newbie seeks koji
 

Hi,

I'm a newbie. My name is Chris and I'm guessing I'm a lot older than most of the people on here. LOL I live in the UK where I have a small business rustproofing cars. I'm hoping some nice japanese person can tell me how I can import a small quantity - for my own use (omg - I sound like a drug dealer! lol!) ..........................of Koji. Yes Koji that marvelous stuff you can use to make miso and sake and koji pickles with.

I want to make lots and lots of Koji pickles because I'm a health nut and I'm just realising just how good the Japanese diet is. I used to sneer at white rice as unhealthy but now I realise that the Japanese then use the rice bran to make pickles with! So maybe they get the B vitamins etc found in the rice husks after all and even enhanced with extra enzymes and other nutrients from the fermentation process. How smart is that!

Cheers Chris

If you can't get koji...have you ever heard of/considered natto?
That is considered a health food >.>

x]
who can honestly say no to fermented soy beans? ^_^

Chris, have you checked whether the UK will allow you import koji? Since it is a mold spore, you may not be able to get it cleared even if you find a sake brewery that will ship it from Japan. It might be easier to import the koji pickles in bulk since they are processed food and not exactly competitive with a native food product.

>>>>I think it can be imported. There is a company called gem cultures in the US who say they can ship some of their koji items (not all) to the UK. I have emailed them a couple of times and get no reply though.

I want to make my own pickles. And anyway, if I imported them from Japan I would have to import a container and I certainly can't do that. I just want to make some pickles for myself.

Could someone who speaks japanese do a google search (or similar) for me to see if there are some specialist koji producers in Japan? The Koji will be very lightweight I think so it must be fairly easy to ship me a parcel.

Cheers Chris

Hi Yuujirou,

Yes I like natto. Unfortunately it does not like me! I have a sensitivity to soy. Also, there are some question marks about how good soy products are for your health. I know there are some things which are very good for you in natto and miso but there are some things which could be not so good. Also, lots of people have allergies to soy and I'm one of them. One of the reasons I want to get some koji is that I love miso and I want to make some gluten free (I also have a sensitivity to gluten) and soy free miso from rice or chick peas.

Cheers Chris

Since I don't do well with Japanese, all the site I found were commercial producers or sake breweries that weren't offer their compounds.

I check Gem Cultures and saw nothign about koji at all. Since they work more with tempeh I would not think they would be a good source.

However...... check out this link.
KOJI to Brew Sake

If that ends up being a dead end, maybe more searching for homebrewing of sake will turn up more sources for koji, rather than looking for it to use with food products.

BTW, you just inspired a culinary experiment. I am going to attempt a soup that is a cross between hummus and miso. We'll see how it goes.

Hi Taln,

How are you going to make your hummus/miso soup? Are you going to make miso from chick peas?

Thanks for that link. Its potentially very useful although I have still not come up with a supplier. The sake connection idea could be productive though. I have also tried previously to get Kasu - sake lees in the UK but have not had any success. The answer may be to make my own sake and make my own kasu as a by product.

Cheers Chris

I thought about the "grown your own" solution with the koji too, but the risk is pretty high if the wrong mold grows. Might work for the kasu, though.

The hummus-miso is going to take a bit of research, but given the main ingredients its seemed like and interesting direction to take it in. I have always regarded the kitchen as my incognito chemistry lab, with cookbooks as simply some one else's experimentation journals.