Koji Stock

Back in February of 2019, I wrote (here) about using Japanese ingredients, such as culinary powders and stocks, to make pasta sauces and I shared a recipe by Danny Bowien for what has become a staple in my kitchen pantry: shiitake mushroom powder. Here’s how I use the powder to make a quick yet flavorful fresh pasta sauce serving 2:  

Sauté a diced shallot in 2 tablespoons/28 grams of butter. Add 1 tablespoon/2 grams of mushroom powder to the pan and stir the mixture together over moderate heat. Add some thinly sliced vegetables to the pan. (When in season, I like to use thin slices of fresh artichoke heart or asparagus.) Pour in ½ cup or so of water, a bit more butter and a pinch of fennel pollen and/or some chopped herbs. Bring the mixture to a simmer, taste and season with salt and pepper, cover the pan and braise the vegetables for about 4 minutes. The sauce is now ready to receive the cooked pasta. Mix the pasta and sauce together for a minute over moderate heat, add freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano and/or Pecorino Romano cheese and cook until the pasta absorbs its sauce. The shiitake powder enhances the flavor of the other ingredients without contributing a mushroom flavor. The powder makes the sauce taste delicious and savory.

When I want to add even more flavor to this pasta sauce, I use koji stock in place of water. In The Noma Guide to Fermentation (Artisan, 2018), René Redzepi and David Zilber write that they “find koji indistinguishable from magic—the best kind of magic, in fact, because anybody can wield it.”

Koji

What is koji? Per The Noma Guide to Fermentation, “[k]oji is a term that comes from Japan, where it refers to rice or barley that have been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, a species of fungus—a sporulating mold, to be exact—that grows on cooked grains in warm and humid environments. (In the English-speaking world, we apply the term koji interchangeably to the inoculated grains, the fungus, and the spores.)”

I first read about dried rice koji in a 2013 article by Tara Duggan in the San Francisco Chronicle. Duggan’s piece focuses on shio-koji, an easy-to-make mixture of dried rice koji, salt and water. Shio-koji tastes salty, sweet and savory all at the same time. Use it like salt to marinate meat, make pickles, and add flavor and depth to salad dressings and sauces.

The Noma Guide to Fermentation contains a recipe for shio-koji. But, better yet, Redzepi and Zilber tell the reader how to make the actual koji grains. The book goes on to suggest innovative ways to use both fresh and dried koji grains. One application surprised me: use dried koji grains to make stock. Redzepi and Zilber write: 

“One of the best possible uses for dried koji is as a flavoring for stock. Boil 1 liter water in a pot and add 150 grams crumbled dried koji (not koji flour). Turn down the heat and let the stock simmer for 10 minutes. Strain and discard the solids. What you have is a versatile, vegetarian base liquid that can be used for a whole flight of applications.”

That’s it! In 10 minutes you can create this magical liquid that enhances and deepens the flavor of food. On its own, my homemade rice koji stock smells and tastes just slightly sweet and of mushrooms, but its own unique flavor disappears as it cooks and the koji works its magic. The authors share that, thanks to koji, at Noma they “more or less stopped making long-cooked meat stocks and producing sauces via classical reductions…By cooking koji into a lighter broth, we can achieve the same rich, complex flavors without the heaviness of all that gelatin and dairy.” 

If you want to try koji stock but don’t want to make and dry your own koji grains, finding commercially-manufactured dried rice koji isn’t nearly as difficult as one might imagine. Start your search at a well-stocked Asian market. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you might find dried rice koji at a nearby grocery store with a good international food section. The brand I see most often here in the Pacific Northwest is Cold Mountain. If you cannot find dried koji grains locally, you can buy a container on-line from US and Japanese sellers.

Being me, I wanted to make my own koji grains. I used my Brød & Taylor Bread Proofer and a homemade cedar tray to hold the grains. I bought koji spores (aka koji tane) from GEM Cultures, a business here in Washington State and from Kawashima, an on-line source in Japan. Koji tane doesn’t cost too much and has a self-life of months if properly stored. By carefully following Redzepi and Zilber’s clear instructions, I went from uncooked white rice to koji grains in 2 days of mostly unsupervised attention. Making barley koji is just as easy as creating rice koji.

Is koji stock made from homemade rice koji better than stock made from Cold Mountain dried rice koji? In my experience, the homemade stock has a much deeper aroma and taste. But both produce remarkable stock.

If you haven’t checked out Redzepi and Zilber’s book, I recommend you give it a look. The Noma Guide to Fermentation explores a broad assortment of fermented foods ranging from simple lacto-ferments, such as pickled white asparagus, to mind-blowing black vegetables and garums made from roasted chicken wings. Redzepi and Zilber also explain how to use koji to make miso and shoyu.

Buckwheat Bigoli

In June of 2020, A Serious Bunburyist turns 10 years old. I conceived of this website as a place where I would share information about pasta-making, review new cookbooks and memorialize some of my favorite recipes. In my inaugural post I shared a recipe to make a regional Italian pasta called bigoli in a bronze Venetian pasta press called a torchio da bigoli (here). Over the years I’ve posted a number of different bigoli recipes on this site. To start 2020, I want to share another one, this time a dark bigoli version made with buckwheat flour.

Dark Bigoli (Bigoli Scuri)

Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009) lists bigoli’s ingredients as “[g]enerally whole-wheat flour made from durum wheat, but sometimes soft-wheat flour, water, and salt, and often duck or hen eggs.”  Zanini De Vita makes no reference to buckwheat flour, but she notes in her remarks that bigoli “…was always dark until not long ago because peasant women made it from whole-wheat flour.” 

In Bugialli on Pasta (1988), the late Italian food historian and teacher Giuliano Bugialli writes “[o]riginally, dark bigoli probably were made using buckwheat flour, since the grain was once plentiful in the Tre Veneti. (Today, the region is more commonly known as Friuli-Venezia Giulia.) But earlier in this century the Italian government began to require that certified commercial pasta be made only from durum wheat flour, and soon even in the home whole-wheat flour came to replace the buckwheat.”

As Bugialli points out, regional Italian pasta makers were—and still are—naturally opportunistic and used available ingredients. In the Encyclopedia’s Entry No. 200 for Pizzoccheri, Zanini De Vita writes “[t]he cultivation of buckwheat in the alpine valleys from Lombardy to Trentino was already widespread toward the fourteenth century, especially in Carnia….” Italy’s Carnia province lies approximately 40 miles northeast of the Veneto region. Whether buckwheat is the original bigoli flour or not, one can easily imagine buckwheat pasta dough finding its way into a Venetian torchio.

Buckwheat

Buckwheat, a flower seed and not a true wheat grass grain, presents challenges to the pasta maker because buckwheat flour contains no gluten. Buckwheat’s characteristics differ by variety, but generally its seeds have a very dark, bitter-tasting outer hull that surrounds a lighter-colored triangular kernel (aka groat). After de-hulling the seeds, mills grind the groats to make buckwheat flour.

Most buckwheat noodle recipes, whether to make Italian pasta or Japanese soba, blend wheat and buckwheat flour to strengthen the dough. In Cooking By Hand (2003), Paul Bertolli writes that buckwheat flour “…has a forceful taste all its own, though the necessity of mixing it with a greater proportion of white flour to strengthen the dough structure also serves to tone down its flavor.” Bertolli’s buckwheat flour blend in Cooking By Hand is approximately 30% buckwheat flour and 70% extra fancy semolina (aka extra fancy durum).

In my experience, extruding a buckwheat dough (e.g., in a torchio) permits the pasta maker to reduce the amount of wheat flour used when making buckwheat pasta without detrimentally affecting the dough’s structure. Exceptions to this general rule exist, especially if making pasta with a coarse, stoneground buckwheat flour containing flecks of hull. However, using a torchio to extrude buckwheat pasta generally allows the pasta maker to focus on taste and texture and worry a little less about dough strength.

Over the last three years I have made buckwheat pasta with buckwheat flour from a number of sources. I used my KoMo grain mill to grind fresh buckwheat flour from store-bought groats. I tried different buckwheat flour from mills here in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. My favorite homemade buckwheat pasta uses a Japanese Ni-Hachi style soba flour (80% buckwheat and 20% type 00 wheat flour) that I bought on-line from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I enjoy the flavor and texture of pasta made from this finely ground blend.

The following recipe, which serves 2, uses Anson Mills’s soba flour without adding any additional wheat flour. The first few times I tried this soba flour to make bigoli with my torchio, I added small amounts of extra wheat flour believing I needed to strengthen the dough. I found adding additional wheat flour unnecessary. Anson Mills’s buckwheat-rich blend works just fine as is with a torchio.

1) Put 115 grams of Anson Mills Ni-Hachi style soba flour into the bowl of a standing mixer equipped with a mixing paddle.

2) Put 1 whole large egg and 1 egg yolk into a glass beaker and beat the egg mixture together.

3) Turn on the mixer and set it at its lowest speed. Very—and this is important—slowly add small amounts of the beaten egg mixture into the flour. Patiently wait between each small pour to allow the mixer to incorporate the egg into the flour. From start to finish, the step of adding the egg mixture to form the dough takes me about 10 minutes, more or less.

You will probably not need to add all of the egg mixture to get the proper consistency for this particular pasta dough. On average I use approximately 58 to 59 grams of the egg mixture for 115 grams of Anson Mills’s soba flour. The dough should not come completely together in the mixer bowl and will look crumbly. I point this out because it is very easy to over-hydrate a buckwheat-rich pasta dough and a sticky dough can cause a mess when extruding a long, thin noodle like bigoli. Here’s a picture of the ready dough in my mixer bowl.

4) Remove the bowl from the mixer and reach into the bowl to bring the dough together with your hand. Form the dough into a log shape that will fit into the torchio’s chamber. The dough will look and feel dry, but don’t worry, it will soften as it hydrates in step 5, below. 

5) Very tightly wrap the dough log twice in plastic film and let the dough rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. Tightly wrapping the dough helps to hydrate the dough.

6) After 30 minutes, unwrap the dough, assemble your torchio with a bigoli die and place the dough in the torchio’s chamber.  Set the piston into the chamber and turn the handle. Cut the pasta at your desired length. (I aim for approximately 8-inch long noodles.) The extruded bigoli should feel just a little tacky, but not unworkably sticky.

Once cooked, this dark buckwheat bigoli boasts a pronounced toasty, almost nutty flavor. Many traditional Northern Italian recipes for buckwheat pasta (e.g., bigoli, blecs, grumi di grano saraceno and pizzoccheri) call for less buckwheat and include milk and butter in addition to eggs. These ingredients, although delicious, often mask buckwheat’s unique flavor.

If the idea of a buckwheat-extruded pasta appeals to you, feel free to try different buckwheat blends and torchio dies to create a pasta that has your desired taste and texture. I like making a buckwheat version of fiorentini (here). Or consider using a spaghetti quadri die (here) to create a square, soba-like noodle.

Finally, I cannot end this post in good conscience without providing this caveat: Extruding a dry dough will put stress on a torchio and, after extruding your pasta, you may find it difficult to remove the die ring nut by hand. I solve this problem by employing a rubber mallet to gently tap the die ring nut clockwise to loosen it.

Best Cookbooks of 2019

For the last nine years I’ve posted my picks for the best cookbooks of the year. With so many outstanding cookbooks published in 2019, I worked hard to winnow the worthy down to the five that I liked best. I present, in alphabetical order, my list.

Alpine Cooking: Recipes and Stories from Europe’s Grand Mountaintops by Meredith Erickson, Ten Speed Press.

American Sfoglino: A Master Class in Handmade Pasta by Evan Funke with Katie Parla, Chronicle Books.

The Book of St. John by Fergus Henderson & Trevor Gulliver, Ebury Press.

The Gaijin Cookbook: Japanese Recipes from a Chef, Father, Eater, and Lifelong Outsider by Ivan Orkin and Chris Ying, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Lavash: The bread that launched 1,000 meals, plus salads, stews, and other recipes from Armenia by Kate Leahy, John Lee and Ara Zada, Chronicle Books.

A little more about these books.

Alpine Cooking surveys the cuisine of the Italian, Austrian, Swiss and French Alps. Under Italy she shares recipes for Radicchio Dumplings, Piedmontese-Style Agnolotti and Ditalini with Fava Beans. In her Austrian chapter we learn how to make Pine Schnapps, a Spring Rhubarb Cocktail and Apricot Dumplings. The dish I most want to try in her Swiss section is Veal Stripes in Cream Sauce, Zürich-Style from the Zürich Via Bellevue Hotel in Gstaad. Desserts standout in the French Alps chapter, especially the recipes for a simple Savoie Cake and a not-so simple Polka Dot Paris-Brest. If you plan to travel in these alpine areas, Erickson shares her bar, hotel and restaurant recommendations. By far the most handsome book on this year’s list, I found myself transported by Christina Holmes’s exquisite photography. 

And speaking of photography, as I wrote here, American Sfoglino succeeds, in large part, because of Eric Wolfinger’s photographs. The trio of Funke, Parla and Wolfinger make hand-rolling a thin circular sheet of pasta (sfoglia) with a long rolling pin (mattarello) seem perfectly possible with both desire and practice. After covering the basics of creating pasta dough and sheets, Part 2 of the cookbook tells the reader how to transform la sfoglia into delicious Emilian pasta dishes. I applaud Chronicle Books for letting Funke dig deep into the disappearing craft of making la sfoglia.

If asked to pick the most important cookbooks of the last 25 years, I’d confidently offer up Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail Eating. Henderson’s latest cookbook, The Book of St. John,“reflects a moment in time” in Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s 25-year-old St. John restaurant. Henderson writes as well as he cooks. In the cookbook’s Introduction he shares that “[n]ose-to-tail means holistic eating. It is a way of being in the world…[it] is not about bravado and it should not be about ego; one should never forget that the point of a kitchen is to cook people their lunch, which they should enjoy.” Another quote: “It is no good for a chef to sleep under their oven; they should make like a whale, keeping their mouth and their mind wide open for the plankton of ideas, and they should spend time with their family.”  Food-wise, the book boasts that it contains 100 brand new recipes from London’s iconic restaurant. If you own Nose to Tail Eating and/or Beyond Nose to Tail, then The Book of St. John might strike you as quite familiar. So what! If you love Fergus Henderson’s other books, you will love this book, too.

My pick for the best cookbook of 2019 goes to The Gaijin Cookbook. I own a lot of Japanese cookbooks, including a good number that cover Japanese comfort food/soul cooking/home-style recipes. Most of these books are very good. (I especially like Tokyo Cult Recipes by Maori Murota.) Orkin and Ying have penned an essential work for cooks interested in making comforting Japanese food. Since its fall release, I’ve cooked more than a dozen dishes from The Gaijian Cookbook ranging from Tonkatsu (Fried Pork Cutlets) to Ochazuke (Rice with Tea) to Kurimu Shichu (Chicken Cream Stew) to Gyudon (Beef and Onion Rice) to Gyoza (Japanese Dumplings). Another shout out to the photographer: Aubrie Pick’s images perfectly support Okin and Ying’s text and genial voice.

Armenian food occasionally plays a supporting role in cookbooks put out by major publishers. Naomi Duguid includes recipes from Armenia in her 2016 Taste of Persia. Olia Hercules scatters a few Armenian dishes in her two cookbooks, including her latest, Kaukasis. Lavash, however, is a genuine, one-hundred-percent Armenian cookbook. After teaching a food photography course at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Armenia, John Lee returned to the states and shared his Armenian food experiences with Kate Leahy, a seriously talented food writer who helped author a number of excellent cookbooks (including one of my favorites, A16). Leahy and Lee hooked up with Ara Zada, a Southern California chef who also taught a workshop at TUMO, and Lavash represents the fruit of their partnership. In its introduction Leahy speaks to the culinary differences between historical “Western” and “Eastern” Armenia, the food traditions that Armenians carried with them during the diaspora, and the evolution of food in Armenia proper after the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire. I always wondered why the food from today’s Armenia rarely resembles the food that my Armenian grandparents and first-generation parents cooked in the San Francisco Bay Area. Leahy does a great job of explaining this in a way that makes historical and cultural sense. I plan on writing a full review of the cookbook in 2020, but I happily include Lavash on my best of 2019 list.

I want to conclude with a list of other outstanding cookbooks that I read in 2019. In no particular order, I recommend these books: Jubilee by Toni Tipton-Martin; South by Sean Brock; Soul by Todd Richards; My Mexico City Kitchen by Gabriela Cámara; Tu Casa Mi Casa by Enrique Olvera; Pasta Grannies by Vicky Bennison; The Turkish Cookbook by Musa Dagdeviren; The New Pie by Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin; and Food Artisans of Japan by Nancy Singleton Hachisu. If you like hunting for excellent Japanese ingredients, definitely check out Hachisu’s book.