What does your food come from?

Continuing on our quest to know, grow and create, as much of our food as possible, we were invited to make miso and tofu last weekend. Good times…do you know how miso or tofu is made? Soy beans are harvested in late fall and hung for a few weeks to dry out (some people store them over winter in a shed even). Once the beans have hardened, you lay out a big tarp and start stomping on the branches. The weight of your body breaks open the pods and the round, yellow beans pop out. In other Asian countries, cows or horses do the stomping. Other places simply chuck the branches into the air on a windy day. The wind splits the pods, the heavier branches drop immediately, and the lightweight beans are carried furthest away and then gathered!

Once the beans have been released from their pods, by your favorite method, they have to be sorted.
Many are shriveled or have been bored into by small insects as you can see:
This is a tedious task (I sorted more beans this week, 10 kilos took me a entire day and a half). Here are some acceptable ones:
Then the beans soak overnight, and the next day, are boiled over a giant fire for about eight hours.
If you are making miso, you need something called koji, which is a type of mold used to ferment grains(barley, rice, etc.) in Japan. Click THIS to read a much better explanation about koji. Sometimes the word koji is used for the already fermented (by the koji mold) grain, and that is how I will use the word from now on. The koji smells slightly sweet and alcoholic and can be used to make soy sauce, mirin or sake too! We used rice koji that a friend of a friend grew organically and made.
You can see how parts of the rice are 'rotting' away.
The boiled beans and koji are mixed in equal quantity with salt. You know if you have scratches on your hands when you do this step!
This mix is hand cranked through a meat grinder to make a thick paste. It is pretty wet so you have to smash it down into the large funnel.
The finished pasteYou then shape softball size lumps of the paste (it is surprisingly heavy) and chuck them into a plastic bag lined bucket. It is essential to get all the air out of the paste and pack it firmly into the bag. Our bag is the one in the bottom bucket!
Then you tuck the bag away in a cool, dark place and wait a year. Yes, a year.

The fermentation process gives it the pretty reddish brown color (fresh miso looks a lot like ground hamburger meat, especially curling out of the grinder). The miso making we joined only involved from the grinding step on. But I learned (and enjoyed it) so much that I asked my friend if we could do it again, doing every single step ourselves, the best way to learn. Hence my hours of bean sorting this past week!

If you are making tofu, you blend up the cooked beans in a food processor (or blender), adding a little water to make a smooth paste, although I assume many years ago this mashing was done by hand. You dump this creamy mixture into a large pot and let it boil for some time. Once you can see it is settling out, you can skim the top filmy layer off to make something called yuba. I have no explanation or comparison for you if you have never tried yuba…you just have to eat some for yourself.

Then the entire contents of the pot are poured over a thin muslin cloth. The milky part that drops through the cloth is soymilk and tastes amazingly delicate and delicious when drunk warm out of the pot! Much better than the boxed stuff! The cloth strains out the tough layers of the bean, which looks crumbly, moist and fluffy. This is called okara and can be used to make salads, gyoza filling and other delicious things and again, I have no comparison to give for its taste/consistency. My favorite point in this process though was that no part of the bean is wasted!

Gathering up the ends of the cloth you squeeze the okara to get as much moisture out as possible. Then, into the soymilk you add a substance called nigari, which is a clear, watery by-product of salt production that helps the soymilk set. The nigari soymilk mixture is poured into a muslin cloth lined mold made of sweet scented cedar, the lid is placed on and magic happens. About an hour later, you remove the lid and a delicious block of tofu is sitting there, waiting to be enjoyed! I think even the most anti-tofu person couldn’t help enjoying this freshly made delicious-ness! It is indescribable. So light, gentle and smooth. You don’t need to add anything (soy, green onion, or sauce). Amazing.

We are definitely planting our own soy beans this year since most tofu in Japan, despite being ‘made’ locally, uses American or Brazilian grown GM, pesticide laden, monoculture soy beans. Green Coop does offer tofu made with domestically grown soy beans but the beans are grown in Hokkaido and the tofu made on Kyushu. Better than using imported beans, but with the transportation and oil costs involved not as good for the earth as growing and making your own!

So that’s life lately. Simple, peaceful and happy as usual. Happy Spring.