Miso starts to look different.

Miso that has just been packed is astonishingly white.

Soybeans, koji and salt, mixed and pressed into a container. It looks a long way from the “color of miso” I was used to seeing at the store.

The first year I made it, I looked at this and felt a little uneasy. Would it really turn that color?

The bright color of the soybeans is still there, and the grains of koji are plain to see. The taste and the smell are both young. Made into miso soup, the broth is pale and the flavor is soft.

But from here, time begins to move.

The enzymes made by the koji slowly take things apart: the starch of the rice into sugars, the protein of the soybeans into amino acids. Then the reactions involving those sugars and amino acids build on one another, and the miso that was white takes on color bit by bit.

It is the same kind of change as the browning on seared meat, or onions cooked until they turn amber.

In other words, the color of miso that we know was not in the ingredients from the start.

It is a color that arrived later, out of time.

Seen that way, the color of miso stops looking like “just how it is” and starts to look like “the result of something that happened.”

That is the only thing worth keeping from this chapter.

Color is something that comes into being.

In the next chapter, I will talk about how that color is less dependable than I had thought.

The first time I turned a miso over and read the back, one thought came clearly.

This is not what I want to eat.

I did not hesitate. So I decided to make it myself.

But I did not want to leave it there. To say “this is not it” without knowing why it had become this way seemed to me the same as knowing nothing.

So I looked into it.

The problem of gas

Miso is alive.

Fermentation goes on after it is packed into the bag. The yeasts work, and carbon dioxide comes out. Left alone, the container swells. Sometimes it bursts.

This has to be carried a long way. It sits on a shelf for months. It is set out with the same taste in Hokkaido and in Okinawa. It is kept at a price people can reach.

For that, something has to be done about the swelling.

There are two answers.

One is to stop the fermentation. Heat it. Or add alcohol. Once the movement stops, no gas comes out. The taste does not change on the shelf either.

The other is to let the gas out. A small valve is put on the container. The gas goes out, and outside air does not come in. The miso inside travels with its fermentation still going.

Two opposite answers to the same problem.

What you can tell without buying

For me, this was a big discovery.

Sometimes there is a small round thing on the lid or the bag of a miso. Or a small hole. Often a note of caution comes with it.

That is a valve for letting gas out.

Which means that a miso with one on it is a miso that is still fermenting. It is moving, so the gas needs a way out.

You can tell from a distance, without reading the label on the back.

A valve costs money, so some have only a hole. And it does not mean that a miso without one is not good. Only that one that has it is, for certain, moving.

This is the part my eyes have come to go to first at the store.

Valve or no valve, the next thing I look at is the label. What it is made from. How much time it has spent. What has been added.

In the next chapter, I will talk about how to read it.

Up to here, I have been talking about the label.

From this chapter on, I want to talk about taste.

Packed from the same ingredients, a different length of time makes an entirely different seasoning. I see that in my own kitchen every year.

One-year miso tastes of one full turn of the seasons

It is packed in winter. In spring it slowly wakes, in the heat of summer the fermentation moves along, and in fall it settles.

The “one year” of one-year miso does not only mean that the hands of the clock have gone around once. It means it has passed once through all four seasons.

The whitish miso becomes the color of miso we know well. Even so, a little of the brightness from when it was first packed is still there.

The taste is sweet and round. The sweetness of the koji remains, and you can taste both it and the soybeans. Made into miso soup, the broth comes out a soft color too.

This is the taste I like best. In summer especially, I often make miso soup with one-year miso.

Two-year miso stays longer in the mouth

In the second year, the color deepens a great deal. From light brown toward something close to the color of adzuki beans. The koji blends into the miso, and the texture turns smooth.

The taste grows fuller. But it is not simply a stronger one-year miso.

Rather than getting stronger, it stays longer in the mouth.

It seems this is not only my own impression. The “koku” of miso is understood not as strong saltiness or umami, but as a sensation in which thickness of taste, spread, persistence and mellowness ── things like these ── are layered.

In long-aged miso, components called Maillard peptides, which form during aging, are reported to be involved in this thickness and persistence. From around eleven months of aging, the sense of spreading through the mouth and the aftertaste are said to grow stronger, and in twenty-month miso, peptides that had turned brown were identified.

Seeing it in numbers gives me a strange feeling. The thing I had felt as “somehow this stays a long time” had a name.

Three-year miso: a little settles it

Miso in its third year grows darker than you could imagine from the whiteness it had when first packed. The grains of koji have almost disappeared from view, and soybean and koji have blended into one miso.

Both the aroma and the taste are rich, and adding just a little settles the outline of a dish.

I use it often in winter. Miso soup on a cold day, simmered root vegetables, a miso bed for pickling, grilled rice balls.

The food does mostly turn brown, though. Good on the tongue rather than good in a photo. I think that, too, is what three-year miso is like.

Beyond miso soup

Miso is not only for miso soup.

I put it into all sorts of dishes. A little in a dressing. As a hidden note in simmered dishes. Meat sauce, curry, stew. People are more often surprised when it goes into food that is not Japanese.

The reason is probably that its layers of umami are thick.

In miso, the amino acids that come from soybean protein being taken apart, and the peptides that form during aging, lie one on top of another. They hold up the taste of the whole dish from underneath.

While cooking, there are times I think “something is missing.” I add salt, and it still does not come together. At times like that, putting in even a teaspoon of miso often pulls the taste together all at once.

What it adds is not saltiness. It is depth.

The darker the miso, the stronger this effect. But the color comes along with it, so that part I work out with the dish. For a dish I want to keep light, a little one-year miso. To bring it firmly together, a little two- or three-year.

Japanese has the word kakushi-aji (隠し味), a “hidden taste,” but it feels less like hiding and more like laying something underneath.

Mixing is fine

And there is no need to settle on one.

Sometimes I use two-year miso as it is, and sometimes I combine it with one-year miso. Mixed, a taste appears between the sweetness, the aroma and the color that neither one had.

No difficult ratios are needed. Add just a little dark miso to the usual miso soup. Taste it, and if you want a bit more, add more.

Not by the recipe, but finding “here” with your own tongue.

Years of aging are not a ranking. Three-year miso is not the grandest. Each length of time has its own taste.

Today, which do I want to eat: a bright taste, or a deep one?

Choosing miso is also noticing your own senses.

In the next chapter, I will talk about the ones who were making that taste. Not me, but the workers too small to see.

Up to here, I have been talking about the time of miso.

One year, two years, three. One full turn of the seasons. The change going on inside the jar.

It has all been about long stretches of time, so you may have thought this.

That sounds like a lot of work.

The hands move for a few days

Miso is packed once a year.

The night before, the soybeans go into water to soak. The next day they are boiled, mashed, mixed with koji and salt, and packed into a container. Counting the days before and after, a few days.

And once that is done, there is nothing more to do.

Spring comes, summer passes, and it is fall. All that time, the miso is growing on its own.

All I had been doing was choosing, mixing, and waiting.

And it gets easier every year

The first year, it certainly took time.

But the second year was a little quicker. The third year, more so. The hands remember. The order of things becomes clear. I begin to see where I can ease off.

With each year, the experience deepens and it gets easier.

It was daily life that got lighter

And there is something I noticed.

All through the year, I no longer went to the supermarket to buy miso.

I never run out. I never think “it will be gone soon.” There is always miso in the kitchen.

It is also something put by in case anything happens. It keeps a long time, so it is reassuring.

It saved money as well. When I pack it I buy a good quantity of ingredients, but thought of as a year’s supply, it costs less than buying miso all along.

And more than anything, I know everything it is made of.

Where the soybeans were grown. What rice the koji came from. Which sea the salt is from. I am the one who chose them.

A miso that my family’s hands have touched, that has spent the seasons with us, is in the kitchen.

The work should have increased, and yet daily life has become easier than before.

It is strange, but that is how it is.

Which time shall I eat today?

When I choose a miso, what I am looking at is neither price nor color.

Whether today’s me wants to eat a bright taste or a deep one. That is what I am asking myself.

There is no need to have perfect ingredients from the start. There is no need to take someone else’s right answer as your own just as it is.

First, look. Taste. If it seems possible, try packing some.

In one bowl of miso soup there is not only soybeans, koji and salt, but the time that miso has spent.

Which time shall I eat today?