You do know Aspergillum oryzae, don’t you? If not, maybe this picture will jog your memory:

LOL, I had no idea what it was until not too long ago.

It’s a fungus (mold), and a crucial component in Asian food. “Component” rather than “ingredient,” because it’s not used directly as an ingredient, but is critical in making many of the tastes we associate with Asian cooking, such as doubanjiang/Sichuan bean paste ( https://tiabr.com/doubanjiang-build/ ), fermented black beans, miso, sake, and most importantly, soy sauce, about more in six months if things go well.

It requires high humidity and temperatures to grow, on rice, grains or beans, and that’s usually followed by a long (at least six months) fermentation, although not for sake, which since yeast is used in the West for brewing is where “The Yeast from the East” comes from, although that’s pretty much the end of that analogy.

You can get a starter culture of A. oryzae from the usual online sources, also searching on “sake starter” or “koji-kin.” It’s a bit pricey, but you only have to buy it once . . . if you let it go too long, it will sporulate, and then you can just dry the grain (or whatever) and use that for your next batch, or sift the dried grain and save the spores, more about which in painful detail in a future post. I’ve been an abject failure growing it on rice, but had no problems with bulgur, rye, barley, and soy and fava beans.

(Get on with it, Robert.) I wanted to make fermented black beans:

. . . which despite looking like they may have originated in the nether regions of a hamster:

. . . are delicious. Often used in complex sauces like for ma po dofu, but they are excellent in a simple stir fry of greens and a bit of garlic.

It was exceedingly difficult to find out how to do this, on the web. Finally I found a Filipino recipe, so here’s what I did.

Soak the soy beans over night, then cook on a slow boil until done, but not mushy. Stir in 1 gram koji-kin mixed with 1/2 C. flour to coat the beans well:

Cover with a cloth, then keep at 90 degrees and high humidity for three to four days, until the beans are well coated with the mold. I forgot to take a picture, but here are some fava beans that went through the same procedure:

Transfer to a jar and add a 20% brine solution. I did two batches.

This is where the internet instructions I found stopped. I waited for six months, hoping against hope that they would turn black.

Oh dear. Clearly I overcooked the beans in the left jar. I decided to leave t’other one for another six months.

Enough fermentation to have cracked the lid, and at some point juices had escaped and run down the side of the jar:

The fermentation wasn’t done yet. Loosening the ring, then taking it and the cap off, first a release of juice, then it swelled up, which seems the wrong way around:

I rinsed the beans, but one of these things is not like the other one:

But, you ask, how did they taste? Surprisingly, pretty good. Not like black beans, but not unlike them either. Maybe like a cross between black beans and fermented bean curd:

. . . which makes sense.

But the proof is in the pudding:

I added more of the beans, and tasted it before adding the bacon and 1 Tbsp. of oyster sauce so as not to queer my palate. Pretty good, with the fermented goodness and slightly cheesy taste of the beans, but even better with the additions.

Yum!

-R

PS Absent info from the net, I thought maybe I should dry the beans, necessarily since we’re in the July humidity swamp in the oven. After a couple of hours at 170 degrees:

Now they look a lot more like yer classic fermented black beans, but don’t really taste any different. Still, this is pretty yummy, and another welcome addition to my pantry.

-R