How to Make Homemade Korean Sake: Makgeolli with Koji

“You need a mother or a starter,” explained Sebastien Bureau, the head of Research and Development at RISE Kombucha and the man who gave me koji. I was taking part in the Living Table Tour, a gastronomic bike tour offered by Melissa Simard through her company ‘Round Table Tours. I’d been guiding her food truck tour all summer, but this was my first time attending the healthy living tour that featured eco-friendly and sustainable organizationsin Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood with stops that included Crudessence for plant-based raw sushi, Santropol Roulant for a look at the rooftop garden and beehives, and a conference and tasting at La Centrale Culinaire with Bureau.

We were looking at his rubbery kombucha culture after trying his rose and hibiscus kombucha, homemade mead and sprouts. The man’s a culture-guru. His microbiology and biochemistry background has helped him create and/or sustain bacterial starters that go into everything from his homemade sourdough bread to beer. But it was at the mention of koji that my ears perked up.

“I made my own koji and made some sake with it. My first try wasn’t that successful,” he said. “Sake’s hard.” Fortunately, I selectively ignored that last bit, as visions of bottles of pure, unpasteurized nama sake floated through my head, accompanied by plate after plate of salty dried squid in soy sauce, robata-grilled yakitori and black cod à la Quebec (with turbot – half the price, just as tender and sweet).

After the presentation, I walked straight up to Bureau and said, “I want to make sake with you.” And god love him, he didn’t laugh. Instead he talked about the best season (fall) because summer’s too hot, the importance of temperature regulation (impossible in my apartment) and the complicated process. But he said he’d give me some koji and I could start with a Makgeolli if I wanted – a Korean rice wine made with koji. It’s like sake for beginners. 5 day fermentation. Nothing but koji, rice, water and maybe a little yeast. The koji was the hard part (you can order it online if you don’t want to make it yourself or can’t find it in a store like Mycoboutique in Montreal), but Bureau was just going to give me a jar of it. All I had to do was grind it up and add it to steamed short-grain sticky rice.

That’s how I found myself a few weeks later standing outside Bureau’s door on a Saturday morning, where a plastic bag with a 500 mL mason jar was hanging from the door knob. Bureau had left town that morning (who takes care of his sourdough culture? I wondered), but had offered to leave me the koji as long as he got to taste my results.

I’d done a fair bit of sake research by now, and realized how difficult sake would be without a factory full of machines and vats with temperature gauges. Small scale sake making is rife with problems, which is why bad sake is abundant. And really good sake would have been very hard to make consistently until modern times. I now assume that most of what people in Japan were drinking up until the 1900s was so-so at best, with the odd amazing year when no wild yeasts got into the batch and altered the flavour or the temperature stayed low enough for exactly the right number of days, then changed just enough to build a certain flavour profile (floral notes or fruit or herbs or minerals), then stopped just at the right moment before it turned into a vinegary fruit bomb.

But Makgeolli seemed do-able. I decided to follow this recipe, substituting the wheat yeast for koji and skipping the sugar.  It was plenty sweet just from the rice.

So I soaked sushi rice (I wasn’t going for a Junmai Daiginjo…the purest sake made from the most refined, highly polished rice – the ice wine of sake in that it takes much more rice to make a single batch than a normal bottle of sake).

I washed my rice about 15 times and sterilized all my equipment in vodka (neutral flavoured alcohol that evaporates). I cleaned bowls and spoons and funnels and my hands. I steamed my rice in a cheesecloth in a steamer basket, making sure there was enough room in the cloth for the rice to expand. In Makgeolli and sake, you slightly undercook the rice. You don’t want it to become mushy (something to do with the koji not inoculating the rice as well, I think).

Then I ground the koji in a blender, added a little instant yeast and stirred in some chlorine-free water to make a paste. I combined this with the slightly cooled cook rice in a sterilized bowl along with 2 litres of water, breaking the rice up gently to distribute it in the liquid.

Once combined in a large ceramic bowl, I covered it with a clean, vodka-sterilized and dried cloth, and sealed with an elastic band so air could still get out but no wild yeasts could get in. Then I waited.

I was supposed to wait until rice grains started rising to the top, but the mixture was so dry the next day that there was no way anything could float. After my Sriracha paste mold disaster a few years ago, I was scared. The last thing I wanted to do was throw out an entire batch of moldy Makgeolli and waste Bureau’s precious koji (that’s stuff’s expensive!). Since the makgeolli can be diluted later, I figured I’d hedge my bets and dilute now. I added about 5 more cups of water and split the makgeolli into three sterilized bowls so I could ferment each one for a different length of time at a different temperature. I re-covered with clean cloths and elastic. And I waited. You have to stir each day (with a sterilized spoon), so two days later, I noticed that my Makgeolli babies were bubbling away. The most active one I put in the fridge to quiet it down. And the next day, I added a second bowl to the fridge. The third day, I took the first bowl out, now that it had learned its lesson, and let it ferment on the counter again for another day. The next day, the second bowl came out of the fridge and I let it ferment another two days at room temperature. I also put the third bowl into the fridge on that day. Even in the fridge, it kept on bubbling a little.

It’s very cool to see a living thing created out of inoculated rice and water. At least geeky, sake-loving me thinks so.

Then you have to filter out the koji and rice grains in a cheesecloth. Good luck getting it all out. This is how you get nigori sake (if you follow a proper sake recipe). That’s the cloudy, sweeter sake. Unless you filter with a cheesecloth and then have a really fine way of filtering like a siphon, and do it several times, you’re probably going to end up with cloudy Makgeolli. That’s fine. That’s how it should be. You’re also going to end up with carbonation! Sparkling sake! I thought my Makgeolli had gone off, but Bureau assured me that was how it was supposed to be.

I sieved and then bottled my sake, using old bottles, including one that held one of the best sakes I’ve ever tried.

I tested my first batch on day 7. It was very yeasty. At least the leftover cooked sake rice – the lees – called Sakezuke would make a great coating for chicken and fish, I thought.

 

But then my second batch was softer, more rounded. And my third was even more neutral flavoured. I didn’t think there anything really special about any of them, but they were “nama” (unpasteurized) sake – which are available in other provinces, and countries but not available in Quebec. And the ones made in Ontario and British Columbia are more like table wines than Grand Vins. If you ever get to Boston or New York, look for them in specialty shops there.

I think I should have pasteurized the sake by boiling it. All those wild yeasts (who knows what Bureau’s koji had held and what had gotten into my batches via the air in my apartment?) and commercial yeast (which is what I’m fairly sure made it taste overly yeasty and I would cut back on or eliminate next time) were making me break out in red blotches after a glass or two. But no one else had any reaction.

I froze leftover sakezuke and brought samples of my three sakes to Bureau, as well as to some chefs at La Centrale Culinaire and the owner of Mycoboutique, who traded me some of his homemade Chanterelle Mushroom Liquor. 1pm on a Wednesday and we’re sipping shots of homemade hooch in his St-Denis boutique.

Bureau thought my Makgeolli was not bad. He liked the first one the best – the most raw. I liked the third – the softest. And the Centrale Culinaire chefs liked the second. Other friends seemed to prefer the second and third. But the longer it stayed in my fridge, the more it bubbled (it’s hard to get out all that koji and rice), so it got pretty funky by the end. Now I have about a cup of siphoned Makgeolli left, which I’m reserving for cooking. And I have a whole lot more respect for even so-so sakes at the liquor store. They’re tough.

Things I learned:
1. Don’t bike with Makgeolli. The jostling makes the tops pop off, which I found out while biking from work to La Centrale Culinaire…
2. Use only the tiniest amount of commercial yeast, if any. Otherwise it tastes very yeasty.
3. Don’t through out the leftover grains after straining them from the Makgeolli! They’re deemed a health food product and very expensive in Japan!
4. Pasteurization was created for a reason. Unless you’re sure your Makgeolli is very, very clean, it’s safer to boil (and this from a Nama-lover). This will, however, destroy some of the hard-won flavour.

But now it’s fall, which is real sake making time. And Bureau and I have plans. And high hopes.