Amazake without boiling?

[bhaugen]

What happens if you make amazake without boiling it? Are the live cultures good for you?

How long could you keep it refrigerated before it gets bad in some way? Or does it not really go bad, but just gets more alcoholic?

[Tim Hall]

Don't know how long you could keep it before it would go off. But the boiling phase is intended to stop the enzyme activity and any yeast. Basically if you don't boil the amazake, the enzymes will continue to convert starches to simple sugars, and yeasts will likely start working on the sugars to convert them alcohol. You'll start making sake in other words.

[bhaugen]

Thanks for the reply.

But is consuming the unboiled amazake bad for you in any way? Or would it be more like first drinking rice beer, and then later drinking rice wine? (In other words, why not?)

Where I'm coming from: I like the commercial amazake I have tried, but prefer cultured foods with live cultures. So I hesitate to order some koji before figuring out if I can treat amazake as a real probiotic.

[Tim Hall]

Well, I can't answer your question entirely, but here's what I can offer you: I personally don't regard aspergillus (koji culture) as a probiotic to begin with. What the koji is there for is to create enzymes to convert starches to sugars for other bugs to chew on - these are the potential probiotics. Even in miso, where the koji is not heated/pasteurized, the koji culture is essentially killed out upon salting, and it's the probiotic bacteria that take over.

The major health benefit most people seek from rice sweetener is that it's a whole-food sweetener, and not refined. Theoretically if you could leave all the enzymes intact by not boiling the amazake, it would have added benefit by aiding in digestion...especially starchy foods.

But is the live aspergillus culture safe eat? I'm not sure. My suspicion is that heating the amazake to 145-150F kills the aspergillus while leaving the diastatic enzymes intact (proteins, proteolytic enzymes and many microorganisms begin to break down in the 125F range, but this is certainly not true for all microorganisms).

You might consider adding some ginger-beer bug or kefir culture or some other wild culture to your amazake and let it go through a secondary fermentation if you want to get probiotic benefit from it.

[erroneous monk]

the following might help you decide whether ingesting live a. oryzae might be a good idea: http://www.epa.gov/biotech_rule/pubs/fra/fra007.htm - Aspergillus oryzae Final Risk Assessment

i'm pretty sure it was also one of the cultures in a batch of EM mother culture i received a few years ago - drinking brews i made with it made my faeces smell really sweet!! it is no longer an ingredient in the same brand of mother culture.

it seems to have some limited use as an animal probiotic - at least in trials. e.g http://www.pjbs.org/ijps/fin495.pdf

[Pikachu]

Hi bhaugen,

Of course you can drink Amazake unpasteurized.
Homemade miso is live so it's OK. Koji rice is used for picking veg (live) as well and you don't boil those. Commercial products has to go through heat-treatment otherwise the product will continue to ferment so this is where the difference is between homemade and commercial poduction. I think LIVE stuff taste better.

As for storage, you could freeze it if you make a big batch but then again that would kill off Koji-kin.

[ralpharnold2]

I personally put the amazake in the home freezer to stop
its' additional fermentation. Seems to work out for me.
(I'm no weirder than normal). Love that amazake!

I got around the water bath method by simply putting the
bowl in the oven....I experimented and found the spot
on the warm portion of the stove's dial that consistently
heats to 130dF only....normally I have put the amazake mixture
in the oven and go to sleep and let it work while I rest...which allows me to have some delicious amazake in a smoothie
in the morning and I put the rest in freezer. I just cut off chunks
of amazake and throw in blender for smoothies as desired
(well, as I can, anyway).

Ralph in Gladstone, OR