Our first attempts at miso-making years ago marked an important turning point for noma: we realized that to learn more about ourselves, we had to broaden our horizons.
Soon enough we found ourselves in Japan, minds blown by everything, particularly the notion of umami and all the ways to create it. When we returned to Copenhagen, we challenged ourselves to come up with a similar pantry of our own. First, we tried to see if we could make a tofu by coagulating the milk squeezed out of yellow split peas. It didn’t work. But with that failure, a door opened: what we needed to do to these yellow split peas, so high in protein, was ferment them. We decided to make a miso.
As a refresher, miso is a fermented paste made from a mash of cooked soybeans, koji, and salt. Like vinegar, it requires a two-stage fermentation: the fungus Aspergillus oryzae is grown on either rice or barley to produce koji, and then the powerful enzymes produced by the koji are harnessed to dismantle the protein and start in another substrate (traditionally soybeans), cleaving them into amino acids and simple sugars, respectively. Wild yeast, lactic bacteria, and acetic acid are also part of the equation, deepening the complexity of the miso as it ages.
We were very happy with this miso made of yellow split peas. Here was an ingredient made exactly like a miso, except that replacing one Japanese input with a Nordic one yielded something that felt indebted to Japan while uniquely ours: an homage we were proud of. We were making an effort to listen to stories beyond our own.
The texture, the look and feel, of this ingredient we dubbed “peaso” was squarely in line with Japanese miso. It was also, just like miso, an ideal receptacle for scraps: adding the pulp of a juiced vegetable or seed husks could accent a peaso in fascinatingly delicious ways, as long as you let time do its work.
But the baseline flavor of a peaso is brighter and fruitier. This key difference resulting profiles of the two techniques is due to a few factors.
Anyone who has eaten at noma can probably tell you that our food does not put saltiness front and center, which is one the reasons we landed on 4% salt in our ode to Japanese culinary tradition instead of the typical 8% salt. The higher salt content in a classic miso inhibits the flourishing of the yeast, lactic acid bacteria, and acetic acid bacteria—which crank up the treble—and thus it must age longer than a peaso to develop its deep savory quality.
Over the course of months or years, extremely slow Maillard reactions create appealing and complex flavors while slowly browning the miso; the longer aging leads to a more caramelized product. One with which we would never compete.
For more on the history of miso and other soybean-based ferments across Asia, along with noma’s relationship to these traditions, check out this post.
