Volume 1, 17: I stock up on the flavor of my homeland.

Volume 1, Chapter 17: I stock up on the flavor of my homeland.

A week passed.

The magic tools I ordered were completed five days after I visited, and I asked Mister Gunt to set them up in the shop for me. The rising box I was so worried about turned out to be almost identical to the real thing. I tried it out right away, and as I expected it made breadmaking much easier. I showed the Silases, who were suspicious of the box, the breadmaking process and got them to eat some bread. They accepted its uses despite their astonishment.

During the five days, I busied myself with cleaning and fixing the worn down areas in the shop. I asked some traders for help with the parts I couldn’t do myself, and the bigger renovation projects are going under construction soon.

By the way, this shop actually has two floors. The second floor used to be a living space, and it seems the old couple used to live up there. As I planned on commuting here from the Claude mansion, I decided to turn the second floor into a storage and resting space.

I also got the cutlery and silverware for the shop. I finished the talks with the Ashley Company, who agreed to provide food ingredients.

I decided to set the opening date to a month later. The menu was pretty much set, so I only needed to iron out the smaller details now.

There was still some time, but I didn’t know if I would have time after the shop opened so I decided to make the flavor of my homeland today. Yes, that’s miso and soy sauce. I wanted to make these two seasonings indispensable to Japanese cuisine no matter what.

I purchased two types of beans similar to soybeans from the Ashley Company, and made miso and soy sauce with each of them. Why now, you might be wondering, but that is because I’ve finally made the koji-starter that is required to make miso and soy sauce.

After five times of trial and error, I finally succeeded in getting the koji mold to stick to the soybeans. I couldn’t see the koji, so I enlisted the help of the spirit Basil. I don’t think I would have been able to make any without Basil. A thousand thanks.

Now I just had to prepare the ingredients. That’s why I was in the kitchen so early in the morning. I left the beans to soak in water yesterday, and they grew two times their size today. All ready.

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Miso and soy sauce are both started by cooking the beans. Miso beans are cooked for around six hours, soy sauce for around eight; they must be slowly cooked on low heat, with the scum constantly skimmed off. The beans are cooked until they can be easily crushed by your fingers.

Then I mixed the miso with koji and salt first. Just in case, I made a batch with more salt and another with less. It would take many days before they were finished, so better to be safe.

Then I crushed the boiled beans with a large mortar. I remember crushing this with the stone mortar we used to pound mochi back at home.

After crushing it until there were only a few beans, I added the koji and salt mixture in. Sometimes I would add some of the water from boiling the beans to make it just the right thickness. Using the two batches of salted beans with salt and koji, I repeated the task of adjusting the thickness around four times. It was dull and taxing work to mix and mash. Finally, I poured it into a large ceramic container, taking care not to make any air pockets.

I lightly salted the top, covered the opening with a clean cloth, then topped it with a wooden lid and a heavy stone on top. There was no seran wrap to seal it or prevent contamination in this world, so I wrapped the whole thing with a large cloth and tied it with a rope. Then I wrote down the date, the type of beans I used and the salt ratio on a piece of paper and tucked that in between the cloth and the rope.

The preparations for the miso were done. Two or three months later, I would have to do something called tenchi gaeshi and mix and flip the whole miso batch, but that was still a long way off.

Next is the soy sauce. First, I mixed flour with a wooden spatula in a pan until they were slightly browned. Then I took out the boiled beans with a strainer and cooled them to below body temperature. Once the flour was also at the same temperature, I mixed it with the same amount of koji taken from the koji-starter. Then I mixed in the beans, piled it into a small mountain in a rectangular container and placed it into the bread rising box.

That was all I could do for the soy sauce today.

The next day, the beans had stuck together, so I gently pulled them apart and spread them flat on a container. It went into the rising box again, but without the temperature control. If the temperature was too high, there was danger of growing natto bacteria too, which I didn’t want.

And the next day. I took the container out of the rising box to see that the beans turned green. It seems the koji mold was growing, I observed with relief. Just in case, I had Basil look at it, who confirmed that it was okay.

I put the beans into a ceramic container identical to the one with miso, and mixed in some cold salt water. Now it would sit in the refrigerator for three weeks. I would have to take it out every four to five days to crush any beans that floated up to the surface. After three weeks, it would sit at room temperature to ferment for about half a year, and I would have to mix it every two or three days too. It was quite exhausting. After making it by hand, I fully understood how much work was put into miso and soy sauce that I could have easily bought at a supermarket or convenience store in my previous world.

Maybe it wasn’t as difficult in modern day Japan, as there were probably factories to mass produce it, but it struck me deeply how hard it was to make it traditionally.