I love miso, although to be honest don’t know many uses for it. Of course there’s miso soup, a staple in many a sushi adventure and indeed in my kitchen; I use it in salad dressings; and somewhere have a recipe for Miso-Roasted Pork, which is delicious.

There are two varieties of miso that are easy to find: aka (white) miso and shiro (red) miso, both of which are (very) thick pastes, usually in small plastic tubs, in the freezer section of your favorite Asian market. One nice thing about miso is that it will keep indefinitely (literally for years) in the freezer, with little degradation in its flavor.

Miso is another Asian ingredient based on the fungus/mold Aspergillum oryzae, also a key component of things like sake and soy sauce. Making miso is pretty easy: first you grow the mold on rice/grain/soybeans; then dry and optionally grind them and mix with cooked, mashed soybeans and lots of salt; then keep it weighted while the fermentation happens. It’s the last part that’s the most difficult, because you have to wait many months, or a year or more.

The aforementioned misos both use rice as a substrate for the mold, and are ground to a smooth paste. Unsurprisingly, there’s a much wider variety of misos available in Japan, such as soybean-only and chunky grain-based versions.

It’s worth noting that although the supermarket versions are true to their names, i.e. “white” miso is indeed whitish, and “red” miso is darker and reddish, the names are more indicative of style than color. Basically, “white” misos are made with less salt and fermented for a shorter time, maybe three to six months, so they have more “delicate” flavor (insofar as any miso could be considered to have a “delicate” taste.)

I have been a complete failure with growing the mold on rice, but successful with grains and beans. Barley is traditional, but I didn’t have any at the time, so my first miso adventure was with its cousin rye.

Later on I made some with barley and beans, and may have gotten a bit carried away (but they will last for years):

I ran out of appropriate containers, so ended up using some sturdy bags, with plastic bags of pebbles as weights. Here is my first reveal, a chunky rye white miso:

Hmmm, doesn’t look much like the supermarket version. Maybe after a bit of blending?

Ah, that’s better.

But, you ask, how did it taste?

Surprisingly good. Not quite like the supermarket version of white miso, maybe a bit mellower and with a sweeter (despite the salt) flavor.

But the proof is in the pudding. I made a miso dressing for cucumbers:

And the gold standard, miso soup. I didn’t have tofu, so I used some parboiled carrots:

This was very good (with a hit of sansho), and if I hadn’t known better, probably wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t commercial miso. This batch of miso has gone in the fridge, whereas the rest will continue to ferment in my basement, so I’m looking forward to (in a few months) trying out the next one.

Yum!

-R