Koji, generally made with fermented rice, is quickly gaining wide appeal among chefs in the city.
Chef Justin Champagne-Lagarde is such a devotee of koji, he named his cat after it. A bit of a catch-all term, koji refers to anything — often rice, barley or soybeans — that has been inoculated with a mold known as Aspergillus oryzae. The mold, sometimes called koji starter, when left on rice for at least 24 hours and up to 72 hours, will ferment it and, in turn, allow it to ferment other foods.
At Perch, his acclaimed restaurant on Preston Street, Champagne-Lagarde is a fan for several reasons, but one is its ability to reduce wasted food by allowing fermentation of food scraps a chef might otherwise have to throw out.
Champagne-Lagarde grows mainly Aspergillus oryzae, but he has also grown Asperillus niger, which is citric acid.
“[Given that it’s also citric acid,] koji is really used everywhere on the planet and everyone has consumed it one way or another, which is super cool,” Lagarde-Champagne says. “We grow Aspergillus oryzae and we grow it primarily on rice. As much as I love barley koji, barley has gluten and we have a number of guests who are celiac so we try to keep things gluten-free where possible.”
Champagne-Lagarde grows his koji in purpose-built cedar trays, steaming the rice before he sprinkles the spores on it. From there, he either dehydrates the koji for longevity or uses it fresh.
“We primarily use it fresh, but if we’re making a koji-infused oil or a butter or something like that, we’ll dehydrate it,” he says.
One of his team’s favourite uses is lacto bacillus-fermented koji water that virtually all of its proteins are touched by at some point.
“It’s seasoning with an enzyme,” Champagne-Lagarde says. “So you’re seasoning with a product that has salinity in it, but it also has these enzymes that really help make the umami in the protein pop. So, for example, if you marinate your beef, or any protein, with koji, what it’s doing is breaking down the molecules or the blockchains into smaller amino-acid formats that are easier for your palate to taste and to experience. It creates this umami hit and unlocks the flavour that’s already in the meats or the vegetables. A lot of our proteins are marinated in shio koji for four to six hours before we cook it.”
And then, just before serving, they season it again, with lacto-fermented koji water.
“It just adds this nuance, this delicacy, and this umami pop that you can’t really get from anything else,” he says.
At his restaurant Perch, chef-owner Justin Champagne-Lagarde, bottom right, is a fan for several reasons, but one is its ability to reduce wasted food by allowing fermentation of food scraps a chef might otherwise have to throw out. In his very active waste-reduction program, he uses koji to create garums of all sorts. Traditionally a fermented fish sauce many will recognize from Thai recipes, garum actually dates back to Roman times.
In his very active waste-reduction program, he uses koji to create garums of all sorts. Traditionally a fermented fish sauce many will recognize from Thai recipes, garum actually dates back to Roman times. With koji, Champagne- Lagarde expands its origins from a fish sauce to a sauce made from whatever he has in the kitchen that he might otherwise have to throw out.
“We have an egg-white garum on the menu right now,” he says. “When make pasta and you have extra egg whites, we just freeze them. And then, once we have a ton, we thaw them, mix them with salt and koji, and let it sit for about eight months at room temperature. We stir it once in a while and then we get this egg white soy sauce, essentially.”
Sometimes, he also dehydrates the egg white garum and uses it as a dry seasoning. When he was interviewed, he also had a smoked sturgeon dish on the menu and he was making a garum using koji and the sturgeon trim.
“That’s been going for about nine months now,” he says. “Next month, I’ll taste it and hopefully strain it off. We have an octopus garum and a geoduck garum on the go, too.”
And, he creates his own miso using koji and bread trimmings.
“It really unlocks the door to using up all your waste and also prolonging so many ingredients,” he says.
Champagne-Lagarde has grown his own spores, but for the most part, he buys them just to make sure they’re 100 per cent safe.
“It’s a wild ingredient that’s just endless — you’ll never find an end to what you can learn and do with it and then develop with it,” he says.
Koji products hit Ottawa
Champagne-Lagarde’s enthusiasm for koji and his mad scentist approach to it led him to accept an invitation from the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa to a koji seminar and tasting. Titled “Unleashing the magic of koji: Nature’s flavour enhancer,” the “master class” was given by Noriko Suzuki, a Montreal-based koji producer and distributor. Her company — San-Ô —produces koji-based products, such as a koji pickling base, barley koji, koji rice for several different purposes, koji starter and toma-so (a miso made with sun-dried tomato and a product Champagne-Lagarde uses with his current menu.) Miso is probably the most common ingredient that comes from the koji family.
“Koji is a kind of starter of all kinds of Japanese fermentation techniques,” Suzuki says, “so it’s a very interesting ingredient.”
Suzuki explained the process of making koji and noted that there were three kinds of koji spores: yellow, white and black, each with its own unique application in Japanese cuisine. Yellow is the most popular, she explained, and is used in the production of sake, miso, soy sauce and amazake, a sweet beverage that’s popular in Japan. Black is used for a specific kind of sake made in the southern part of Japan while white is used for soy sauce and condiments.
Suzuki explained that koji is gaining popularity among chefs in other parts of the world, particularly those work- ing in Nordic and French cuisines. The fact that Swedish embassy chef Cole Baker was in the audience was therefore not surprising. Suzuki also mentioned that Denmark-based Noma, largely seen as the best restaurant in the world, uses it make a milder fish sauce.
“When I started my business, I expected more Japanese customers, but it ends up that 99 per cent are Nordic, French, Mexican,” she says. “It’s very international.”
San-Ô sells its products online at labrasseriesan-o.ca and Hungry Ninja, a shop on Merivale Road, also carries them.
Popular Atelier alumnae product
Justin Daniel Tse remembers using koji regularly when he worked as sous-chef at Atelier in Ottawa, where Justin Champagne-Lagarde also worked. Now the executive chef at Wander the Resort in Prince Edward County, Tse says he still uses it, but mostly to tenderize meat.
“I blend it with water and I use it as a wet protein flavour enhancer,” Tse says. “It’s great on duck, elk and bison. We’ll let the protein sit in koji [water] for up to five days — it basically cures in the koji. It’s adding umami without using MSG and the meat becomes a whole different product.” Tse gets his koji from the Ontario Spring Water Sake Company, also known as IZUMI Brewery, in Toronto’s Distillery District.
“I get all my koji from them,” he says. “We also buy their sake.”
When Tse was working at Atelier, Adam Ghor was one of his colleagues in the kitchen. “Adam took the world of koji and fermentation and ran with it,” Tse recalls.
Now the chef and co-owner of Stolen Goods, a cocktail bar on Sparks Street, Ghor says he still loves the product, but doesn’t currently have any on his small menu.
“It brings a complexity to a dish,” Ghor says, adding that his favourite application is the same as Tse’s: a koji water mixed with salt, applied to proteins. He likes to brush it on steak and then grill it. He also remembers a dish he made at Atelier with koji and kohlrabi. “That was really good.”
Ultimately, Ghor says it’s a “very neat mold, that transforms a dish.”
Also an Atelier alum, Jason Sawision uses koji at Stofa, the restaurant he now owns.
“We use the salt koji from San-Ô, and some of its misos,” Sawision says. “It adds a depth of flavour to proteins and an umami bump to proteins such as beef. We’ve also mixed it into different spreads and dressings and we also use it as a wet seasoning, brushing it directly on a finished product. If you had a nice seared piece of tuna, you might brush it on at the end, instead of using it from the start of the cooking process.”
He says he uses it in a vegan version of bagna cauda — an Italian dipping sauce for vegetables that is traditionally made with anchovies, olive oil, garlic and butter.
“We use it with lemon juice and capers and a bit of miso and parsley and it turns out really well,” Sawision says. “It’s not exactly a bagna cauda, but it’s the closest thing that we can describe it as. It’s just a really versatile product.”
