Today I visited Daimon Jozo, a family-owned soy sauce brewery with over 100 year history in Nara. Ingredients of soy sauce are: soybeans, wheat berries, salt and water. Soybeans are steamed, mixed with roasted and crushed wheat berries and inoculated with koji spores. It takes 72 hours for koji mold to grow, then it is…
One of the things I noticed during this trip was that komatsuna is getting more and more popular. When I was a child, it was called “mochina” in our area and we ate it only for new year in mochi soup. Now it is sold year-round everywhere. It was even served as one of the…
As per Japanese tradition, February 2nd is the day to ward off evil spirit and bring in fortune. At home, people throw roasted soybeans saying, “demons out, fortune in!” Many shrines throw packets of beans to visitors to wish them fortune. I visited a nearby shrine and received a couple of packets. One of them…
