Home
Knowledge
From the Lab

From the lab

Here FlavorFocusLab shows what is being worked on in the lab right now: experiments, recipes and projects with businesses. Each note says what is in the jar or the tray and what it is for.

Culture: Yeasts, bacteria and koji, depending on the experiment
Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0

Yeast, drawn in dots

Shoyu from our own koji

In the jar, shoyu mash (moromi) made from soy koji and salt brine is maturing. It is stirred regularly, and we sample it to see how its colour, aroma and flavour change over the months.

Fermenting shoyu mash in a large jar with a spoon in it

How shoyu is made

Koji in trays

Steamed grain with koji spores, spread out in shallow trays. This way the mycelium grows evenly, and the koji is easy to loosen and turn.

A white tray of grain koji in the foreground, two people out of focus behind it

Oval yeast cells in greyscale, some with small buds — Yeast cells (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) under the scanning electron microscope, some with buds. Yeasts are involved in many ferments, for example in sourdough and in shoyu mash, where they are usually other species. Image: Mogana Das Murtey and Patchamuthu Ramasamy, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab).

This text is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 (opens in a new tab): you may share and adapt it, with attribution to "FlavorFocusLab" and a link to this page, for non-commercial purposes. Photos and graphics are excluded. In addition to CC BY-NC 4.0, we permit the use of our own website texts to train AI models, including for commercial purposes. This additional permission does not cover third-party quotations, photographs or graphics and does not change their licences.

Working with the lab

For businesses

What starts here on a small scale, Simon develops with restaurants, canteens and startups for everyday use in their business.

See consulting

For you

In Kimchi & Co. you start a ferment yourself and learn how to tell whether it is going well.

See Kimchi & Co.