I don't think it would be an understatement to call rice koji the mother of Japanese flavor. Yes it was a longer video, yes it did get quite nit-picky, but I think once you master how to cook the rice and make your own rice koji you can make anything...which is what I'll be showing you this week😊 Let me know if any of you make your own rice koji - any problems...suggestions/hacks you can share❤
I steam my rice in the pressure cooker too and it gives me perfect rice for koji every time. I put my soaked rice in a cloth lined basket inside the pressure cooker, turn on the heat and when the steam comes out of the valve, I cook it for only 3 minutes! Then I let it cool down until the valve opens and voilà, perfect rice ready for inoculation. All in three minutes. I'm using a "real" pressure cooker on an induction stove though, you might have to experiment with the cooking time if your pressure cooker reaches a different pressure.
Glad I found this koji explanation before my first attempt! There isn't alot of thorough explanations of koji making on UA-cam. Lots of great details and tips here! Thank you so much for this beautiful content/video! High 10 ladies!!¡
For anyonyone coming across this...and @EastMeetsKitchen, this tech(nique) is *by far* the most straightforward, repeatable...*sane* methodology I have found for an individual, trying not ro go insane :) To *really* simplify it, as well as help with containment...and *contaminant control* - after the rice is soaked, but *before* you steam it, put the rice in a re-usable fine-mesh Nut Milk bag. Use a Nut Milk one, not like cheesecloth. From this point, you will not remove the rice from this bag until it is done. So, Steam in this bag, like she says. I check halfway thru and give it a good shake. When it is done and cooled down as directed, inoculate the rice *in the bag*...just pour it in, draw it closed, *shake to distribute* and coat the rice with Koji. Put the *bag* into a container like the video says, put into Instant Pot. Do the 18Hours, and, shake the bag like 10-15secs, or with clean hands, "break up"/re-distro, thru the bag from outside, then back into the container. This will allow the culture to disperse heat from the inside, but reduce overall cooldown, as well as exposure risks. Do your moist towels, everything else...just don't open the bag/remove rice. After next one/run, 12H I believe, open up/have a look/sniff and make sure it went from "cheese-foot" (lol) to "sweet nutty". Depending on your mass of rice/water/etc, check more often after hour 30, certainly don't let go beyond 40. I cannot recommend this tech enough. If your rice is not too wet, or "rock-hard"/too dry, you will almost certainly get "nutty-sweet Koji-kin" in 30-40/8ih hours following this. I hope more people discover this and try for themselves. Thank you so much :)
I've watched a lot of koji rice videos and this is totally the most helpful one yet! I hadn't seen a video using normal kitchen stuff and I love it! thank you!
A foraging vlog from the English countryside would make 2023 the best year ever! Fermenting is one of those food sciences that really connects us to our past when sustenance was a challenge.
So true T. I'm always the one wondering "oh how did ppl start eating this or how did they know to do that?" And a lot of the times it was what you said. Things go bad. You still have to eat it...and if it doesn't kill you, it can become a culinary masterpiece 😂
@@EastMeetsKitchen my favorite to think about is tea because it's so simple but also like, "usually when I boil something, the thing becomes edible and pretty decent. These leaves are still terrible. But the water I cooked them in though..."
This was very interesting, and I appreciate your incredibly detailed instructions; I loved the "concerned mom" way you ended them : ) Looking forward to seeing what you do with this, and also how the nukazuke is going/went. Thanks for posting!
Originally I was going to include another recipe instead of the nukazuke but that one didn't work as well so if I can finish filming some clips and editing them I can/should probably include it during fermentation week. (Though there is lunar new year coming up...everything is so close together this year....oh I didn't check whether you remembered what the name of your ferment was called...)
@@EastMeetsKitchen I think it was nukazuke; I just don't know where I got the idea--maybe a cookbook I no longer have?--and how it turned out. Like most cultured things I made in my old house, it probably moldered : (
Nice video. I've made Koji once, in an empty aquarium with a heat element, worked perfectly for me, I must say it was very humid in there though. I would say it has a cheesy/parmesan smell to it. I did get some sweet tones aswell, it was weird.
Oh wow an aquarium! The hardest thing is to get the temperature and humidity correct. Once you find a setup that works then rice koji is a cinch. Haha right...it kind of goes from parmesan to sweet chestnut, which is amazing and weird☺️ It's how the enzymes breakdown all these components and whatever they release...which fluctuates depending on the substrate.
Love the way u explained everything. It's so detailed and organized. Btw, you are the only one whom i came across on the Internet (or UA-cam) said that the homemade koji rice has a smell of old socks, which kinda relieved my worry because pp always said that Koji rice smells like chestnut.I have made three batches before with my yogurt maker and they all smelt like dirty socks which made me think that i must have done sth wrong in the process🫣🫣. I ended up throwing them away as I didnt know that it was normal. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Did you know that there is an international online convention called kojicon that you can follow? It starts on 20 of February and they are selling tickets right now
Will you make natto at some point? Preferably in instant pot 😉 I bought bacteria but I'm scared to use them 😂 I've never tried it so not sure what to expect
this has got me excited to attempt this. only problem is that I can’t find any koji kin in my country so i am going to attempt catching spores in the wild.
Thanks for the great explanation! 🙏🏻😊 As a homemade tempeh producer, I think it's time for me to get involved into the Koji. I have a question related to the Koji spores. Which has been your preference and for which reason? Could you give us an explanation? It's not that easy to decide. 😅😁 White Koji Spores Light Rice Koji Spores A. Luchuensis Spores
I love fermentation, but it's a really daunting process since there's not much room for error usually and it's so frustrating to start over several days in lol. The most difficult thing I have made successfully was tempeh (using the warming drawer of my oven - turning it on and off several times a day so it wouldn't get too hot or cold hah!). I actually got a pressure cooker in the meanwhile so I should really experiment with that - so far I've only used the yogurt setting for making soy yogurt. Anyway, looking forward to more videos in this series! Excited to see what you're going to make with the koji rice as I had not heard of it before :)
I'm never ever going to make this, but it's so interesting! The cultural differences between what it smells like is, of itself, notable. I'd love to know what compounds are in play there, and if one could manage it by measuring that alone. (Lol, no.)
Oh mine! thank you so much for the detailed explanation. I am keen to experiment but found many videos are either too brief or too long. I appreciate you going thru the step by step method and the tips and reasons on why you did what you did. BUT what if my pressure cooker doesn't have yoghurt functions, what is the alternative? Did you try the sous vide method before?
Is it possible to request a small sample (i.e. a teaspoon) of the koji rice for me to try on my pressure cooker that has an option to make yogurt? I live in Lilburn, GA.
So I did that with the citric barley koji water recipe...the airfryer is so strong that it just dries out the stuff. If you do it I recommend getting a big ziplock bag and wrapping it around. Every once in a while I open it in to let in some fresh air☺️
@@EastMeetsKitchen my air fryer is the size of a microwave, and allows for a lot of air flow, and I can manually control the fan as well, so I'm pretty optimistic it would work fairly well. I'll get some mold and tell you how it goes!
Hello, I saw your comment about keeping boiling water on the side for those who want to try this without the yogurt function, but obviously that's going to be quite energy consuming. Would you have any suggestions for people with an instant pot but an earlier version (ie. without the yogurt function)? I was trying to looking at yogurt options to see if I can use the same strategies, but most rely on overheating and then residual heat to go down, or reheat every few hours, both of which wouldn't make sense with a days-long process like koji. Would appreciate your thoughts, thank you!
Love making rice Koji, it smells a bit like tropical fruit, and then more mushroomy and chestnutty, I made a couple of misos, The hot water bottle method in a portable cooler worked for me, but i checked the temperature very often, also i did inoculate at 30°C, I did get one fail once caused by trying to make it work with boiled rice (it doesn't work trust me, i mean it still produces enough enzymes but you will get yeast and bacteria growing in it and it will start to ferment while u try to grow more Koji) Best methods that i have tried are steaming the rice, or cooking in the microwave with the right amount of water in a microwave rice cooker container
Today, I watched again your video and towards the end of your video @24:10 you clearly stated that you saw a Japanese person shakes a plastic box to loosen its contents, the Rice Koji. I, too, have seen that video and I believe this is the video (ua-cam.com/video/bE2n5w3rOec/v-deo.html).
This uses an Instapot, a brand name. Most pressure cookers do not have a 'youghurt setting ' as they are pressure cookers, not multi cookers. A multi-cooker is not the same as a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers can be (and are) often stove top. So the title is misleading.
This is literally hair-splitting semantics. My "air fryer" can shut off the fan and be used like an oven, and even cook real rotisserie meat. It's still an air fryer.
Hey Craig. So if you don't have one with the setting what you can do is try to wrap the whole pot/bowl in some blankets and place it in a box with some boiling water to the side. You're really just trying to get a low warm atmosphere. -- to your comment...haha unfortunately I can't make my channel as "click-baity" as many of the other YT channels I watch. Sometimes I wish I could...get some more views😜 But in search, the word "multi cooker" is not as widely recognised as pressure cooker. People don't generally type multi cooker. And for anyone without a yogurt setting, hopefully I was able to give you some more ways to grow the koji in the video. It's just sometimes short of putting the photo in the thumbnail ☺️, you have to watch a bit of it to see if the recipe will suit what you have available or do you have to adjust. That's just how content which I freely distribute to you on my own dime works.
I would really like to listen to you, but unfortunately there’s this incredibly irritating music in the background that’s competing with you, so is it at all possible for you to do this video without music in the background?
1:25 ... a vegan that wants it to taste 'more meaty'...that is the greatest contradiction ever...Are you missing something in your diet .... like 'meat' lol.
I don't think it would be an understatement to call rice koji the mother of Japanese flavor. Yes it was a longer video, yes it did get quite nit-picky, but I think once you master how to cook the rice and make your own rice koji you can make anything...which is what I'll be showing you this week😊 Let me know if any of you make your own rice koji - any problems...suggestions/hacks you can share❤
Oops should have checked description sorry! Toasted rice flour is new though I’ll figure that out next.
I steam my rice in the pressure cooker too and it gives me perfect rice for koji every time. I put my soaked rice in a cloth lined basket inside the pressure cooker, turn on the heat and when the steam comes out of the valve, I cook it for only 3 minutes! Then I let it cool down until the valve opens and voilà, perfect rice ready for inoculation. All in three minutes. I'm using a "real" pressure cooker on an induction stove though, you might have to experiment with the cooking time if your pressure cooker reaches a different pressure.
Glad I found this koji explanation before my first attempt! There isn't alot of thorough explanations of koji making on UA-cam. Lots of great details and tips here! Thank you so much for this beautiful content/video! High 10 ladies!!¡
For anyonyone coming across this...and @EastMeetsKitchen, this tech(nique) is *by far* the most straightforward, repeatable...*sane* methodology I have found for an individual, trying not ro go insane :)
To *really* simplify it, as well as help with containment...and *contaminant control* - after the rice is soaked, but *before* you steam it, put the rice in a re-usable fine-mesh Nut Milk bag. Use a Nut Milk one, not like cheesecloth. From this point, you will not remove the rice from this bag until it is done.
So, Steam in this bag, like she says. I check halfway thru and give it a good shake. When it is done and cooled down as directed, inoculate the rice *in the bag*...just pour it in, draw it closed, *shake to distribute* and coat the rice with Koji. Put the *bag* into a container like the video says, put into Instant Pot. Do the 18Hours, and, shake the bag like 10-15secs, or with clean hands, "break up"/re-distro, thru the bag from outside, then back into the container. This will allow the culture to disperse heat from the inside, but reduce overall cooldown, as well as exposure risks. Do your moist towels, everything else...just don't open the bag/remove rice. After next one/run, 12H I believe, open up/have a look/sniff and make sure it went from "cheese-foot" (lol) to "sweet nutty". Depending on your mass of rice/water/etc, check more often after hour 30, certainly don't let go beyond 40.
I cannot recommend this tech enough. If your rice is not too wet, or "rock-hard"/too dry, you will almost certainly get "nutty-sweet Koji-kin" in 30-40/8ih hours following this. I hope more people discover this and try for themselves. Thank you so much :)
Love this. Thank you so much.
I've watched a lot of koji rice videos and this is totally the most helpful one yet! I hadn't seen a video using normal kitchen stuff and I love it! thank you!
Literally, you're the queen of vegan recipe world. 🌱 Really appreciate your skilled labour! Thank you so much for every one of your videos! 💜
A foraging vlog from the English countryside would make 2023 the best year ever! Fermenting is one of those food sciences that really connects us to our past when sustenance was a challenge.
So true T. I'm always the one wondering "oh how did ppl start eating this or how did they know to do that?" And a lot of the times it was what you said. Things go bad. You still have to eat it...and if it doesn't kill you, it can become a culinary masterpiece 😂
@@EastMeetsKitchen my favorite to think about is tea because it's so simple but also like, "usually when I boil something, the thing becomes edible and pretty decent. These leaves are still terrible. But the water I cooked them in though..."
I love the detail you give in this process.
this is amazing! never knew how detailed the process was
I know!! And how the koji enzymes break down the rice/grain gives it this unique flavor.
This was very interesting, and I appreciate your incredibly detailed instructions; I loved the "concerned mom" way you ended them : ) Looking forward to seeing what you do with this, and also how the nukazuke is going/went. Thanks for posting!
Originally I was going to include another recipe instead of the nukazuke but that one didn't work as well so if I can finish filming some clips and editing them I can/should probably include it during fermentation week. (Though there is lunar new year coming up...everything is so close together this year....oh I didn't check whether you remembered what the name of your ferment was called...)
@@EastMeetsKitchen I think it was nukazuke; I just don't know where I got the idea--maybe a cookbook I no longer have?--and how it turned out. Like most cultured things I made in my old house, it probably moldered : (
Nice video. I've made Koji once, in an empty aquarium with a heat element, worked perfectly for me, I must say it was very humid in there though. I would say it has a cheesy/parmesan smell to it. I did get some sweet tones aswell, it was weird.
Oh wow an aquarium! The hardest thing is to get the temperature and humidity correct. Once you find a setup that works then rice koji is a cinch. Haha right...it kind of goes from parmesan to sweet chestnut, which is amazing and weird☺️ It's how the enzymes breakdown all these components and whatever they release...which fluctuates depending on the substrate.
Love the way u explained everything. It's so detailed and organized. Btw, you are the only one whom i came across on the Internet (or UA-cam) said that the homemade koji rice has a smell of old socks, which kinda relieved my worry because pp always said that Koji rice smells like chestnut.I have made three batches before with my yogurt maker and they all smelt like dirty socks which made me think that i must have done sth wrong in the process🫣🫣. I ended up throwing them away as I didnt know that it was normal. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
Many thanks for this comprehenive sharing.
Спасибо! Очень качественный сюжет, без суетливой наигранности.
Did you know that there is an international online convention called kojicon that you can follow?
It starts on 20 of February and they are selling tickets right now
I just received my first Koji spores and I can't wait to get started!
I'm not vegan, nor will I ever make this - I don't even own a pressure cooker! However, I love your channel and your videos ❤❤❤
Will you make natto at some point? Preferably in instant pot 😉 I bought bacteria but I'm scared to use them 😂 I've never tried it so not sure what to expect
this has got me excited to attempt this. only problem is that I can’t find any koji kin in my country so i am going to attempt catching spores in the wild.
Thanks for the great explanation! 🙏🏻😊
As a homemade tempeh producer, I think it's time for me to get involved into the Koji. I have a question related to the Koji spores. Which has been your preference and for which reason? Could you give us an explanation? It's not that easy to decide. 😅😁
White Koji Spores
Light Rice Koji Spores
A. Luchuensis Spores
I love fermentation, but it's a really daunting process since there's not much room for error usually and it's so frustrating to start over several days in lol. The most difficult thing I have made successfully was tempeh (using the warming drawer of my oven - turning it on and off several times a day so it wouldn't get too hot or cold hah!). I actually got a pressure cooker in the meanwhile so I should really experiment with that - so far I've only used the yogurt setting for making soy yogurt. Anyway, looking forward to more videos in this series! Excited to see what you're going to make with the koji rice as I had not heard of it before :)
I hope you have also demonstration for air fryer I don't have pressure cooker yet
I'm never ever going to make this, but it's so interesting! The cultural differences between what it smells like is, of itself, notable. I'd love to know what compounds are in play there, and if one could manage it by measuring that alone. (Lol, no.)
you are a rockstar! great explanation!
Oh mine! thank you so much for the detailed explanation. I am keen to experiment but found many videos are either too brief or too long. I appreciate you going thru the step by step method and the tips and reasons on why you did what you did. BUT what if my pressure cooker doesn't have yoghurt functions, what is the alternative? Did you try the sous vide method before?
Un piacere guardare i tuoi video, grazie della ricetta spiegata proprio bene, ciao.
Thank you so much !! Can you also share steps for red yeast rice ? Is it the temperatures the same ?
The Connections (2021) [short documentary] 🔥🔥
Is it possible to request a small sample (i.e. a teaspoon) of the koji rice for me to try on my pressure cooker that has an option to make yogurt? I live in Lilburn, GA.
Please tell me how to properly vaccinate rice and what is the relationship of spores to ready-made rice? Thanks
Everyone always talks about this stuff, but no one really shows how it's made. Yeah you can buy it online, but how good/fresh is it, honestly?
BTW, my air fryer has a dehydrator function that gets down to around 36 degrees C. Tempted to buy some mold.
So I did that with the citric barley koji water recipe...the airfryer is so strong that it just dries out the stuff. If you do it I recommend getting a big ziplock bag and wrapping it around. Every once in a while I open it in to let in some fresh air☺️
@@EastMeetsKitchen my air fryer is the size of a microwave, and allows for a lot of air flow, and I can manually control the fan as well, so I'm pretty optimistic it would work fairly well. I'll get some mold and tell you how it goes!
Hello, I saw your comment about keeping boiling water on the side for those who want to try this without the yogurt function, but obviously that's going to be quite energy consuming. Would you have any suggestions for people with an instant pot but an earlier version (ie. without the yogurt function)?
I was trying to looking at yogurt options to see if I can use the same strategies, but most rely on overheating and then residual heat to go down, or reheat every few hours, both of which wouldn't make sense with a days-long process like koji.
Would appreciate your thoughts, thank you!
Love making rice Koji, it smells a bit like tropical fruit, and then more mushroomy and chestnutty,
I made a couple of misos,
The hot water bottle method in a portable cooler worked for me, but i checked the temperature very often, also i did inoculate at 30°C,
I did get one fail once caused by trying to make it work with boiled rice (it doesn't work trust me, i mean it still produces enough enzymes but you will get yeast and bacteria growing in it and it will start to ferment while u try to grow more Koji)
Best methods that i have tried are steaming the rice, or cooking in the microwave with the right amount of water in a microwave rice cooker container
Thanks man. Been looking for low teck approaches.
I didn’t see you add the spores. You went straight from steaming to putting it into the Instant Pot. At what point in the video do you put them in?
Great video and naration
Still wanna c that other way of making koji fast mentioned at end of video
almost like nepali marchaa for making millet wine
The internet says the normal temperature of an instant pot is about 110. Isn't that too hot?
It wants to be at 80 to 90... 100 max.
Can I use Angel rice leaven?
Based on your experience in making Koji, had you ever encountered your Koji emit a green tea aroma?
You are so OC and cute… so articulate and passionate!
希望有中文字幕，謝謝
Today, I watched again your video and towards the end of your video @24:10 you clearly stated that you saw a Japanese person shakes a plastic box to loosen its contents, the Rice Koji. I, too, have seen that video and I believe this is the video (ua-cam.com/video/bE2n5w3rOec/v-deo.html).
where is the part when you inoculate culture?
You should do a skin care channel. You have a nice face.
It's so hard to follow this. Too much rambling.
This uses an Instapot, a brand name. Most pressure cookers do not have a 'youghurt setting ' as they are pressure cookers, not multi cookers.
A multi-cooker is not the same as a pressure cooker.
Pressure cookers can be (and are) often stove top.
So the title is misleading.
This is literally hair-splitting semantics. My "air fryer" can shut off the fan and be used like an oven, and even cook real rotisserie meat. It's still an air fryer.
My pressure cooker has a yogurt setting and it's not Instant Pot brand
Hey Craig. So if you don't have one with the setting what you can do is try to wrap the whole pot/bowl in some blankets and place it in a box with some boiling water to the side. You're really just trying to get a low warm atmosphere. -- to your comment...haha unfortunately I can't make my channel as "click-baity" as many of the other YT channels I watch. Sometimes I wish I could...get some more views😜 But in search, the word "multi cooker" is not as widely recognised as pressure cooker. People don't generally type multi cooker. And for anyone without a yogurt setting, hopefully I was able to give you some more ways to grow the koji in the video. It's just sometimes short of putting the photo in the thumbnail ☺️, you have to watch a bit of it to see if the recipe will suit what you have available or do you have to adjust. That's just how content which I freely distribute to you on my own dime works.
To much talk
I would really like to listen to you, but unfortunately there’s this incredibly irritating music in the background that’s competing with you, so is it at all possible for you to do this video without music in the background?
too much talking.
1:25 ... a vegan that wants it to taste 'more meaty'...that is the greatest contradiction ever...Are you missing something in your diet .... like 'meat' lol.
You do you.
@@georgekatsinis5224 wow fantastic, what an educated response. You are brilliantly... stupid.