Koji Salt, Shoyu and Miso
A craving is a curious thing, sometimes as beneficial as it is irresistible. For Denver Mace, 39-year-old owner of Koji Fine Foods in Chilliwack, a family member’s craving inspired him to start Canada’s first soy sauce microbrewery, making shoyu using traditional Japanese techniques with a Canadian twist.
The first bottles of Kanada Shoyu go on sale in October.
After a relative’s sense of taste was eradicated by chemotherapy eight years ago, the only thing she was interested in eating was food generously laced with soy sauce.
Curious about why soy sauce had such an impact, Mace, an enthusiastic home cook who was already making miso at home, concluded the umami flavour in the salty condiment was cutting through her diminished ability to taste. The hero ingredient was the liquid’s building block: koji mould.
Koji is the cradle of umami in fermented foods, responsible for the round, savory fifth taste that makes soy sauce so mouth-watering. It gives miso its deeply satisfying flavour. It’s the key ingredient in rice vinegar, mirin, sake and shochu, all of which also have umami profiles.
Mace was leery of the amount of sodium his ailing relative was getting with all that soy sauce. He went looking for something that had an umami punch, but with less salt, and discovered shio koji (koji salt).
When he was unable to find shio koji locally, Mace taught himself to make it just as he did with miso. The porridge-like fermented “wet” salt is made with koji rice and packs a mellow, salty umami punch. It has 75 per cent less sodium than using table salt in a recipe.
“It’s a miraculous ingredient that makes your mouth water,” Mace says. He calls a “unicorn ingredient.”
A 250 mL jar of Koji Fine Foods koji salt sells for $12.79 on the company website. The delicious creamy-salty slurry has an umami backbone and a hint of sweetness. It can be added to numerous recipes, including in roasted vegetables and to toast raw almonds, both with flavourful results.
Mace makes and sells koji salt and plant-based miso balls for making healthy instant soup at farmers’ markets in and around Vancouver and the lower mainland. His kids, 13-year-old daughter.
Brooklyn, and son, Austin, 10, often help out with production of the miso balls, which are sold in refillable packaging and come in flavours including Thai red curry, spicy, ginger sesame, roasted garlic and nori.
Encouraged by sales and repeat customers, Mace quit his job of 21 years in the automotive industry in 2018 to make Koji Fine Foods his full-time work.
“I think it provides value to my community by making those freshly fermented foods,” Mace says.
He’s has been experimenting with koji for several years. His kids love miso coup and he wanted his family to eat fresh and healthy fermented probiotics. He picked up the basics on growing koji online from sake-makers. The Noma Guide to Fermentation by chefs René Redzepi and David Zilber provided additional education and inspiration.
He bought koji spores from a U.S. online distributor and Canadian organic soybeans and started to learn by doing, teaching himself to inoculate grains and grow the mould by trial and error.
“I just put in that time and effort at home and really perfected my production methods and now I just grow koji. It just comes in tune and you just touch, feel, smell,” he said. “I can get it down to a science, I’ve done it so many times.”
Some of his early batches of miso are still thriving.
He started exploring making shoyu when it was impossible to find the real thing here.
“I’m like, there must be a Canadian-made soy sauce. And there wasn’t such a thing and I thought, well Canada grows all the soybeans and nobody makes soy sauce. How is that possible?” Mace says.
“I looked further into it and I came to the realization that all that sushi I had my entire life, I’ve never had real soy sauce before. I’ve never had real shoyu.”
Japanese shoyu typically tastes different than the mass-produced, quicker-fermented soy sauces made for export. Unlike some commercial soy sauces, Mace's shoyu has no additives.
The fact Mace is white raises the question of culinary cultural appropriation around making and marketing a traditionally Japanese product.
He considered the issue when he began. He said most people — not all — have responded positively. He’s picked up the skills to make shoyu from experts, including Japanese makers.
“I’m not trying to make Japanese food. I’m trying to make Canadian food using Japanese techniques,” he says.
Kanada Shoyu reflects the Canadian terroir. Organic Quebec soybeans and organic toasted Saskatchewan wheat berries are steamed and inoculated with koji, mixed with a Vancouver Island Sea Salt and Fraser Valley water brine and fermented in Okanagan red wine barrels. The first batch of British Columbia-made shoyu has been fermenting for a year.
Mace’s miso also has his own spin. He uses basmati rice to grow his koji, rather than the usual white short-grain rice, saying the higher flavonoid compounds in basmati adds character to the product.
Two trips to Japan to tour shoyu breweries in 2018 and 2019 deepened Mace’s appreciation for the huge variety and quality of shoyu and the long Japanese tradition of making the condiment.
He and his wife Susan Daichendt first did a working vacation trip to get a better understanding of shoyu. Daichendt says “it smells like home” when their guide took them to Yugeta Shoyu and they smelled the fermenting soy sauce mash, called moromi.
Last October, Mace returned to Japan as part of an international kojiology tour with “koji nerds from around the world,” organized by Japanese-Dutch koji expert and educator Malica Groen of Malica Ferments.
He also met his “shoyu brewing hero,” Toshio Shinko, president of Yuasa Soy Sauce in Wakayama, the region said to be the birthplace of shoyu.
“He really encouraged me to continue my journey and dream of starting Canada’s first shoyu brewery,” Mace says.
He also spent time helping British Columbia health authorities understand why and how his fermented products were food safe as he brought them to farmers’ markets.
“I had to teach two or three levels of Canadian government how to make [foods fermented with koji.] I got to meet the boss’s boss at Vancouver Coastal Health who came by my kitchen inspection,” Mace says. “It’s very safe. There’s nothing harmful going on here, this has been done for thousands of years.”
Salt is the key to fermented food safety.
“You know it’s not rocket science. As long as you’ve got the right salinity and you have the right environment it’s like raising kids. You give them what they want and they’ll thrive.
He leased a 1,200-square-foot light industrial space in Chilliwack last year to start brewing shoyu. His neighbour on one side brews kombucha. On the other, there’s an appliance repair shop.
He took edible Vancouver on a virtual tour of Canada’s only soy sauce microbrewery recently, where the shoyu was fermenting in 10 wine barrels, the batches started one month apart.
He lifted the linen sheet covering a barrel to show the thick, dark red-brown contents. Think chunky black bean dip.“
As long as you just keep the oxygen flowing to it, everybody’s happy. You know, those little microbes just bubble, bubble, bubble and break those little protein chains down into amino acids and that’s what makes it tasty,” he says.
He makes the koji in a 200-square-foot loft above his production floor, a room called the koji muro. Tables hold shallow trays (called koji buta) of steamed grains that are spread out and inoculated with koji spores, then left to grow.
Without the budget to buy a $60,000 commercial steamer for the grains, Mace is proud of the Canadian invention he uses as a worthy hack: $500 worth of Instant Pots.
“It takes 45 minutes and you get a squish on the beans,” he says. He uses a small cider press to extract the shoyu. He’ll make a barrel a month, selling bottles online, at farmers’ markets and perhaps through a network of small stores around the lower mainland.
Maybe Kanada Shoyu will even have a place on tables in Japan one day.
“It’s made [here] on the other side of the world. It’s unique and I hope it is a Canadian product that one day I can sell in Tokyo,” Mace says. “You know, that would be awesome.”
Koji Fine Foods
Chilliwack, B.C.
kojifinefoods.ca | 604.684.3131 | @kojifinefoods
