A Year Later: Opening the Miso I Made in November 2024
In early November 2024, I made two batches of miso—one with soybeans and one with chickpeas.
There are several Japanese practices I started after moving to Portland, and miso making is one of them. There’s a local miso and koji maker here, Jorinji Miso, dedicated to hand-crafting premium products through natural fermentation. Lucky me. Their presence inspired me and made miso making feel much more approachable.
The process itself is pretty simple. I cooked the soybeans and chickpeas, mashed them, mixed them with koji and salt, packed everything into ziplock bags, and tucked them away. Traditionally, miso is fermented in clay pots, but after a few tries, I found ziplock bags to be the easiest way for me to keep mold under control.
Then I moved on with life.
A year is a long time—and also not that long at all.
Seasons changed. The kitchen filled with other meals. The miso stayed quietly on the shelf in my sunroom, doing its work on its own time. No stirring. No checking every week. Just letting it be.
This week, I finally opened the miso.
The color had deepened, and the texture wasn’t perfectly smooth. It smelled rich and familiar in a way that only time creates. I stood there for a moment, simply looking at it and inhaling the aroma. This is it.
Good things take time, and they don’t always turn out perfectly.
My homemade miso isn’t uniform. The color is uneven, and the texture isn’t smooth. And that’s the point. I tend to aim for perfection in most things, and somehow they never turn out perfect anyway—miso included. That’s life.
The ingredients I gathered, how I made it, the air here, and the time that passed all shaped this batch. It could never be exactly replicated, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s fine as it is. I’m happy to enjoy this one-of-a-kind miso, exactly the way it turned out.
I made a simple pot of miso soup with this fresh miso—though I’m not quite sure if a one-year-old miso can be called fresh or not—and realized it’s already time to make another batch for next year. Ah!
So it’s time to order more koji.
This month’s Jorinji Miso direct-sale pickup is at Oyatsupan, which feels like the perfect excuse to stop by and pick up some melonpan and anpan too.
