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Taiwan friends, I'll be doing a talk in Taipei in

Taiwan friends, I'll be doing a talk in Taipei in two weeks. Link to details and registration in my bio. Please help spread the word to other interested people!

For years I have been using what I know as "Chines

For years I have been using what I know as "Chinese Yeast Balls," jiu qu in Chinese, widely available in the U.S., to ferment rice into mijiu. But what exactly they are, and how they are made, has been a bit of a mystery to me until now. In rural Taitung County in Taiwan, we spent an afternoon with Pao Ma, a Taiwanese indigenous woman, who showed us the traditional method of Amis people of Kaadaadaan village where she lives.
Home brewed alcohol was illegal in Taiwan for many decades, until 2002, so these methods were driven underground, but through the efforts of Pao Ma and others, this ancestral wisdom has been revived, and is spreading.
Pao Ma's process begins with 10 plants. I cannot identify most of them, but one is a local variety of basil. The plants are harvested in spring, before they flower, and boiled for four hours. She emphasized that the plants are for flavor, not for the microbes on them. This suggests that you can select aromatic herbs in your area, or dried ones you like, and experiment using them. The herbal concentrate is cooled and she makes a large batch each spring and stores it in the refrigerator.

Pao ma mixes this herbal concentrate with sticky rice flour to make a dough. She adds about 700 ml herbal concentrate to 800 grams of flour. She doesn't add the liquid all at once, mixing it into the flour a little at a time, and only adding as much as necessary to yield a smooth elastic dough. Once it's kneaded into a smooth dough, she weighs out 22 gram portions and rolls each into a smooth ball
She arranges the balls so they are close to each other but not touching, in a basket, or a metal hotel tray, or, in our case, so we could take some with us, in a cardboard food carry-out box.
The starter Pao Ma uses is a previous jiu qu ball. She crushed a dry ball into powder using a mortar and pestle, and sprinkled the powder onto the surfaces of the balls. She stretched rubber bands around the hotel pan full of balls, and draped a towel over it, the rubber bands keeping the towel from touching the surfaces. We closed the top of our carry-out box, brought it back to where we are staying, and wrapped it in a jacket to keep it warm. More below...

Akun in rural Yilan County in Taiwan learned from

Akun in rural Yilan County in Taiwan learned from local elders to make soy sauce, as well as furu, douchi, and other ferments from the qu I detailed in my previous post. I tasted her soy sauce, and it was wonderfully rich and delicious. What's notable about her soy sauce method, which makes it particularly accessible, is that the process takes only three weeks, compared to the year or longer fermentation of the Japanese styles I've made in the past. Akun uses her homemade qu, but you could try her method with soybean koji.

Whatever volume of soy qu or koji you have, you'll need a vessel with a capacity about 5 times that volume.

Here are the steps Akun follows to make soy sauce:

1. Measure out water, about 4 times the volume of the koji. Akun recommends leaving the water exposed to the sun for a day. It wasn't clear what the idea behind that is, but that's how she learned to do it from the elders who taught her.

2. Calculate the combined weight of the soy qu (or koji) and the water, add 4-6% salt based on that weight, and stir well to dissolve salt in the water.

3. Add soy qu or koji to the brine and stir. Mark the level of the combined ingredients in the vessel as a reference point, as you will be adding additional water to account for evaporation.

4. Ferment in a place exposed to the sun if possible. Expose fermenting soy sauce to the sun when it's sunny, but otherwise keep it protected from rain and dew. Stir daily, before sunrise if possible. After a few days the beans will float to the top; keep stirring daily.

5. Add additional sun exposed water as necessary to maintain the level you marked at the start.

6. After three weeks of fermentation, transfer soy sauce to a big pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for two hours with the beans, then strain out the beans. (Akun says some people then cover the beans with additional water, to just cover them, and cook them again for another two hours, then strain them out, a sort of "second pressing".)

7. Return the strained soy sauce (with the second pressing liquid if you do that) to the pot, and simmer for about eight hours, reducing and concentrating the soy sauce.
8. Allow soy sauce to cool. Bottle and enjoy.

We had a very informative visit with a young woman

We had a very informative visit with a young woman named Akun in rural Yilan County in Taiwan. She learned from local elders to make qu (like koji) using botanical starters. She uses leaves of a plant she calls huang jing (Vitex Negundo or Chinese chastetree). She uses a broad shallow basket for the fermentation. She does not use incubation, but only does it in the warm part of the year, and ferments it for a week. Here are the steps she uses for soybean qu:

1. Soak beans overnight, then boil for about two hours, until cooked but not mushy.

2. Spread beans out in basket and dry in the sun for a day, until they are no longer sticky.

3. Arrange beans in the basket in a donut shape, with a hole in the center.

4. Cover beans with lots of the leaves, then wrap with a blanket and leave them in a warm spot.

5. After about 3 days, the beans will be generating heat, which you can feel from the bottom of the basket. Once it is generating heat, spread beans out into an even layer and continue to ferment, checking periodically and mixing beans around to release heat.

6. Continue to ferment until beans sporulate and turn yellow-green, about a week after the start of fermentation.

7. Rinse and dry the qu before using, and for storage, dry further in the sun.

In the next post, I'll detail Akun's method for using this qu to make soy sauce, a much shorter (3 week) process than I've ever tried or heard of.

For rice qu, Akun uses brown rice, and steams it in a rice cooker without soaking. Otherwise her process is the same as for soybeans, except that instead of forming it into a donut as with the soybeans, she mounds it in the basket. Everything else is the same.

This is fermented and cured tofu that looks and ta

This is fermented and cured tofu that looks and tastes something like parmesan cheese, made by Taiwanese chef @seanchen_. His tofu cheese is not exactly vegan, because he ferments it with salted egg yolks. But it sure is savory, rich, and delicious.

Here is his process, as he described it to me. @seanchen_ please clarify in the comments if I misunderstood anything!

1. Prepare a 2-3% brine and ferment chopped cabbage in it for about a month.

2. Prepare salted egg yolks. You can either use the yolks of salted whole eggs, or salt yolks yourself by separating eggs and gently placing yolks onto a bed of salt, then covering with more salt. Leave them a few days until they are firm and easy to handle. (I'm sure vegan friends can experiment with other sources of fatty protein-rich funk, such as douchi/fermented soybeans, or maybe nuts?)

3. Slice tofu and sun dry tofu slices for half a day.

4. Add the sun dried tofu and the salted egg yolks to the cabbage brine and ferment for about three months.

5. Remove the tofu from the brine, let it dry a bit, and then cure it in coarse salt for at least six months, or longer. Then grate or shave it, and enjoy your tofu cheese.

Thanks to @paopopnpickles and @sacco_botto for these images. I was so enthralled I forgot to take photos.

I arrived in Taiwan a few days ago and my fermenta

I arrived in Taiwan a few days ago and my fermentation adventure here is off to a great start. I'm traveling with @marajaneking and @saccobotto, my collaborators on People's Republic of Fermentation (available on YouTube) 7 years ago, along with our new collaborators @paopopnpickles pickles and @ourcookquest. We taught a workshop at @fermeny, where we encountered great enthusiasm and excitement. We visited a third generation fish sauce producer, fermenting fish sauce in a courtyard in the middle of Taipei. The fish sauce was delicious, but the most interesting thing we saw there was proprietor Min Xing's experiment to make a vegan fish sauce equivalent from pineapple! Food Writer Andy Xu @ingredients_tw organized a lunch for us at Shin Yeh, showcasing the incredible range of fermented flavors used in the cuisine here, including soy sauce, vinegar, tofuru, douchi, and, in the most memorable dish of the meal, pickled daikon. The daikons were featured in a soup called Three Generations Soup, with fresh daikon, two-year fermented daikon, and five-year fermented daikon, darkened by time. We went on a foraging expedition to Pinglin, an hour from Taipei, where among other things, we found a Miscanthus grass that Mara harvested to use as a starter for Chu (Chinese koji), from a thousands of years old recipe. Our foraging guides were part of the incredible @grasslands_tw collective. At their Taipei space, we saw and sampled fermentation projects by collective members and chef @seanchen_ . Many delicious sauces, and an experimental fermented tofu that had a texture and flavor reminiscent of Parmesan cheese. I'll post the details of that separately. We're off to a delicious and educational start....

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