Taco Miso

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Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:11 pm

I've been researching miso for the past couple weeks. I've purchased some koji (some rice and some barley) and I'm trying to decide if I need a crock or can do it in jars.

While doing this research, I've come up with an idea and I wonder if anyone knows why this might be a bad plan. I was thinking about using things I make tacos out of to make a miso. Pintos, hominy, (dried) tomatoes, onions, garlic, chilies and maybe(?) leaves and olives. Is this mad?
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby khoomeizhi on Thu Oct 30, 2014 5:14 pm

i have no experience to say whether or not it's mad, but it sounds awesome.

cumin? oregano?
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:15 am

Yeah. I'd at least boil the beans with epazote, oregano, cumin and garlic. maybe add more to the miso mix, too.
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby WWFSM on Sun Nov 30, 2014 8:40 pm

Taco Miso?!?! Wow, that sounds amazing. Did you try it? Did it work?

You could try it two different ways, either ferment with the flavours, or make the miso as per normal, then mix the flavours in and ferment it another week or so. Personally I can see the latter working better as it would be like the traditional miso pickling bed. The Book of Miso (linked to below) has some fantastic ideas for what they call fingerlicking miso. This might be a good place to start for inspiration on what method would work best.

You asked about the size of the vat - officially one gallon is the minimum size for making miso http://books.google.ca/books?id=SKqJsiZ49HkC&lpg=PP1&dq=miso&pg=PA168#v=onepage&q&f=true, however, for home based miso making, I suspect it's more a guideline than a hard and fast rule, especially for sweet (fast fermented) miso.

If you give the Taco Miso a try, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE let us know how it goes. Sounds amazing.
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Mon Dec 01, 2014 2:22 pm

Not yet. I've been putting it off with a lot of other stuff going on. I'm also not sure I have a place to ferment the miso that is neither too hot nor too cold. Basement rooms are around 62F. Garage is often freezing. Chest fridge is 42F. Our currently out-of-commission basement shower might be 58F or so while the room is mostly shut off from the rest of the air. Still need to pick up an extra crock.
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby WWFSM on Mon Dec 01, 2014 2:48 pm

Let us know when you do try it. I'm eager to see what method you choose and how it turns out.

Will you be doing a sweet (short term) or red (long term) miso? Maybe a test batch of sweet, then in a month a big batch of red?
Doing my best to be the change I want to see in the world, one meal at a time.
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Currently Culturing
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Tue Sep 01, 2015 7:28 am

Well OK, then! I have finally gotten around to it. :-)

I reviewed the instructions in The Art of Miso and settled on combining the recipes for sweet white and finger lickin' miso, and struck out on my own. My first two crocks of miso are still aging in the basement and may do for another year or two, but this one is supposed to be a short ferment and I plan to open it every week to witness the progress.

Into a large, glass bowl, I added:
  • 6 cups of pintos
  • 3 cups of hominy
  • 8 cups of barley koji
  • 1 can of black olives, crushed
  • 1/2 cup of sauerkraut (current batch, fermented for eight months), for microbes and moisture-over-time
  • 3 oz sun-dried tomatoes, snipped into strips and slightly rehydrated through microwave steaming
  • 5 Tbs Real Salt
  • ~2.5 cups spring water
  • 3 chilies (pasilla, ancho, hatch green), snipped up into thin strips
  • 5 big stalks of cilantro, bolted to seed, woody bits removed and snipped into small bits, including coriander seeds
  • an unmeasured quantity (1/4-1 tsp?) of each: Mexican oregano, cumin, epazote, chipotle, cayenne
  • ~2 Tbs chikpea miso from South River
I mashed it by hand, squeezing it in my fists. This caused the pintos to become mash but did very little to the hominy. Normally, you'd want to mash some proportion of the beans, but I figured this was a good stand-in for that practice. The character of this mixture is way different than my earlier batches with much lower proportion of koji.

I salted a one-gallon crock, filled it with balls of the mixture, taking care to push out air-pockets, salted the surface, put a plate atop the miso and weighted it with a one-gallon "pickle" jar filled with water.

I'll provide updates as I see the progress. I'm excited!
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Tue Sep 08, 2015 8:18 am

I checked it out after a week and there was a shallow slimy brown liquid on top (tamari?) that smelled a little like miso and didn't taste gross. The body of the mixture didn't seem to have changed much at all though, so I re-leveled it, closed it back up and will check again next weekend.
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Thu Oct 08, 2015 7:38 am

I intend to do another check-in this weekend, but a few weeks ago I took some pictures and wrote a thing about it on Google Plus. I wanted to link those pictures in here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/11718457573 ... 3vU4KxPjvF
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Re: Taco Miso

Postby Christopher Weeks on Sun Nov 22, 2015 10:09 am

Here are another few pics of this miso from today. It's gone super-sour. I'm not sure what to do with it at this point.

https://plus.google.com/117184575738442 ... a4pFppoWHu
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