It is some days later. I have travelled, alone this time, towards the eastern tip of Honshu. Dr Hiroshi Konno of the Akita Konno Shouten ‘Applied Fungal Technology’ company is telling me all about the fascinating possibilities of Aspergillus oryzae. You could say he is a fungi to hang out with (or, please yourself).
Having spent the night in the city of Akita, I had taken a local train to the small town of Kariwano. Though covered in snow for much of the winter, Akita Prefecture in spring is the greenest place I have ever seen. Its lush valleys and forested mountains seem to teeter on the brink of being subsumed by verdant undergrowth.
Kariwano station is little more than two platforms and an overpass, but a team of local ladies in pinnies and white gloves – most likely volunteers working for free – are busy cleaning every inch of it. There is a single, rusty taxi outside but Akita Konno is just a short way down the high street, so I walk.
Dr Konno, in his late fifties with a fantastic thick, bushy, Tom Selleck moustache, welcomes me a few minutes later at the company’s reception whose walls are decorated with striking electron-microscope blow-ups of different fungi which look just like coral. Beneath the photos is a display cabinet with odd, conical glass containers, each with a different type of Aspergillus, ranging in colour from ivory to brown to olive-greens.
As is often the case when I interview people who work in scientific or highly technical jobs, much of what Konno-san tells me flies straight over my head and it is a struggle to keep him to layman’s territory, but this is what I learn about koji kin (and Konno-san has read the following – not the bit about Tom Selleck – so we should be on safe ground):
Koji kin, also known as ‘moyashi’, or ‘seed koji’, is a pure, domesticated version of the ambient fungi (fungi found just hanging about the place) used for hundreds of years in Japan to make their various fermented foods and drink. It is just one of thousands of different types of fungi, enzyme and micro-bacteria Akita Konno sells for the making of miso, soy, sake, shochu, awamori, mirin, katsuobushi, vinegars, pickles and natto, among other products. Each of them needs a specific type of fungus – sake requires a koji which turns the starch in rice into sugar and alcohol, for instance, while miso and soy sauce need a koji that can decompose proteins to create deliciously umami-rich amino acids and peptides. Some koji increase in temperature quickly, some slowly. Black koji (Aspergillus luchuensis), used for awamori, produces a lot of citric acid which is good for fending off other unwanted fungi in the warm climate of Okinawa where it is made, but is bad for sake (although, interestingly, one company in Niigata has recently started using it to make sake: bet that’s funky). The Aspergillus usually used for shochu is also quite high in citric acid to cope with Kyushu’s similarly warm climate, while Aspergillus glaucus, the type used for katsuobushi, is unusual in being what Konno-san termed a ‘perfect fungi’, which means it contains both male and female fungi. The fact that fungi had different genders was news to me, but apparently miso, soy and sake use ‘imperfect’ fungi.
What would happen if you used, say, a miso koji for making sake? ‘You could make a sake with it but most excellent sakes have a simple taste, so you don’t want too many amino acids, not too much umami,’ says Konno-san. ‘A hundred years ago, sake makers would have started the fermentation naturally because they simply weren’t aware of the different types of fungi, so you may well have had people making sake with the “wrong” one.’
Konno’s great-grandfather, the founder of the company, was Seiji Konno, born in 1882, and the scion of a centuries old sake and soy maker. By all accounts a man of meticulous habits (as a hobby he would make charts to record the accuracy of his watches), Seiji studied the microbiology of brewing at Osaka Higher Technical College and was the first man to isolate and propagate the types of Aspergillus oryzae suitable for making soy sauce and sake. This was the first so-called ‘domesticated fungus’, and the Aspergillus oryzae that the company sells today can be traced back over a hundred years to the one isolated in Seiji Konno’s laboratory.
‘We never isolate Aspergillus oryzae from nature, we always use this domesticated fungus,’ Konno-san tells me. ‘The difference between the two is like that of a wild pig and a farmed pig. Ours is a pure culture. Before, they used some old rice from the last batch of sake in the same way you make bread with a sourdough starter, but that would be a mixed culture, you could never be sure how the end product would taste.’ (Later, via email, Konno-san expanded on his pig simile: the domestic pig was bred from wild boars and just as the boars’ tusks degenerated because they weren’t used, so have the toxins in Aspergillus oryzae. Prior to his great-grandfather’s research, one can only imagine the number of Japanese people who died trying to figure out why one particular batch of rotten rice created delicious sake and the other, which looked and smelled exactly the same, but made Uncle Hiroko go green and die.)
As well as selling koji kin to food producers the length of Japan, the Akita Konno company also exports to Europe, the USA and Indonesia where a type of koji is used to ferment beans for tempeh, a tofu-like product made from soy beans. But the various koji kin were only one of its product areas. Konno produces more than 10,000 different cultures in all, including brewer’s yeasts, enzymes and bacteria for the food industry. There is one which is more troublesome than the rest. The type of fungus – actually a bacillus – used to make natto, the frankly disgusting, odiferous fermented soy bean gloop loved by many Japanese as a healthy breakfast treat, is particularly virulent. It grows very quickly – taking just twenty minutes to begin its cell division. The awful whiff of natto should give one warning of its potency but, just in case, the thirty staff at Akita Konno are forbidden from going from the natto bacillus production facility to any of the others on the same day.
Dr Konno, in a pink polo shirt and blue slacks, takes me on a tour of the factory, first to a lab filled with laser scanning microscopes and electron microscopes – big, clunky, grey machinery with massive computer screens of a sort last seen in 1980s sci-fi movies. Shelves are lined with test tubes containing all manner of moulds and fungi. We surprise some technicians who are in the midst of a sake tasting.
‘Sake brewers send us samples for analysis and we advise them on blending,’ explains Konno. ‘And we also make sake ourselves to test our own koji.’ He shows me their special freezers which store their ‘seed bank’ of fungi at −80°C. Then we put on some fetching white wellies to see koji kin being made, entering a special part of the factory through an alarming air-lock system which surprise-blasts me with a shock of air with the force of a hundred hair dryers. ‘Sorry about that,’ laughs Konno-san. ‘Koji is a living thing, it can mutate easily and frequently. It’s like breeding a dog: we have to keep it pure. That’s why sake brewers are afraid to make koji themselves in case it mutates. Keeping a pure environment is very important.’
In the air-locked room, rice is soaked then steamed, cooled and inoculated with the seed culture. It germinates here for a day in a huge perforated steel drum where it is cooled, before being transferred to wooden trays, covered with muslin, to incubate further for five to six days. The wood allows the transfer of air, says Konno. A worker clad head to foot in white hat, overalls and boots brings us some he made earlier: a seed tray, a bit like a cat litter, filled with rice which has now turned a uniform, and rather fetching, dark green.
The room is uncomfortably warm and smells, frankly, of old socks, but eventually it will produce some lovely fungus spores which will then be mechanically sieved from their host rice. Just 70g of these spores will be enough to ferment 200kg of rice to make sake.
‘This kind of solid fermentation is really a Japanese specialty,’ Konno explains proudly. ‘In Europe and America you brew beer, for instance, which is not solid, kernel fermentation, it is liquid fermentation only, which is very primitive. But this kind of fermentation we do in Japan produces many more enzymes which I think will have many more applications in medicine in the future.’
Several chefs in the West ha
ve been experimenting with koji. As well as Umansky, in New York David Chang has fermented pork fillets to make a version of katsuobushi he called ‘porkbushi’, as well as pistachio- and chickpea misos; in Copenhagen, the Nordic Food Lab have made pea miso, or ‘peaso’, and a garum made from fermented crickets. Konno has heard about their experiments but they were nothing new as far as the Japanese were concerned. Shio koji (malted rice in a brine) and amazake are commonly used in domestic kitchens for marinades, pickling and other purposes.
‘The first use of koji was probably four thousand years ago in Japan; definitely it has been used for a thousand years in Japanese food culture, to make miso and so on. Koji has always been used in Japanese home cooking, in dried form on rice, in pickles. Sake lees with koji and salt makes a wonderful marinade for chicken legs.’ There had been a lot of interest recently in making koji ice cream and amazake from a producer in the Czech Republic, he adds, but Konno-san has greater ambitions than just selling koji to chefs.
‘My dream is to create a koji that can ferment like yeast,’ he says excitedly. ‘Imagine if you didn’t need to use yeast to make sake! How great that would taste. And then imagine if you could create a koji which fermented fructose. Sake yeast ferments glucose – the starch in the rice becomes glucose – but if you could ferment starch to create fructose then you could make wine from rice!’ My mind was now on full boggle. How on earth could you do that? ‘It would require a little genetic manipulation and, at the moment, that is not allowed with microorganisms in food production because of the fear that someone might create some killer fungus,’ says Konno sadly.
Naturally occurring fungi can, of course, also be deadly. Aspergillus flavus, for instance, which grows on the soil in warmer countries, closely resembles Aspergillus oryzae but is poisonous. In 1960 an outbreak eventually traced to Brazilian-grown peanuts used in poultry feed caused the death of 100,000 turkeys in the UK. That incident caused a big stir in Japan precisely because of the close resemblance of flavus to oryzae. Meanwhile, Aspergillus fumigatus, which is airborne, is deadly for people whose immune systems are vulnerable and is thus especially unwelcome in hospitals. Hence, these days the production of Aspergillus is very closely regulated by the Japanese government.
I left Konno’s industrious hive of mould production a little wiser about the miraculous properties of Aspergillus oryzae and its potential but I always struggle with the abstract nature of the sciences – or, basically, stuff about stuff you can’t see.
It was time to get back to basics, to return to the world of the tangible, to feel the soil between my fingers,fn1 to delve deep into the roots, the very itself of Japanese food.
Chapter 31
Rice
I am standing up to my knees in mud. My bare arms are burning in the sun but I can feel the pleasant chill of the wet, grey mud through my rubber boots. Frogs are chirruping and from the corner of my eye I see something slither away into the grass.
‘This paddy is deep and soft so the rice will be really tasty,’ the Greatest Rice Farmer in the World (TGRFITW) tells me. ‘Each field has its own character but this one is tougher to work which is why we use this.’
TGRFITW – known to his friends as Katsuyuki Furukawa – gestures to the machine in front of me. I try to turn but my feet remain stuck stubbornly facing his direction. I am literally a stick-in-the-mud. One at a time I wriggle my feet free using both hands to pull the tops of my rubber boots up and turn around accompanied by lurid squelch-sucking noises. The rice planting contraption sits menacingly in the field looking like a cross between a skidoo and a sewing machine. I don’t understand how Furukawa-san is comfortable about letting me loose on one of his precious paddies with something the size of an American supermarket trolley which is also motorised.
The machine has two handlebars: you click the right-hand lever to release the brake, do the same with the left-hand one and you set the monster in motion, he explains. Both functions can operate without you holding the handles which, it will soon become apparent, is a major design flaw when the machine is being operated by a novice.
Suspended immediately in front of the handles is what looks like the paper feeder tray on a photocopier. This ‘hopper’ (I suppose you’d call it) is filled with oblongs of overgrown turf which are, in fact, patches of young koshihikari rice plants from Furukawa’s greenhouses. These gorgeous green sprouts – a beautiful, soothing verdancy – are the reason we are here. We have two fields to fill with these young shoots today, and another two tomorrow. It’s time to get planting.
Ahead of the hopper trays is a small petrol engine driving the whole shebang, and beneath that is some clever sewing gubbins which automatically plucks two clumps of shoots and then divots them into the waterlogged mud. Each clump contains roughly three rice plants which, one day six or so months hence, will be enough to provide enough cooked rice to fill two bowls – an ancient measurement known as a ‘go’ in Japanese. The machine plants the rice in two neat rows about forty centimetres apart at roughly twenty-centimetre intervals, two times per second. The idea is that the person in control of the machine follows behind, tiptoeing along a narrow path between the two straight rows of newly planted seedlings, lifting off the planting lever at the end of the field and executing a neat, 360° turn, before re-engaging the left-hand lever for the return leg.
I take a deep breath, whisper the instructions to myself out loud and release the left handle, but then panic slightly at the sudden, high-pitched infernal racket this initiates as the planter begins to deposit green shoots into the mud. I promptly forget all of Furukawa’s instructions. It is like my first driving lesson all over again. In the few seconds delay, I have already planted a dense clump of rice shoots all in one place, like a bad hair transplant. Furukawa patiently suggests that I also release the brake. The scenery lurches as the machine suddenly pulls me forward. Unfortunately, my wellies remain firmly embedded in the mud. In a split second I have to make a decision: either carry on in my socks and leave my boots behind, or let go of the machine. I choose the latter and watch the rice-planting skidoo chug onwards at an unfortunate tangent away from the previous – perfectly straight – row of new plants. Furukawa-san springs after the machine, moving at surprising speed as if on points, like a ballet dancer. Asger and Emil hop into the paddy to help me, also moving at an impressive rate. And thus my humiliation is complete.
This is not how I had foreseen our trip to the rice paddies of Fukushima. I had such lofty ambitions for our rice-planting experience. I wanted Asger and Emil to meet Furukawa-san and to learn about his extraordinary dedication to growing The Best Rice in the World (I’ll get to his credentials in a moment), and to get a sense for the work involved in farming in general.
In 2011 the tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster devastated the coastal part of this prefecture, killing thousands and destroying buildings and infrastructure. Though Furukawa’s farm, here in Koriyama in the central zone of Fukushima Prefecture, is far from the epicentre and separated from it by a mountain range, the disaster threatened to destroy the market for his rice, and with it his livelihood. But Furukawa kept going, exhibiting a very Japanese type of noble stoicism. I wanted my sons to hear about this and also just to experience the sheer physical hard work of a rice farmer, the endless slog in unpleasant conditions that ultimately results in those ridiculously cheap bags of little white grains which we take for granted on our supermarket shelves back home. I wanted them, also, to meet, simply, a very nice man who conducts himself with unassuming dignity and is key to his community and, in a sense, his country.
I was on a more personal mission, too. I hoped finally to understand the meaning of rice to the Japanese. For many years, in fact since I first travelled to Japan, there has been an elephant in the room in terms of my understanding of Japanese food, and that elephant is rice. I knew how important rice is to the Japanese; it is perhaps the single most significant ingredient, not just in Japanese cuisine, but also as an elemental part of Japanese cultu
re. After all, ‘gohan’, the word for cooked rice, also means ‘meal’. I knew that every proper Japanese meal should finish with a bowl of steamed white rice. I knew that one shouldn’t leave one’s chopsticks sticking out of a bowl of rice because this is a symbol of death, and that it is frowned upon to leave any rice in the bowl at the end of the meal. Having asked innumerable Japanese what their favourite meal is, or what they would choose as their last meal, I also knew that ‘just a bowl of rice’ was the most common answer to both questions. But I also knew that, personally, I found plain steamed white rice deeply uninteresting. I usually left my bowl at the end of meals in Japan, enduring the slightly pained expressions of my fellow diners as I did so.
Earlier, while interviewing the Osakan Michelin-starred chef Fujiwara, he had referenced legendary Kyoto restaurant Sojiki Nakahigashi, one of the most difficult places in the city at which to make a reservation, and where the lunch menu can sometimes be entirely focused on rice. The chef, Hisao Nakahigashi, one of Fujiwara’s mentors, is an influential figure in Japanese cuisine, but unknown beyond Japan. When I had met him, Nakahigashi, a handsome man in his mid-sixties, was affable enough yet I sensed within him an iron core. He has owned his restaurant, close to the Ginkaku-ji temple, for twenty years and every day he forages in the mountains surrounding Kyoto for many of the plants and vegetables he uses. He served me his four-course rice menu for lunch one time when I visited with a Japanese TV crew for a documentary. The meal started with ‘niebana’, deliberately undercooked rice served straight from the donabe, the traditional earthenware pot in which it was cooked in front of us, using water from a well in the restaurant’s backyard. This rice, organic and sun-dried from Yamagata Prefecture, north of Niigata, reappeared in the second course alongside some himono, salted, sun-dried, then grilled fish. In the third course, ‘okoge’, the rice was deliberately browned, making it nice and crusty (it is a universal truth that everyone, no matter their race, creed or colour, likes the browned, crusty rice in the bottom of the pan best of all), before taking a final bow floating in a bowl of hot water with ume and perilla. It was an ascetic, thought-provoking experience, and unquestionably the best rice I had eaten up until that point, but it was still, you know, just rice. While expressing my – sincere – enjoyment about the lunch for the cameras, there remained the nagging sense that I had missed something.
The Meaning of Rice Page 28