The following article is written by Wang Wenjing.
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Cover |Half honey, half ginger [gf]a9[gf].
Jiwu Jun Language: Northeast fermentation, very good.
*: Flavor Planet (ID: fengweixingqiu).
Author: Wang Wenjing.
Southerners don't understand, and more and more young people in the Northeast don't quite understand the meaning of the two sauce bricks that exude a strong smell in the Northeast. Northeast people call people who can't be enlightened as sauce cube heads, and they are talking about this kind of big sauce bricks.
Nowadays, there are not many people who can do a good job of "sauce bricks". In our small forest farm in Heilongjiang, the two people who do the best with the sauce are Grandma Yang and Grandma Tang.
That was in the 90s.
People here in our Northeast love to eat sauce, and the status of sauce in everyone's minds is equivalent to a kind of high-grade salt, if one day you find that the sauce jar at home is empty, there will be a strange feeling in your heart: life has deviated from the established track.
So every year we use dozens of kilograms of soybeans to make sauce, the purpose is to ensure that the sauce jar at home is not empty. And in order to turn so many soybeans into a delicious sauce like a trick, we also choose an auspicious day specifically for this ceremony: the beginning of the tenth month of the lunar calendar.
August, October. Ten.
8. October 28....In the early winter season, the end of the day has to be counted with eight.
Then I was looking forward to a bumper harvest of soybeans. As soon as the fire wall in the house burns up, a large-scale family event officially begins. Grandma Yang's status and Grandma Tang's status will be vividly reflected at this time.
Let's make the sauce! As soon as she called, this year's miso making activity began. Early in the morning, Grandma Yang got up to wash soybeans - laundry basins, washed large iron pots, and everything was of any size and container. Bad beans, deflated beans, pebbles and pods mixed in are all singled out. Put the soybeans in the pot, fill with water, cover the pot and light the fire. The heat should be low, and the soybeans are slowly cooked, cooked, and boiled, that is, "boiled", which usually takes a day.
At about three or four o'clock in the afternoon, the smell of beans swept through the bungalow, wafting out through the cracks in the door. "Quack", the big gray goose flapped its wings and shuttled in the yard, the gate of Grandma Yang's house opened, and the two sons and daughter-in-law walked in.
The next work is for young people. Grandma Yang lifted the lid of the pot, the beans drank dry water, swelled into rust red, and the two sons pounded the watercress, sometimes they didn't want the watercress in the sauce to be distinct, and they had to chop it with a kitchen knife. For this reason, the youngest son, who is a carpenter, specially made a tool for pounding beans: a huge wooden stick, thick at the bottom and thin at the top, and pounded around in a large iron pot, and the watercress turned into obedient bean paste. The daughters-in-law then put the refried beans on a board and broke them into boxy cubes, let them cool, and then wrapped them in a very common earthy yellow wrapper.
As for Grandma Tang's house, the sauce cube is made by her and Grandpa Tang. Grandma Tang, who is good at getting up early, can climb mountains and mountains many times a day, and has successfully gotten rid of the "pheasant neck" poisonous snake pursuit, is vigorous and can always complete the preparation of boiling beans and pounding beans before making sauce as quickly as possible, so she has always been the commander-in-chief, and Grandpa Tang can only start.
A good soybean paste will give birth to Aspergillus oryzae, which helps the fermentation of the soy sauce to break down proteins into various peptides, which in turn become amino acids. The higher the amino acid content, the better the miso will be.
By the time the kitchens of every household began to be surrounded by heat, and the chimneys were constantly filled with cooking smoke, Grandpa Tang had almost cleaned up the idle cottage at home that always used fermented sauce cubes. On the walls on both sides of the ondol, a layer of wooden planks similar to bookshelves was erected by the grandfather. The large sauce cubes wrapped in paper were also neatly lined up on the shelves. At this time, the long process of "koji-making", that is, making "sauce primers", begins.
The process of making the sauce primer will accompany people through the winter, and the people who keep the cat warm at home will spend their boring time with the orchid. The heat released by the fire kang and the fire wall seeped into the sauce cubes, and Aspergillus, Mucormyce, Rhizopus, and Bacillus subtilis frantically started their "enclosure movement" on the shelf. That's what grannies want to see the most!
White or green fluff spreads to the wrapper seal, and a strong smell is released. It is a little reluctant to describe the sauce fragrance, but it is by no means the "smell" in the mouth of children, this not good smell sometimes leads these children to say some "disrespectful words", whether Grandma Yang, Grandma Tang or other old people in the family will cross their eyebrows when they hear it, as if this word will reach the ears of the sauce block, so that it is unhappy to listen to it, it will affect the very critical koji making, so a long time ago, they ordered children to stay away from the sauce block, and they did not allow curiosity to suddenly tear the wrapping paper, Look at the mold spores and mycelium that have taken over the position like weeds.
As the wrapper deflated, the water of the sauce cubes evaporated completely, the rich smell quietly dissipated, and the sauce cubes faded out of people's memories unconsciously.
The following spring, it is common to start by removing the windproof plastic sheeting from the windows. Stay until Bruno. Schultz's honey-like sunlight began to shine into the house, and the end of the third lunar month was almost there. The date of the sauce was repeatedly reminded by the grandmothers in their visits: the eighth day of the fourth lunar month. The days are easy to remember, after all, you also have an eight.
A week and a half in advance, Grandma Yang and Grandma Tang would hold a dustpan and start unpacking the wrapping paper of the sauce cubes. Most of the air-dried sauce cubes have stubborn mold spores and mycelium left, move a small bench to sit in the yard, pour water on the enamel basin and start brushing. Not only do you have to brush off the colorful fluff, but you also have to make sure that the water doesn't run into the sauce. If the fluff is deep in the sauce, it is necessary to change to a smaller toothbrush, and it must be dry until the toothbrush is disarmed and surrendered.
The brushed miso is taken to the sun by the grandmothers to dry, until they are as hard as ever, and then broken into small pieces. What does a good sauce cube look like? The surface is white and yellow, and the inside is brown and red! So the grandmothers' sauce cubes are all bright and slightly reddish bean paste. About a week later, the fermentation date that the grandmothers circled in pencil on the Gregorian calendar plate wearing reading glasses finally arrived: the eighth day of the fourth lunar month.
The miso jar that is used year after year will be scrubbed to a shiny finish on that day. Children have to stand on tiptoe to see that the coarse salt water has not broken the sauce cubes, and a small mountain is piled up in the sauce jar. Then the grandmothers would seal the mouth of the jar with a layer of white gauze and cover it with all the utensils that could protect the jar from rain, people and animals – Grandma Yang chose a large piece of glass, and Grandma Tang fastened the laundry tub to it. A daughter in the family had just given birth, and Grandma Tang tied a red cloth outside the sauce jar according to local customs.
Aspergillus oryzae needs oxygen, so the fermentation of miso cannot be sealed and stored, and it must be raked every day to ensure that it gets enough oxygen.
After soaking in salt water for four or five days, a pair of hands wearing disposable gloves will crush the miso finely. In the next month, as soon as the sun appears, the grandmothers will immediately rush home to open the sauce jar, holding a large sauce rake composed of square wooden planks and wooden sticks, stirring the sauce in the tank, which is called "rake". Some white foam and impurities will surface the miso soup during the stirring, and they will be skimmed off mercilessly, and the sauce will gradually merge with the water.
Rake "is the same as making koji in winter, it is a sacred thing, and if you are not careful, you will be in a lot of situations, such as a sudden heavy rain falling from the sky, and the sauce jar that is still basking in the sun is not covered in time, and the rain falls into the sauce-
There is no room for error in every process of the miso process. Grandmothers will be accustomed to comparing the miso made that year with previous years, but if the fermented miso tastes slightly inferior to previous years, any scene will be reviewed. For example, if the rain was not careful, the "rain" would have become the culprit; If the client is careless, such as Grandpa Tang, the other party will bear the charge of the whole summer, autumn and winter, and incarnate the opening sentence of the short in the parents: Oh, they all complain about the old Tang .....
Our grandfather Tang also knew that he was at a loss, in order to avoid another world war in a long marriage, with the sentence "you are not finished", he put on his hat and walked away - it was I who didn't see the rain well, so from now on, the matter of raking will be handed over to you, "You do it well, you come!" ”
The miso appears on people's tables with the first batch of greens growing in the garden. Yellow and clear, salty and relish, exuding a good smell of sauce. Take a sip of the finely chopped watercress, and the pure sauce flavor instantly spreads in the mouth, and with its presence, all the ingredients become amazing.
Lettuce, shallots, cucumbers, and radishes are simple pickles, but with the mish, you can eat a large pot at a time;
Egg sauce, chili sauce, and meat sauce made from soybean sauce are paired with boiled potatoes, boiled eggplant, tortillas, and millet porridge, and the word "eat support" will also hang on the lips from time to time.
There are also braised crucian carp in sauce, crab stewed in sauce, braised potato braised pork in sauce...In the Northeast, miso is the soul dancer in the big dish, and after eating a big dish with mish, the taste buds will become extremely picky, especially when you are in a bad mood, if you are served a plate of potatoes stewed without sauce, you will almost definitely be furious, and you want to leave.
Making miso is a profound science, and many families follow the rules to make miso for a winter and summer, only to find that in the end, it is still not satisfactory - they are either not mellow in taste, or, like my family, ferment later than others. As a result, there are always some old people who have succeeded in making sauce and will knock on the door of Grandma Tang's house with the sauce they made, and there are always some cheeky children who will go to Grandma Yang's house with an empty tea jar in order to beg for sauce.
Believe me, in the Northeast, no matter how bluffing the big yellow dog and the big gray goose who guard each family, the sauce bowl in everyone's hand will always be served steadily.