On this day the Miso Mission has been accomplished.  The rice koji was ready and properly colonised and both of us were in the right frame of mind, with only a mild attack of filibustering on Munchkin’s part (she had very specific plans as to what she expected to do this morning), to tackle the mountain of beans and gallons of purple-black bean juice (from boiling said beans) required for the making of our Belizean-Style Black Bean Shinshu Miso.

The black beans were defrosted, boiled to tenderness (which thankfully doesn’t take too long with black beans), drained and then mashed.  The use of words makes things appear so easy but while doing, it certainly seemed that there was a veritable mountain of beans.  I left the temperature probe out of the rice koji and room temperature was 36C, so the mashing built up a bit of a sweat.

In the mean time, Munchkin, while muttering to herself that she needed to do other stuff, mixed the bean juice with sea salt, cooled it and added some commercial miso to the mix (for extra lots of beneficial microorganisms).  Thank you, Adriana Guzman for giving us some for this purpose.

The rice koji had to be added to the beans and mixed well.  Using a spoon did not work and I had to resort to using my hands…you can see the excitement that was gripping me at the time!

After adding the liquid portion and mixing again, it was time to fill the prepared 5 gallon pig-tail bucket.  This accomplished, a nice layer of salt was added on the top for protection against undesirable microorganisms.

What happened next was a total, super bonus for me, though it earned me this look from the Munchkin…

…there was still a whole lot of rice koji left and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think of the 28-day Miso Countdown before we run out…the solution…shiro miso.  This type of miso is made up mostly of rice koji, only half the salt and a little bit of beans (compared to shinshu).  The beauty of it and the reason why it is of critical importance right now, is that it only takes four to eight weeks to mature.  Bonsa…we have the answer to our miso shortage!

So, I figured we could make a test gallon of this sweet miso but after measuring out the required koji, realised that we used up all the beans in making the monster bucket; we still had bean juice left-over but no beans.  Resolution:  fortunately I had already grated the day’s quota of coconuts and Munchkin had already squeezed out the cream from them (for selling in town to people that don’t want to buy cans or powdered coconut cream) and we were left with the meal.  We decided to experiment and replace the bean portion of the miso with de-creamed coconut meal.  Once the cream is removed, what is left is actually quite high in protein and while not a legume, it might make a good replacement for beans (it also makes things Belizean and exotic!).  We still used the left over bean juice though.

The bean juice gave everything a slight purple tinge (pretty cool, actually!)…

Here it is packed into a gallon jar:

You would think that this was enough…hee…hee…hee…but I got another look shot my way…

…there was still another lot of koji left to make another batch…so we did…

Five gallons of shinshu miso and two gallons of shiro miso…not bad for a day’s work!!

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