Amazing Amazake
I recently dropped into our local sake maker and picked up another package of koji rice. My plan was to make my third batch of homemade miso since our first one is disappearing quickly and the second one is just over a month into its fermentation which will take a fully year or so. However, I borrowed the book Koji Alchemy and have been reading through it and I’m finding it so fascinating and it is giving me some other ideas for my koji rice.
The first thing I decided to try making is amazake. I’d never drank this before but it is popular in Japan. Despite the fact that it is just koji rice, cooked rice and water 1:1:2 it is super sweet and umami. Aspergillus oryzae is the mold that lives in koji rice, and much of it usefulness stems from the massive amounts of both amylases and proteases that it produces. Foods that are fermented by koji rice will be sweeter and more umami rich because of the action of these enzymes. Glutamate is well known as the amino acid that is the primary factor that gives food that umami deliciousness. It is because of the proteases that glutamate is released from foods in large amounts, it is what gives miso and soy sauce that awesome delicious flavour.
Amazake is not fermented so in making it unlike the miso, we are not trying to grow the aspergillus oryzae but instead we are relying on the enzymes already present from the aspergillus in the koji to break down the starch and protein in the rice to make the amazake sweet and yummy. I used my Instant Pot set to Keep Warm, Less placing a couple of inches of water in the pot and then placing the jam jar with the koji rice, cooked rice and water in the water bath. This setting at most stays on for 10 hours, so I had to run it twice, once at 4 hours and once at 10 hours to get the full effect.
This morning I took the jar of amazake out of the Instant Pot and stirred it well to break down the rice and tasted it. It was shocking how sweet it is without any added sugar. Wow such delicious interesting thing this amazake. So the main reason I wanted to make it was to play with the koji rice I had but then I also had a plan for bread of course. I am using this amazake to prepare a Tangzhong for my vegan version of the sourdough Hokkaido milk bread. Because it is so sweet I didn’t need to add any sugar to the dough. So we shall see if the resulting bread it too sweet for my liking. Having tasted it, I wonder how it would work to make a stiff sweet levain!!
I’ll posted about my first test bake with my amazake in another blog post.
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