[00:00] Here's how I turned all of these shiitake mushrooms into an incredible mushroom soy sauce. So about three years ago, I inoculated some logs with shiitake mushroom spawn, and now every single spring they reward me with a fresh harvest of beautiful shiitakes,
[00:14] which happened to perfectly coincide with me seeing a video from Johnny Kyonkyu on making some shiitake tamari. So big thanks to Johnny for the inspiration for this project. Now first we need to make the mash, so I soak some soybeans overnight,
[00:26] and the next day I brought them up to a boil, skimming off the foam as they cooked. And once they were nice and tender, I added in my dried shiitakes and let them simmer for another 15 minutes. Then I blended everything together in batches until it was a chunky paste.
[00:38] I dumped it in a mixing bowl and mixed in my salt. Now comes the real transformation. To ferment this mash into something really special, we're using some koji. Now you can buy koji online or in a specialty Japanese market, but it's one of my favorite things to make at home.
[00:51] I've got a full video linked if you want to learn how to do that on your own. And I mixed the koji in the mash and packed everything tightly into a jar to ferment. And normally this fermentation process takes around six months to a year at room temperature but by fermenting in a warmer environment around 130 degrees Fahrenheit like this dehydrator right here we can actually speed
[01:10] that process up to just three weeks. And check out this color transformation. The koji has converted those starches and proteins in the soybeans and the mushrooms into sugars and amino acids, creating all of those deep savory and sweet flavors. And what we have here is a shiitake flavored miso
[01:25] paste, which I will save a jar for cooking, but I'm actually after the tamari or the liquid from this paste. So I loaded the miso into a cheesecloth and I pressed it in my cheese press and I extracted every last bit of that dark umami packed liquid. And for that leftover mash, I ended up
[01:41] dehydrating that and feeding it to my chickens so they could peck away at it for a little fermented snack. And in the end, I got a really solid final yield of some homemade shiitake mushroom tamari that I bottled up to use in all kinds of dishes.
[01:53] All right, sample time. Wow. That's so good. So sweet. Definitely a soy sauce replacement. Yeah. For sure. I bet you get shiitake mushroom. It's more, it tastes like it's infused with MSG, basically.
[02:07] Yeah. So much umami.