New Frontiers of Miso

During my visit to New York, I had the opportunity to visit the testing laboratory kitchen of chef David Chang of Momofuku fame. My guide was kitchen lab director Dan Felder, a fellow fermentation geek. They have teamed up with Harvard microbiologists and have even been publishing scholarly papers on some of their experiments. They are doing a few things I’ve never tried, seen, or heard of. The most exciting was making miso from nuts and seeds rather than just legumes.

I sampled the flavors pictured above, and loved their rich flavors. Pistachio miso was my favorite. The nut misos were low-salt sweet misos, fermented for just a short time to avoid the oils going rancid. I don’t have recipes to provide, but I share this as inspiration for fellow experimentalists.

Another innovative project I sampled was koji, simply dried in a dehydrator and ground into a powder. They were using it with salt as a curing agent for lardo, and as a seasoning for fish. Koji has  a distinctive sweet flavor that could be used to season many different things.