What is the difference between fermentation and leavening? What does fermentation mean?
At the moment when fermentation ends, when the yeast eats the sugars, alcohol is produced. This is the first stage, we call it fermentation. Yeasts are fungi, not bacilli, something on the border between bacteria and plants. And when they finish their activity, another bunch comes in, that’s bacteria. And they start consuming the alcohol that the yeast made before them. And this phase is called souring, because something acidic is created.
How did you come up with pea miso?
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Simple – I read somewhere that the first foods brought here by the first Slavs were peas and millet. So it occurred to me that peas are the basis of our culture.
Miso – that’s Japan. Do you want to imitate Japanese cuisine? Or what are you trying to do?
Japan has a great tendency to preserve old things and preserve them. He has a great ability to simplify things on the one hand, and on the other to make them incredibly perfect. This is their natural trait because they are great at it. Miso as a food did not originate in Japan, but supposedly somewhere in continental Asia. The Japanese came there, saw it there, took it home and tweaked it into an incredibly clean, wonderful technology that creates something beautiful, fragrant, tasty. And they transformed the whole thing.
And I like the idea of taking Japanese perfection and moving it here to us in Europe. At a time when we think that everything has been invented – the McDonaldization of the world blinds us – many important things do not exist here. We haven’t even started a food like miso. We are only now beginning what the Japanese discovered three thousand years ago. And it is interesting both socially and gastronomically.
And what is miso good for? Can I put it in potato chips?
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That’s the best idea. If you take an ordinary Czech potato, it smells, but it does not have a distinct taste. And miso is the bearer of taste for us. We call it umami seasoning. Umami is the taste that is wrongly assigned the fifth place. But it is the first, most basic taste that we perceive as humans, but we don’t even have a word for it in Czech, nor have we started to deal with it, we are so terribly behind the Japanese.
From my point of view, it’s the first taste – the taste of beer, bread, cheese, tomatoes, everything that most people love, that they never taste. The basis of what our taste buds stand on. It is said to be the largest area of the tongue that perceives this taste. The other tastes that we as Europeans attach the main role to – hot, bitter, salty – are just the edge of the tongue. The main taste, which plays a decisive role on the tongue, is carried by this paste. And thanks to this, it defines the Japanese gastronomic line as absolutely distinctive. Japanese taste is the highest level of gastronomy.
What does the job of a pollinator entail? And how is miso paste made? Listen to the full interview.
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