Miso Madness is almost over as the Munchkin is starting to feel twitchy over our dwindling supply of soap…

…which means that our run of frenzied fermentation is coming to an end and the previously, prematurely terminated Soap Marathon is going to have to resume (yeah, our soaps are really popular and people just can’t get enough of them; this is A Good Thing, she tells me ;-P).

After the frenzy of rice koji making and the resulting shinshu and shiro misos, we are ending our run with a couple of pig tail buckets of hatcho miso.  The first bucket was made two days ago, however, it turned out to be about a gallon short because I held back some of the black bean koji to reinoculate the next batch of beans.  There was a slight set-back with that particular batch (yes, yes, I’m sure you’ve heard about the Great Bean Bungle…let’s move on…) and to make a long story short, another batch had to be introduced into the equation.  Anyway, back to the short bucket:  I just “happened” to have a gallon batch of miso from last year which was made with cacao beans and while very aromatic, the chocolate taste was just too overpowering (yes, chocolate-lovers, this is actually possible!).  So, we emptied all of the containers, mixed them together again with the addition of bird peppers (Korean-style??) and a generous handful of black peppercorns.

And voila’, the first full bucket of Belizean Style Chocolate (Cacao Bean) Hatcho Miso (with chilli and black pepper) was born:

Time to start thinking about soap…

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