Some of you may recall that a year ago, I made miso. The year’s fermentation was over a couple of weeks ago but today was the first chance I had to check out the results. They were a bit surprising.

Six months ago, I took a sneak peak to see how the miso was progressing, so I was expecting the miso to look nearly the same as it did then, and taste maybe just a bit mellower. Here’s what I found:

The label on the crock tells me it’s ready.

Hey, there’s my small molcajete! (I tend to use my molcajetes as weights just as often as I use them for grinding.)

And the plate the sushi place near Luke and Lanet’s gave me!

I didn’t find any soy sauce like I did at six months, but what’s this? The miso looks much darker.

Removing the plastic wrap proved my eyes were not deceiving me: the miso really had turned from yellow to brown.

At first I was disconcerted by this unexpected color change. But it didn’t smell strongly or bad: just pleasantly of miso. So I tasted a little bit and it tasted good…really good. I also remembered that I originally followed two recipes from different sources: the instructions GEM Cultures sent me, and the recipe in Wild Fermentation, and that though the two had been nearly identical, the former had called it “yellow” miso and the latter “red”, so I’d been very confused as to what to call mine. And at six months, it sure looked yellow. But I guess what happened is I made red miso.

This is how much I have:

I’m going to let some of it age even further by keeping it in a cool place in the basement, but out of the fridge.

It’s MUCH better than it was at six months. The texture is very much improved. You can still see the koji, which makes it appear to not be perfectly smooth, but it feels really nice. It’s like a very, very soft clay. I’d venture to say it tastes better than the red miso I have from the store. (It’s also darker than the red miso I have from the store.) I wish I could describe it better than just saying it tastes like…miso. It’s mellower than it was at six months, but much more complex. At six months, I still thought the store-bought stuff tasted better. This – this is pretty good stuff.

To celebrate, I made miso soup for lunch. I may already have put miso soup up here somewhere, but well, if I did, this post is better. I don’t measure anything. This makes about two servings.

Miso Soup

Put a 4″ inch piece of kombu in two cups of water in a saucepan.

Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

Keeping the heat on medium low, remove the kombu (you can eat it if you want) and add 1/2 teaspoon or so of dried wakame. I also add a splash of sake and a splash of rice vinegar, but both are optional.

Add some diced tofu. Fortunately I just made a batch today, as it would have been a shame to stick store-bought tofu into miso soup made with homemade miso!

Put a few tablespoons of miso in a small bowl – how much depends on how strong the miso you’re using is – and add some of the hot water from the pot, about 1/4 cup. Whisk together.

Pour the miso into the pot and add some chopped scallions. You’ll commonly see it advised not to let the soup boil after adding the miso because boiling kills the beneficial enzymes. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but scalding hot miso soup isn’t nice anyway, so keep it just under a boil until you’re ready to eat.

I also made Chili-Miso Noodles by cooking some udon, and whisking together 2 tablespoons of miso, 1 tablespoon of chili broad bean paste, a couple splashes each of rice vinegar and mirin, and about 1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame oil, heating this mixture briefly, and stirring into the noodles, then garnishing with scallions.

A very miso-y meal.

I know some of you are suffering with me in the mid-Atlantic region, which was hit with two blizzards/near blizzards in a span of four days. We’ve enjoyed several years of mild winters and Virginia in particular does not budget or prepare for much snow, so this has been crippling. The federal and county governments have been closed for days and many side streets are impassable, even those that have been plowed. Four-wheel drive vehicles seem to be doing okay on our street, but neither Mark nor I can even get our cars out of the driveway. There’s a good 4″ of snow on the road – all the plow did was sort of push it down, not push it away – and Mark had to help the mail man get his truck out of an intersection the other day when it got stuck. (It just so happened that I’d made Mark lug home kitty litter from Wegmans, which was convenient timing for the mail man!) I’ve been walking up to Wegmans on good (non-actively blizzarding) days for exercise and to get lightweight things, but we won’t be driving anywhere for several more days. The street is hard to walk on because in most places, the snow is not compacted down, so you really have to trudge. And where it is compacted and smooth, it’s icy. Basically I AM MOVING TO AUSTRALIA. Or if that’s impossible, California, even if I am pretty sure they’re due for a huge earthquake. Anyway, I haven’t taken too many pictures, because I’m just sort of disgusted with snow, but here are a few from the first storm.

Mark’s been, bizarrely, excited about shoveling. Which is fine with me! He looks like The Little Shoveler Who Could in this pic.

This is my car. I had to go out at 3 am during the first blizzard and wipe it off because it’s a convertible and I don’t want the heavy snow to break the top, so this is just what snow was added to it until the next morning. By the end of the day yesterday, the level of snow was higher than the hood of the car; it looked like I’d driven into a bank of snow.

This is the side yard. If you look carefully, you can see this is a fenced area. Inside that fence is the pool. Thinking about the pool during this weather makes me very sad. Especially since my swim classes have been cancelled all week so I haven’t been doing any swimming.

I hope everyone else who’s been affected by these storms has been staying safe and warm. Unlike my poor friend Nona, we’ve had power the whole time, and we can both work from home, so we’re faring better than many people and I’ve no right to complain. Except I opened my last bottle of red wine last night and once that’s gone, I may have to complain. I think instead of juice and other healthful things, tomorrow’s trip to Wegmans is going to have to involve the wine store.

I’m sure my Canadian friends are going to laugh at me again. But I’m REALLY over snow. And they’re predicting more on Monday.

I make tofu just about every weekend, and last night I dutifully began soaking my soybeans as per usual. Today, though, I found that I just didn’t have it in me to make the tofu. It’s not hard, and I’ve done it so often I can do it in my sleep, but for some reason I just really did not feel like making tofu. That, however, left me with a bowl of soaked soybeans, which I then decided would have to be the basis of dinner. I’ve made barbecued soybeans before, and those are good, but doing that would have required making another dish or two to round out the meal and I was really lacking in motivation. I’ve also made a kimchi soybean dish that is really good, but alas, we don’t have any kimchi right now. So I did a bit of internet sleuthing for ideas (there are surprisingly few whole soybean recipes in all my cookbooks) and ran this one by Mark. He liked the sound of it, so I have veganized it for him, and by extension, you!

Soybean Casserole

1/2 cup bulgur
2 cups vegan “beef” broth, divided
1 onion, chopped
pinch fennel seeds
1/4 tsp celery seeds
1 green bell pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 carrot, grated
red pepper flakes, to taste
sherry, wine, broth, or water for deglazing (optional)
1/2 cup tomato sauce
1 14 oz. can crushed tomatoes (I used fire roasted)
1 1/2 cups cooked rice
2 cups cooked soybeans (this is probably about 1 can if you are lazy)
hot sauce, to taste (optional) (I used garlic-flavoured Tabasco)
salt or seasoning salt, to taste (I used Vegeta)
vegan cheese, for topping (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bring 1 cup of the broth to a boil and add to the bulgur in a bowl. Cover and set aside.

I had frozen rice in the freezer. This is how I defrosted it: I sat it in some boiling water (I love that electric kettle!).

Grate the carrot.

Chop the onion and bell pepper; mince or press the garlic.

If you have an oven-safe Dutch oven that you’d like to bake the casserole in, use that. Otherwise, you can use a skillet and a separate casserole dish. In either case, heat some oil in the Dutch oven or skillet, then add the onions, fennel seeds, and celery seeds and saute until soft.

Add the bell pepper and garlic and saute for another few minutes.

Add the carrots and fry for a bit, using sherry or wine (or broth or water) to deglaze the pot if necessary.

If you are using a Dutch oven, add the rest of the ingredients, stir, and bring to a boil. If you used a skillet, scrape the contents into a casserole dish and then add the rest of the ingredients and mix.

Bake for 45 minutes.

Optionally, top with shredded or grated vegan cheese and return to the oven. The Whole Foods near me have started carrying Sheese, which I am super excited about, so I used a bit of that:

Bake another few minutes and remove from oven again.

It ain’t pretty, but it was easy to make and tasty!

By the way, instead of the bulgur, you could use packaged vegan “ground beef” (mince), which I think would have been pretty good if you like that sort of stuff. I’ll probably try that next time, although the bulgur method is the more healthy.

Some of you may recall that back in January I made miso. It takes a year to fully ferment, but you can try it after six months and my six months were up on July 19th. It dawned on me today that July 19th is not, in fact, weeks in the future, but in the past. WHERE HAS THIS SO-CALLED SUMMER GONE?? Anyway, the anticipation was killing me. Had I been incubating something horrible for the last six months or was there really, truly edible miso in that white crock??

Several scenarios sailed through my head, but what I was not expecting was to remove the weight and find…

a dark liquid covering the plate. (Those lighter-colored things on the right are the pattern on the otherwise gray plate. This picture is a bit of an optical illusion.)

It dawned me, however, that what that liquid was was soy sauce! Indeed, I think it is, because you make soy sauce from soy and koji as well. It was pretty salty (I was real brave and tasted it) and there wasn’t much of it, so I just drained it off, removed the plate and the plastic wrap, and discovered this:

Miso! I think the parts that are grayish are really just indentations from the plastic wrap, and the circle is the indentation from the bottom of the plate the weight sat on. Nonetheless, I’ve read that the top layer of miso isn’t very good, so I scraped it away …

… and removed some of the good stuff with a spoon.

It’s real miso! It’s not gross! I’m as surprised as you are, trust me. To taste it, I heated a small amount of water to just under boiling and stirred some miso in. This is the most basic miso soup you can make.

It tasted fine, so I removed a little bit to use now, then packed the rest of it back down …

… covered with fresh plastic wrap …

… put the plate back on it (here you can see the pattern that looked a bit weird under the soy sauce), and the weight, and sealed it back up to wait another six months.

Here’s the bit I reserved; I’ll think of something fun to do with some of it this week. I have plenty of commercial miso, but I’m dying to see what mine tastes like in every day use!

Next up, last week when I mentioned using xantham gum as a thickener, a few people were interested. Lou asked me about using it in tofu mayo so I figured I’d try it and see. So this is for Lou.

I started with Bryanna’s recipe, using 5/8 tsp Indian black salt (which I use when I want something to seem “eggy”…and also because I bought a ton of it at the Indian grocery yesterday and I have more than I can store), one tablespoon canola oil, one tablespoon apple cider vinegar, and one tablespoon lemon juice. After tasting it, I thought it was too lemony (which is weird, I love lemon, which is why I used it, but it was a little overly “bright” for mayo, I thought), and I added maybe half a tablespoon Dijon mustard at Lou’s suggestion. I liked it much better then. Here’s the texture, with no thickener:

It’s a bit hard to see, but although it’s creamy and somewhat thick, it is a little runnier than real mayo is (I think – it’s been ten years or more since I’ve used real mayo!).

I started adding xantham gum by the 1/8 teaspoon, blending it in thoroughly using the food processor (really, it’s a Sumeet Asia Grinder, but for this purpose, it’s a food processor). To my surprise, 1/8 and even 1/2 teaspoon did nothing discernible to the texture. Finally I added what made a full teaspoon of xantham gum, blended thoroughly, and let it sit about five minutes. I don’t know if the change in texture is really apparent in the photos, but it did become more mayo-y:

I think I can therefore report to Lou that she may like the results if she wants to play around with her mayo recipe using xantham gum. This may actually be closer to a mayo texture than Vegenaise is, although I consider Vegenaise a pretty perfect product.

I wouldn’t ordinarily use this amount of mayo in the two weeks that Bryanna says it’s good for, so I may be turning this into my coveted ranch dip this week. It’d be really great if I could make the ranch dip guilt-free because it’s really, really good, but it’s not really, really good for you. I’ll keep you posted.

Remember the book pillow I made? Brachtune sometimes does this completely adorable thing where she sleeps with her head on it, but yesterday I found her apparently under the impression it’s a computer!

Also, I was able to use the pool all weekend – woo! The website I use for weather has been predicting intense hail and thunderstorms all day, but in reality it was warm and sunny and gorgeous – perfect pool weather – and I’ve yet to see a hint of hail. Not that I’m complaining! Thunderstorms are predicted for the rest of the week, however. It’s incredible the number of thunderstorms we’ve had this summer. Thursday night, Mark, Fortinbras, and I saw the National Symphony Orchestra perform Carmina Burana, one of my favourite pieces of music, at Wolf Trap, during a violent thunderstorm that lasted the entire show, rain beating down around us and lightning filling the sky. Although I felt sorry for the hardy souls on the lawn, it was actually a pretty cool way to experience the concert, and the performance was excellent. I really do like thunderstorms – I may have been the only bride on the planet to hope for thunderstorms on her wedding day (didn’t get my wish) – and I appreciated the one Thursday night, but I’m begging the weather gods to let me continue to use the pool!

I decided to take my love of fermenting things to a new level and make miso. Because I’m insane. Really, though, it’s pretty easy if you can find koji, which is rice that has been steamed and mixed with a certain kind of mold spore. The hardest part about it is you have to wait up to a year to eat it. This will be by far the longest I’ve ever fermented anything.

You can make your own koji if you can get the mold spores. I have some and I’ll probably try it at some point, but I decided to use pre-made koji the first time around. As with most of the cultures I use, I purchased it from GEM Cultures.

The next thing I needed was a crock to make the miso in. The directions that came with my koji instructed me to use a 1 1/2 quart straight-sided crock. All I really have are jars, so I had to find something else with a mouth as wide as the sides. Off to the thrift store with me, again! I found this crock, which was perfect:

Then I was on my way to making miso!

Miso

2 cups dried soybeans
1 cup soybean cooking water
1/2 cup sea salt
2 1/2 cups koji (available from GEM Cultures)
1 Tbsp unpasteurized miso (If you can’t find this in stores, GEM Cultures sells it. You can also omit it if you have to, but apparently it really helps your miso along.)

Soak the soybeans in plenty of water overnight. The next day, boil them for 4 to 5 hours or until quite soft, being sure to add water as necessary.

When the soybeans are done …

… drain them, reserving the cooking liquid.

Add one cup of the soybean cooking liquid to the soybeans and mash. I used a blender but I think potato mashers are pretty common.

Here are the mashed soybeans in a bowl.

Add the salt …

… and stir it in thoroughly.

When the soybeans are cool enough to touch, add the koji and the unpasteurized “seed” miso. If you’ve made miso before, you probably didn’t pasteurize it, so you can use it as the seed miso. I ordered some from GEM Cultures in lieu of searching for it in stores because most of the writing on the miso I buy is in Japanese.

Stir very thoroughly again.

Next prepare your crock. I got the idea to rub the sides down with salt from Wild Fermentation, which I read about on Cyn’s blog and realized I needed to own. So what I did was bring water to a boil in the kettle, pour it into the crock to sanitize it, then pour it out without drying. Then I set it on its side and sprinkled the sides with salt while rolling it. It wasn’t the most even of jobs, but I figured it was better than nothing (which is what the other instructions I had indicated for the sides of the crock).

Press the miso firmly into the crock, making sure there are no air bubbles. My knuckles got tired so I used a potato masher for a bit.

Tigger then appeared on the scene to investigate.

Smooth and level the miso.

Sprinkle the top fairly generously with salt. You’ll be removing this layer before eating so don’t worry about it being too salty. Particularly concentrate the salt around the edges.

Cover with plastic wrap, pressing it down onto the miso and up the sides of the crock.

Find a plate that fits just inside the crock. This plate is particularly appropriate for this application because not only does it fit the crock perfectly, but I acquired it from a Japanese restaurant.

Place a heavy weight (at least a pound) on the plate. I forgot to go out rock-hunting today so I used my small molcajete. (I’ll probably go find a rock and retrieve my molcajete!)

Cover the crock, with a lid if it has one, or with a heavy piece of fabric tightly tied around the top.

Label the crock! This seems like a step I’d skip, convinced I would magically remember the date, and then later kick myself about for being so stupid.

Place somewhere out of the way. Here it sits next to my fancy new sauerkraut crock (that I got for Christmas), in which is brewing a new batch of sauerkraut, in a spare bedroom that is inexplicably but handily very cold.

Soon I’ll have a whole row of crocks with things bubbling inside them. I am the mad fermenter!

Check back in 6 months when I try it the first time, and then in a year when it’s fully matured!

Update, July 26, 2009: See results of the six-month check-in.

By the way, Tigger says hi.

The last time I failed to post for several days in a row, I had the excuse of being extremely busy. This time my excuse is exactly the opposite. There is a direct correlation between the day they finally fixed my pool filter and the day I stopped having anything to post here. I’ve pretty much been either swimming in the pool, or floating atop it in my inflatable barge, reading a book. In short, doing nothing. Dinner’s been a rushed affair every night as I’ve been making up for all the swimtime I’ve lost while the filter was broken. Although I don’t have any exciting food to share with you, my weekend has been pretty idyllic.

I did spend all of Saturday morning in the kitchen, though. It was a soy extravaganza on Saturday, in fact. I recently purchased The New Farm cookbook to see if it held any secrets that would help with my tempeh-making. I made tempeh per its instructions (the main difference being that I cooked the soybeans for an hour an a half instead of just half an hour or so). Success!!

I think the problem last time was definitely cramming too many beans into the baggie. I’ll just have to weigh them from now on and make sure it’s exactly 8 ounces of dried beans, which results in the perfect amount for one sandwich-sized bag. I used a higher quality, thicker baggie this time and not only was it much easier to pierce it with the needle, but I was able to remove the tempeh without cutting it, so I will be able to reuse it.

In other soy news, I’ve been noticing that when I make soy milk, the liquid drains through the okara bag that came with my tofu press faster than it does the bag I made myself out of muslin, which I concluded was because the weave of my muslin was tighter than that in the other bag, and since the faster the liquid drains, the easier it is, I’ve been wanting to find a fabric even more loosely woven. So Friday night I went to the fabric store and discovered chiffon.

If you’ve ever been a bridesmaid, you may recognize chiffon as the stuff the bride made you wrap 200 tiny plastic bottles of bubbles, or Hershey kisses, or other wedding favors in. (No one had to wrap anything in chiffon for my wedding because my entire bridal party consisted of Fortinbras traipsing down the aisle carrying our rings on a wedding stick as we said our vows before all of six witnesses in a Scottish castle. I wore black, Mark wore a kilt, and there was no chiffon in sight!)

I may not have been interested in chiffon for bridal reasons, but I’m here to tell you it makes a great okara bag! Because it is slippery, it’s a bit of pain to sew, but it’s worth the small amount of trouble. The soy milk filtered right through it, and with just a couple gentle presses with potato masher, I had extremely dry okara. Not only that, but cleanup was a breeze! My other okara bags never get really clean, but the okara just slides right off the chiffon! And it dries very quickly. I also used a piece of chiffon to line my tofu press when I made the weekly tofu. This worked well because not only did the whey drain through it rapidly, making a firmer tofu faster, but it’s not as bulky as the big piece of muslin I had been using.

I think my tofu should marry my tempeh!!

Another new thing I’ve incorporated into the soy milk-making process is the Multiquick. It had never occurred to me to use an immersion blender to grind the soybeans; I guess I didn’t think they were powerful enough to do it. But one of the reviewers on Amazon said she used hers when making soy milk, so I tried it out, and it worked fine. So after they are finished soaking, I pour off the soaking water, add fresh water to cover, and blend them right in the same bowl I soaked them in. This is particularly helpful when making more than a quart of soy milk because I used to have to do it in batches in the regular blender.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m ashamed of how wasteful I am when I make soy milk and tofu. Because I haven’t had much success using okara, I usually just throw it away. Same with the whey when making tofu. This weekend, though, since the chiffon afforded me the opportunity to extract so much liquid from my okara with very little effort, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to dry it as suggested by Maki at Just Hungry. So I spread it on a pan …

… and baked it at the lowest temperature my oven allows (170 degrees Fahrenheit) until it was completely dried out. I’m not sure how long it ended up taking because I sort of did it in cycles, being “busy” in the pool most of the day. It was maybe 1.5 hours total?

Then I ground it up.

Now I will do something with it. I think Bryanna was discussing dried okara as a parmesan substitute recently; I’ll probably give that a whirl. Maki suggests using dried okara in baked goods, but ugh, I’m so disgusted with using soy byproducts in baked goods! I’ve tried using okara before and it turned my bread into bricks! I wasn’t using dried okara, and Maki claims the texture is much better with dried, but after baking a brick this weekend using whey leftover from making tofu – because the New Farm cookbook said it was good to add to bread – I’m about ready to claim that soy products have no place in bread!

I’ve become a bit of a bread snob; I rarely bake any “straight doughs”, that is, dough made and baked all at once, with no pre-ferments or sponges. But since I was too busy Friday night playing with my chiffon to put together my usual doughs to bake on Saturday, I decided to try the whole wheat recipe in the New Farm cookbook (which, as you can see, has gotten a lot of use since I got it), and at New Farm’s recommendation, I added some of the tofu whey.

Big mistake! It didn’t proof very well, which was the first sign that things were going badly, but I thought maybe I’d just put it in too large a loaf pan. But when I removed it from the oven, I recognized that signature pale, deathly color I’d seen in my previous attempts to use okara in bread. Look at it, it looks sick:

I hadn’t mentioned my whey trial to Mark, from whom I have to hide fresh bread if I don’t want it devoured within two minutes, and who cut himself a slice after it cooled. He took a bite and promptly came to me with a skeptical look on his face, asking me to taste it and tell him if it tasted, well, tasteless. It did. It tasted like cardboard. Mark threw the slice away in disgust.

So today, I decided to bake the same bread, but without whey. Look at the difference:

Now, to be fair, the bigger loaf was much better kneaded, because my mixer crapped out on the bad loaf before it was fully kneaded, and due to an injury sustained while making the okara bags the night before (my thumb tangled with a rotary cutter and lost – ouch!), I wasn’t able to knead it by hand very effectively.

So, speaking of the New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, on Thursday night, I was making Vegan Dad’s Green Enchiladas and decided that instead of using my usual “cheese” recipe from Simply Heavenly!, I would flip through the New Farm book to see if they had any “cheese” recipes I could try out. I found one and was shocked to find myself looking at the very recipe I almost always use from Simply Heavenly! I don’t want to say Abbott George Burke is a plagiarist, and I honestly think most of his 1,400 recipes are original, but I just found this weird:

I have made the recipe on the right so many times I have it memorized, so I recognized it the instant I saw it in the New Farm cookbook…which was published 22 years before Simply Heavenly. Incidentally, although I feel lost, confused, and misled – like I did when I realized that Bauhaus’s song Telegram Sam was really a T.Rex song – I actually recommend the “Simply Heavenly” version because it uses 1/4 the amount of margarine (it’s the only difference!), and it’s plenty. Also, this “cheese” was really good in Vegan Dad’s enchiladas, which you really must make. Mark has been absolutely rhapsodizing about them ever since. I’m a bit afraid he prefers Vegan Dad’s recipes to my own! I guess if I’m second best to anyone, Vegan Dad might as well be the one.

Whew…that was a lot of jabbering on my part without posting a recipe! I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you, especially after deserting you for so many days. I can show you a picture of the Sweet and Sour Tempeh I made tonight:

It’s from – surprise! – the New Farm cookbook. I’m probably the last vegan on the planet to buy this cookbook; it’s been on my wishlist forever, but I just never got around to it. Maybe because I think I have half of it in the form of printouts of recipes that have been posted on various websites, forums, and mailing lists over the years. So I guess it’s about damn time I bought a proper version of it. I was surprised to realize, too, that Tofu Cookery, which I have had for years, is also by Louise Hagler and the folks at the Farm. I had no idea!

That’s all the food news from nowhere. Here is a picture of a turtle we rescued from the pool yesterday, though:

Isn’t he great? I named him Prince Harry. I don’t know why I named him that because I have no special interest in the royal family and in fact can’t tell Harry from William, but that’s the name that popped into my head. Prince Harry didn’t think much of me, I’m afraid. He was so eager to get away from me and my animal paparazzi tendencies that he walked right into a chain link fence and had to be helped by Mark, who relocated him to a safe place. Then Prince Harry toddled off somewhere as far away from me as he could get.

I discovered wild raspberries growing by the pool as well.