One Blessed Discovery
A bad batch of shoyu is a worthwhile sacrifice to preserve the opportunity to discover what we can’t imagine
By Josie Martin
It is an exercise in humility trying to make one thing become another. I return to my collection of fermenting vessels each evening and peer closely at the minuscule details of the terrain to check for signs of success, like a child watching crystals grow. I smell and taste and touch, growing closer with my senses as I witness the way flavors unfold in the jars of shoyu I am making from old coffee grounds or the way the SCOBY relaxing in their acetic pools bob and then sink.
Rain comes and doesn’t come. The sun beats down on the back of my neck. The flea beetles chew holes through all my greens and the Arugula grows spicy in the heat. It’s a good year. It’s a bad year. My kombucha is quite good; effervescent with a balanced flavor that is sweet tart on the front and floral on the back, but my shoyu tastes like shit when it’s finished, some barely visible transformation having taken place, mocking my effort as it went.
I think back to the day I started that ferment. My roommates were in the kitchen with me, we were laughing and chatting as I weighed each ingredient on my analog scale. I realized as I measured the koji that there wouldn’t be quite enough, so I decided to scale down the other ingredients to match, performing haphazard calculations for volumetric measurements I couldn’t convert, to the amusement of my company. I used a crockpot set up on a metal beehive lid in lieu of a rice cooker, hoping a month on the warm setting would achieve an acceptable temperature range without catching my house on fire. As the first days passed, it became clear the jars were too full and some of the liquid overflowed and cooked to a thick, black paste and after a month, it still didn’t look like the pictures in the recipe book.
Hoping for improvement, I left it for another week during which the central air in our house stopped working, the temperature rising to a balmy 85 degrees, my quickly ripening ferments competing with my quickly ripening body odor for worst smell on the block.
Any one of these factors, or perhaps all or some of them in combination could have been the reason that when I finally opened the jars, the coffee shoyu tasted bitter, with a subtle burnt flavor; or why the liquids and solids were inseparable, the sum of them congealing into a kind of brown, grainy inedible goop. It had the slight aroma of something close to what I had expected, at once savory and bitter, but was tinged with some other unnameable quality that made everyone’s noses crinkle up. At this moment, I pictured the NOMA fermentation lab where the pictures in my recipe were taken — climate controlled, perfectly sized glass beakers and jars with precisely measured contents and printed labels lining the walls; notebooks scrawled with daily observations regarding change in color or volume; well-worn hydrometers and charts filled with data on umami and sugar content — and I wondered if the great fermenter David Zilber still experiences disappointment.
Rain comes and doesn’t come; humans invented umbrellas and irrigation in answer but we have never had reign over weather. Perhaps David and I possess different views of ourselves in the world; one comfortably toying with divinity, the other bowing down helplessly to the unfathomable. I consider the merits of both; precision and consistency on the one hand, and the question of what it means to remove chaos from the inherently chaotic on the other. I consider the origins of fermentation as a means to extend the bounty of the growing season and about its contemporary purpose at NOMA as a vehicle to access new and unique flavors. It occurs to me that I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between the two. If it doesn’t taste good, is it worth preserving? If it tastes bad, is it really preserved at all?
My shitty shoyu might last in the refrigerator for ten years, but who cares? It’s inedible now and certainly will be then. Yet, ironically, I’m sure no completed ferment lasts longer than a few days in the NOMA kitchen. Chaos or control, intuition or intention, someone, sometime got “it” right and that is the reason for being that both David and I share.
How many times did someone leave soybeans out too long, taste them and spit them out, before that one blessed discovery? I decide in the end that a bad batch of shoyu is a worthwhile sacrifice to preserve the opportunity to discover what we can’t imagine. After all, it may have been someone in the kitchen, laughing and chatting with friends whose distraction gave way to the discovery of shoyu so long ago.
