock as well? Or do I need to make any other modifications?
Any insight is appreciated. Thank you for your assistance.
Been fermenting for a year and koji is the one thing I can't make myself love. There's a real mental block, but also the results keep letting me down. I tried a random collection of recipes from the Noma book and also from Koji Alchemy:
Roasted Koji mole: ended up throwing all of it away because it was just...bad.
Shio koji: I tried it once but, was underwhelming.
Amazake cultured cream: does literally nothing special, can't taste the point of it.
Peaso: currently making a Peaso batch I started in February, tried it, but it's just fine. Nothing special.
The one exception is rice amazake, which is great. But I made a batch with pearl barley and the texture was straight-up yucky, and barley amazake is honestly kind of disgusting to me. So I'm trying to figure out: is it me? Am I doing something wrong (substrate? strain? application?), or is this a palate thing I just need to train?
So I forgot to stir my shio koji for a few days and this white fuzz layer formed on top. It smells sweet and awesome. My plan was to use it to marinate meats and stone fruits and whatnot for grilling.
My question is what to do with it now? Should I skim that fuzz layer off? Should I Stir that fuzz layer in to the rest and let it keep going? Is the fuzz an indication that it’s done or do I want to see fuzz throughout the whole thing?
Thanks everyone