Riana Lagarde in France sent me links to photos of artist Michel Blazy’s gorgeous kombucha art. “He calls it Jus de Nympheas and it is various kombucha scobys made to look like lily pads in the style of Monet’s garden.”
Photo below by Debra Solomon. More at http://www.flickr.com/photos/
During my visit to New York, I had the opportunity to visit the testing laboratory kitchen of chef David Chang of Momofuku fame. My guide was kitchen lab director Dan Felder, a fellow fermentation geek. They have teamed up with Harvard microbiologists and have even been publishing scholarly papers on some of their experiments. They are doing a few things I’ve never tried, seen, or heard of. The most exciting was making miso from nuts and seeds rather than just legumes.
I sampled the flavors pictured above, and loved their rich flavors. Pistachio miso was my favorite. The nut misos were low-salt sweet misos, fermented for just a short time to avoid the oils going rancid. I don’t have recipes to provide, but I share this as inspiration for fellow experimentalists.
Another innovative project I sampled was koji, simply dried in a dehydrator and ground into a powder. They were using it with salt as a curing agent for lardo, and as a seasoning for fish. Koji has a distinctive sweet flavor that could be used to season many different things.
