Brad Makes Miso Paste

I did, thank you for noticing, Vinny.

Cleaned it up, took it all off,

guy even shaped up the face a little.

Whatever, let's get going.

(beep)

Hey guys, today on It's Alive,

we're going to be making a little bit of miso.

I've made it before several times and

it does require a little bit of time.

Is this episode gonna air like two years from now?

Well, funny you asked, actually you're kinda

blowing the secret for us.

Sorry ...

But I have some nice ones set up

that I started a year ago, that have been aging for a year.

This whole show is a lie!

(laughs)

(upbeat theme music)

Traditionally miso is made from soybeans

but you can pretty much miso just about anything.

I know those guys over at Momufoku, David Chang and all,

they have a line of misos, where it's like all soy,

you can do chickpeas, people have done corn,

you can do all kinds of stuff.

You can miso just about anything.

Miso you, Vinny.

(menacing trombone)

So what I did is, I had some soybeans,

one part soybean, one part chickpea,

one part great Northern bean.

So I cooked those all here,

so it's a total of four cups of beans

that I added to 10 cups of water.

The next ingredient in the miso is koji.

Koji is a rice grain that is inoculated with a mold

so it's pretty much just covered in a mold.

You can get this on (beep) dot com

or a Japanese supermarket, if you're lucky enough

to have one; we've got one here in New York called Sunrise.

It's wonderful, check it out if you haven't been

and you're in the area.

Then I got 20 grams of salt.

Check this out, Vinny, I got the good salt too, babe.

There's only what, there's three ingredients in here.

You might as well splurge a little and get good ingredients.

So we cooked those and now I'm gonna strain 'em,

but we gotta reserve the liquid because the liquid

is gonna go into the miso making process.

(water straining)

Whew, that was good, right?

So I got about five, four and a half cups of water

of the bean cooking liquid.

I'm gonna need four cups, so that worked out great.

The next move is our beans,

let me go get a big bowl, alright, hold on.

And we're gonna mash these beans up so I like

to get one with a little bit of a flat bottom,

just like you (beeps).

Temperature is important,

so you don't want your beans to get cold

but you don't want 'em too hot.

I'm gonna stick that in there.

We're at 130 and climbing, 140 degrees.

You can't add the koji until 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

I'm gonna go ahead and place this, our cooking liquid,

in the fridge and I'm gonna let that chill a little bit.

Alright buddy?

So here's our beans, nice and cooked, nice clean hands.

You want nice clean hands.

And what we're going to do is just mash these up.

You don't need to pulverize it

into a complete mushy paste.

You can, I've done that, it works fine,

but I like to leave a little bit of texture to it,

not a lot but a little bit.

So like I said, we're gonna be making a red miso

so that's gonna age for, I mean you can go

a minimum six months, up to two years,

some people go four years.

So I'm gonna keep mashing.

You in here, buddy?

Put that thing on zoom.

I kinda like it a little silky, a little smooth,

not a ton of texture,

but that's completely your, up to you,

it's not gonna affect the process,

it's just gonna affect the texture,

the final texture of your product.

Oh Vinny, I'm having a little bit of a flashback.

(sniffs)

You know what that smells like, bud?

'Member that time be made beer

at the old Suarez family brewery?

Check out the episode.

It's smells just like that spent mash that we drained out.

Remember I said and I stuck my face in it.

(chewing sounds)

(laughs)

(ahhs)

Oh, by no means is that underrated.

Anyway, let me see where this is at.

Wow, we dropped about 20 degrees,

just in the mashing process.

So we're at 115, I'm gonna throw this into the fridge here.

In the meantime, Vinny, while that comes to temperature,

let's talk about what we're gonna put it in.

I got this here nice crock, little fermenting crock,

pretty nice, check it out, @bostonpotter,

hooked me up with this little fermenting crock that he makes

and today we're gonna fill it up with miso,

so you want to get something that's non-reactive,

it's not gonna have a negative corrosion effect,

because a decent amount of salt, excuse me.

I washed it before with a little white vinegar,

distilled white vinegar and then just rinsed it out

with a little water.

(sighs)

Now we just wait for that to come to temp, Vinny.

Where we at?

98 degrees, that's fine.

The cooking bean liquid is a little bit warmer,

By the time we mix it, it's gonna be perfect.

Alright Vinny, we have nothing to worry about.

We got our mashed up beans, okay.

We're gonna add four cups of water total,

the bean cooking water.

What we got here?

(menacing music)

We have about four and a half so I'll leave a little bit.

I'm gonna add just a little bit now, just to get it

so I can mix it up a little easier, okay.

We're gonna add all 18 grams of salt,

so I'm just gonna add a little bit too now,

get that in there nice and just start to mix it up.

And it's interesting,

we get two birds ...

(metal dropping)

Claire, you alright?

I'm good.

Alright.

A little bonus for you guys, in the miso making process,

there's a byproduct, which is essentially tamari,

which is a gluten free soy sauce.

So we have these beans, there's water in it,

there's salt in it and there's the beans and the koji

and over time, oh, we'll get to that,

stay with me here Vinny.

That's why I never did good in school.

Teacher's talking about something, reading something,

and I'm in there bouncing off the walls,

staring at freaking squirrels in the trees, you know.

And now we're gonna add the koji

and this was five cups of koji.

We mix that right in, I'm gonna do it

in little batches here.

Now I'm gonna put on some gloves and do this by hand.

Alright, Vinny?

Uh, (beeps expletive).

(beeps)

Whoa, Jesus Vin, that's a new angle pal.

Nice to meet ya.

Now if you wanted to, if you wanted a much smoother miso,

at the end, you could take those koji granulars

and put them in like a Vitamix or something

and buzz it into a powder.

But that's not what we're doing this time.

I'm sure there's a bunch of you guys already making

your own miso out there and stuff.

I'd love to hear what you've miso'd, alright Vinny?

Make a miso out of you, Vinny.

(menacing music)

Say that alright?

So now we're gonna pack it into the crock.

Remember we reserved two tablespoons of salt.

Take one tablespoon, you don't have to measure it,

just by eye, half of this and you want

to coat the bottom of your crock.

What this does, I believe, is just help, you know,

prevent any kind of molds or anything forming on the bottom.

It might also help in the drawing out of liquid.

And then reserve some to coat the top too,

but we'll get there.

So you want to pack that down nice.

Now I do have a decent amount left over.

I have a smaller crock vessel I'll fill up.

Like I said, it takes a year, so there's no point

in doing a cup of it, you know what I mean?

I'll save this; I'll do this later.

(upbeat music)

Oh, you're back.

Okay, let's get an internal temperature real quick.

It's dropping, when we went in there, it was about

102 degrees actually, but you want to be

as close to 100 as possible.

That temperature is like a real happy spot for the koji

and that heat will start to activate fermentation,

which is good, so what I like to do

is I take a piece of cardboard, do a little trace,

alright, and we're gonna go ahead and cut that out.

I've got this little razor here, be careful.

You can really cut the hell out of yourself with this thing.

Trust me, I've done it.

One time I was cutting a piece of Plexiglass,

previous life I was a glazer, not a great one,

but I did it for a few years.

I was cutting a piece of Plexiglass and I was holding it

and it slipped and it went, brand new razor,

I had just put the thing in and it went (cutting sound),

look, you can still see the scar.

See that line right there Vinny?

This has nothing to do with miso.

15 stitches, right down to the bone, freaking terrible.

Alright, so don't do that.

Pop that right out, look at that, huh.

Place this in here

and that's gonna be our lid

and then we gotta do a little piece of parchment too.

Check this out Vinny, trace that, right like that,

we're going in with the knife, voila!

(crumbling paper)

Parchment, alright.

Now, that remaining tablespoon of salt,

you just want to go ahead and sprinkle that

right on there and that acts as a nice

little protective barrier too.

If you find pieces of mold, it can be white mold

or a little bit of green mold,

well you can just scrape that off, it's fine,

put a little more salt on.

Black mold, no good, you might want to start over.

Here's my nice little bop, bop.

Look how good that fits Vinny, get in there

and now we're gonna put this on,

which is our major seal topper, okay,

and that gets pushed in like that, okay,

and what I have here is some stainless steel ball bearings.

Okay, I found these, thousands of them.

No they're not Claire's, I found them.

Yeah, I found them at the World Trade Center.

Claire, Karla remembers.

There were buckets of them.

They were gonna throw them away.

(mumbles)

Perfect for pie weights, actually, but back to the miso.

So what you wanna do, you want to weigh it down

and that will help push out the liquid.

It starts off giving off a lot because there's

a lot of moisture, but as it dries out,

it will excrete less and less soy sauce

until nothing is coming out.

12 six, is it the sixth?

I think it's the seventh.

12 seven then, miso medley,

because we used three different types of beans.

So yeah, we're gonna put this over

in the fermentation station over there (train whistle)

and we'll check back in a week.

Oh, one last tip, in the young stages,

in the young stages of miso, I like to put it

on like a little sheet tray or in like a little vessel,

in case you have a little overflow, you know what I mean?

But come back in a week.

Bah!

(upbeat music)

Vinny, after you, get in there, don't touch nothin'.

What did we come in here for?

(laughs)

(beep)

Alright, so it was a week ago, we set up our miso paste

and now it's been one week.

That liquid, I'm gonna strain it off into a little vessel

and we're gonna reserve that.

I wish you could help me sometimes Vinny.

Look at that, they don't teach you that in culinary school.

Eventually it will stop producing as much liquid.

It will continue for a while,

but that's how much soy sauce came off in one week

and I probably spilled another quarter cup on the floor,

on the table there.

I put the lids back on, so the weights go back on,

maybe we'll do something real fun, real quick,

see what the internal temperature is in there.

68, 68 and a half.

That was pointless.

I'm going to go back and put these

in the fermentation station right here (train whistle).

Let them hang out for you know,

another 11 and a half months.

And now we're gonna do a little magic here.

Drum roll please (drums).

The swap of all swaps Vinny, the one year, okay.

I set these up 2/24; I think this might just be soybeans.

Regardless, you'll get the same outcome,

so that was still very gold, still very,

the color was still very blonde, this is the tamari

that we drained off the one week old miso.

As time goes by, it gradually starts to get darker.

It starts real blonde and eventually it gets,

soy sauce looks the same color as that there.

This is the tamari from these vessels.

There was a lot more of it, I've been using it,

gave some to some friends and what I do

is collect it and just keep adding it to the same jar.

Sometimes once I get to the real aging of it,

it just starts to give off that real dark molasses

kind of miso soy sauce.

I reserve a little bit of that separately,

just because its like real special,

put that on a little bit of like raw fish

or just on some rice or something.

It's pretty special.

It's nothing like any of the soy sauces

that you're buying in a store.

I can go ahead and decant this,

take it out of the vessel,

in case you don't know what that means, Vinny.

And look, you can see on the edge, that's how dark

that miso, the soy sauce comes out,

but here's just the straight miso paste.

You're gonna have some real nice ways to use miso,

obviously a real easy thing is miso soup,

make a nice little dashi, which is bonito flakes

and some kombu, some water, just kinda steep,

look that up if you want to do it

and then you can add your own little miso and some seaweed,

really easy, really comforting, delicious

and you can add dressings or marinades,

it like breaks down and dissolves into liquids pretty well.

Do some real nice like black cod or some halibut,

a nice white fish.

It's a great way to add an extra depth of flavor.

I mean sometimes I even like to take a tablespoon of it,

drop it in a braise and let it melt into there.

Once I take it out of this vessel, I usually just pack it

into either like plain containers or Ball jars, something.

What I do, you know and you go get the little miso

from the supermarket, the supers market and

it has that little like topper that's on it,

that kind of paper thing, I store it like that too.

I make a little topper for it, 'cause it can start to

harden and get a little crusty, you know what I mean?

You just want to keep the oxygen off it,

sealed container in the fridge,

I'm pretty sure it lasts almost forever,

so make miso, have fun, cook with it,

let me know what you like to cook miso with

and put it in the 'ol comments and bon appetit.

Yeah, you think that was good?

I didn't bring enough to the table.

No, I'm not disappointed in myself Vince.

(beep)

Oh, what's that sound like Vinny?

(squishing sounds)

(beep)

[Brad] Won't you be my neighbor?

(laughs)

Isn't that what the same song, Mr. Rogers?

(mumbles)

(beeps)

But it's delicious, use it, what?

Nothing.

We're talking to each other.

(upbeat music)