Koji Alchemy: Rediscovering the Magic of Mold-Based Fermentation(Soy Sauce, Miso, Sake, Mirin, Amazake, Charcuterie) Hardcover – Illustrated, 4 Jun. 2020

Was interested in learning about how to make soy sauce and watched a bunch of stuff on YouTube but this is a real gem. Found it a bit hard to get into the writing style to start with, and it seemed to say a lot without giving much information, but stick with it. Brilliant book. Especially like the way they bring in other contributors.The only down side was the binding as a few pages came out where they have pictures bound into the middle.That said, I expect this to become a well thumbed reference book.Excellent!

This is a great reference book and very informative. My only issue is the lack of images. It is very text heavy and sometimes the layout looks like it was done by the author rather than a skilled designer. Overall very interesting and I've already applied a lot of the principles and made some miso.

I had no idea about koji, I am taking my time to sip through this book to discover gems of knowledge and techniques. Anyone who’s pallet desires new dynamic flavours textures and magic should at least read the summary if not buy the book

I had no idea that some of the world's tastiest foods - soy sauce, miso, sake, etc - all had koji in common. This book demystifies koji, with a lot of traditional and novel uses for it. It's one of the most eye-opening food related books I've ever read, and I keep longing to make miso chocolate chip cookies...

Really easy to understand and useful.

Information on fermentation

If you like to be constantly interrupted by all kinds of random people - this book is just for you. It looks and feels like pop up advertising on paper. The very moment you felt a slightest interest in the topic - a gray area pop up would intrude your space and interrupt whatever you were doing.As for the index of this book - it is better to not even begin. If you'd like to find some recipe quickly - you're out of luck, there is everything in the index except one word - recipe. So you have to scan through all that, trying to guess where the recipes would most likely be. Then you go to that page and start scanning from there. If there is no recipe in this part of the book - bad luck, try again. If there is one - it most likely would not be the classical one nor the authors one, it would be of some random unknown to you person like John or Jane or some such.But even if eventually you found a recipe - it would not necessarily work. The very first recipe of sake (p. 172) reads 4L of cooked rice and 1L of water. Do you realize that one part of water would not even cover four parts of rice? About any recipe online has at least the same amount of water, most of them having rice to water ratio about 2:3 which makes sense, the yeast simply would not work without water! After reading that recipe I lost that tiny amount of trust I had for the authors and started a return case.So personally for me, the ratio of empty talk to practical usable knowledge in this book is 10:1 and even that 1 is difficult to find and you'd have to create your own index to keep it accessible.

Fascinating, high quality book