The ground is frozen now, and it’s time to get into miso making.
Ecologically grown swedish soybeans, seasalt and rice koji I saved from spring. 
Ground and mixed
Todays result: 5 liters of 2 year rice miso. 
When I’ve used up the rest of the koji I made last spring, then I’ll have to make a bunch for next year.
Using up the last of rice koji I made in the spring, I did a double batch of rice miso. 1.5 liters of 1 year miso and 3 liters of 2 year miso.
Yesterday was Lucia Day, a big holiday here. Lucia comes bringing light in the dark times leading up to the winter solstice when the solar system turns towards the brighter half of the year again.
The first batch of miso at the end of fall, the beginning of winter, brings on the start of the miso season. There is still some harvesting and digging to do, as well as carpentry, sculpting and building projects to keep me active in the garden all through the winter, but on those dark and blistery cold days it’s nice to have stuff to do indoors like pickling, making koji and miso, sourdough bread baking and such.
Yesterday, I gathered what’s needed for a batch of sweet white miso.
I washed and soaked some soybeans for 6 hours.
Boiled the beans for 4 hours. Then let them sit overnight.
Then this morning, it was just a matter of mixing the salt and koji in (I made the koji this spring and saved enough for about 4 batches).
Then grinding and mixing.
Then into a jar to ferment until May next year.
You can find better recipes and instructions for making koji and different kinds of miso under the menu above.
I cooked the beans last night, then mixed and mashed this mellow miso and stuffed it in the jar.
It has to ferment for 1 year now. My mellow miso has a slightly greater proportion of rice koji and lower percentage of salt, so that the fermentation goes faster, and it has a milder flavor.
I also opened a 2 year rice miso from March 2011.
I’m planning on packaging some it and taking it to sell at the farmers market in Uppsala tomorrow along with some sauerkraut, other pickles and some pumpkins that have survived the winter.
The boys were home today and eager to work, so we decided to make some lactic acid fermented carrots. The last batch was finished off at last nights dinner. We fetched about 8 kilos of carrots from the root cellar. They were in very good condition and had surprisingly little damage from carrot fly larvae.
The ingredients:
– carrots
– garlic
– mustard seeds
– caraway seeds
– seasalt
– canning jars
Make the pickles:
– clean and shred carrots
– weigh up carrots in 1 kilo portions
– to each kilo mix in 15 grams seasalt
– add several garlic cloves
– add a pinch of caraway seeds
– a pinch of mustard seeds
– mix all together
– press into canning jars
– close and seal jars
– label them
Now we place the jars in a warm corner of the kitchen (18 – 22 degrees centigrade), so that the lactic acid bacteria can begin to grow vigorously for about 10 days. They are then moved to the cool food storage cellar, and after about 6 weeks the carrots have fermented sufficiently and are ready to eat.
We’ll eat quite a lot of these pickled carrots, but most will be taken to the farmers market for selling.
timogarden 