Well OK, then! I have
finally gotten around to it. :-)
I reviewed the instructions in The Art of Miso and settled on combining the recipes for sweet white and finger lickin' miso, and struck out on my own. My first two crocks of miso are still aging in the basement and may do for another year or two, but this one is supposed to be a short ferment and I plan to open it every week to witness the progress.
Into a large, glass bowl, I added:
- 6 cups of pintos
- 3 cups of hominy
- 8 cups of barley koji
- 1 can of black olives, crushed
- 1/2 cup of sauerkraut (current batch, fermented for eight months), for microbes and moisture-over-time
- 3 oz sun-dried tomatoes, snipped into strips and slightly rehydrated through microwave steaming
- 5 Tbs Real Salt
- ~2.5 cups spring water
- 3 chilies (pasilla, ancho, hatch green), snipped up into thin strips
- 5 big stalks of cilantro, bolted to seed, woody bits removed and snipped into small bits, including coriander seeds
- an unmeasured quantity (1/4-1 tsp?) of each: Mexican oregano, cumin, epazote, chipotle, cayenne
- ~2 Tbs chikpea miso from South River
I mashed it by hand, squeezing it in my fists. This caused the pintos to become mash but did very little to the hominy. Normally, you'd want to mash some proportion of the beans, but I figured this was a good stand-in for that practice. The character of this mixture is way different than my earlier batches with much lower proportion of koji.
I salted a one-gallon crock, filled it with balls of the mixture, taking care to push out air-pockets, salted the surface, put a plate atop the miso and weighted it with a one-gallon "pickle" jar filled with water.
I'll provide updates as I see the progress. I'm excited!