Mad Scientist

A few times ( I could count them on one hand) in my decades long career, I have created something that felt both inspired and original. In 2000, I created a crab souffle that became very popular and has followed me around, sometimes to my dismay, ever since. Like many chefs, I can be resistant to repeating myself monthly, much less for two and a half decades, so I tend to be both flattered, and  less than thrilled when a current guest asks if it will soon be making a menu appearance. In 2000, I had never seen a crab souffle anywhere, so the absurd idea crept into my head that I may have invented it. A quick search on the fairly new worldwide web turned up somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 examples of my “invention.” At no point since that time have I ever had the temerity  to think that I may have created something entirely new…until this week. 

At OBS, we play around with a lot of things in our food lab. A large part of that involves koji production. Koji is a spore that works magic on foods through protease, amylase and to a lesser extent, lipase. In layman’s terms, it breaks down proteins into amino acids, starches into sugars, but works only slightly on converting fats into fatty acids. Koji, which is necessary to make miso and sake as well as being useful in a multitude of other ways, is grown primarily on grains. The spores are distributed on grains and chambered to propagate. Jeremy Umanski wrote a Bible on this entitled “Koji Alchemy.” He devised a way to grow koji on cocoa nibs, which was both fairly involved and brilliant. I believe he used the koji nibs to make amino pastes (the cousin of misos.) I successfully mimicked his method. It then occurred to me that these could potentially be used to make tempered chocolate and that because of the conditions prevalent in the process, that they’d likely be amazing. Since I have both a freeze dryer and a melanger, I was able to actually make tempered chocolates from koji nibs and, well, they’re amazingly intense fruit bombs. The koji somehow lessened the perception of sweetness, while increasing complexity of flavor. I think, because it spent 12 hours grinding in a melanger at 104 degrees, the conditions were perfect to set off a chain of amino acids. The results of this experiment exceeded my wildest dreams. Of course, I Googled “tempered koji chocolate .” To my surprise, nothing came up!