How Is MiSOgood Made?

How Is MiSOgood Made?

MiSOgood is both delicious and nutritious with countless applications from soups to sauces and beyond. While it’s relatively new to American kitchens, you might be surprised to learn that it has been around for well over 1,000 years! Salty, earthy, and savory, MiSOgood is quickly becoming a top ingredient around the world thanks mainly to its big umami flavors, its versatility and its easy usage.

To better understand how to use this amazing product in your own cooking, let’s take a closer look at its origins and how it’s made.

What Is Miso?

Miso is a mixture made from fermenting soybeans (or rice like MiSOgood’s Soy-Free) with salt and koji, a type of edible fungus packed with healthy probiotics, vitamins, and minerals.

Like a fine wine, MiSOgood is then slowly barrel aged to umami perfection. The longer the miso mixture ages and ferments, the stronger its flavor profile grows and the deeper its color gets. The colors of miso range from white miso, like our MiSOgood Sweet & Savory white miso, to brown miso, like our MiSOgood brown rice miso, which is barrel aged for more than 2.5 years.

How Miso Is Made

Making miso is a five-step process.

  • Cook the Ingredients: Soybeans are soaked in water, then boiled or steamed. If the miso contains rice or barely, these are also soaked, then steamed.
  • Add Koji: The koji fungus is added to the rice and/or barley and left to grow over a period of about three days.
  • Mix the Ingredients: Once the koji has sufficiently developed, it is added to the soybeans and mixed with salt and water.
  • Fermentation: The mixture is then placed into a fermentation vessel (tanks in most commercial productions), which are then left to ferment in a warm location for a minimum of three to six months. How long a miso ferments depends on how strong the producer wants the flavor to be:  The longer the fermentation period, the stronger the taste.
  • Testing and Packaging: Once the fermentation period is complete, the miso producer will test the product for taste and quality. Once it passes inspection, it’s packaged and ready to be sold!

The Extra Step MiSOgood takes

Miso is most commonly sold as a paste. That means that they need to be added to liquid to make them usable, otherwise the flavor is too strong. You can’t just smear miso paste onto salmon and have it automatically turn into a glaze. That means it’s usually important to know the right liquid to miso ratio in order to use it properly.

At MiSOgood, we take the extra step to make all our organic miso products usable right out of the bottle. We pre-blend all our miso products with water and other liquid ingredients to get the consistency right every single time. That makes working with MiSOgood simple, fast and easy, allowing you to add to your favorite dishes in less than 1 minute!

Check out our full line of MiSOgood sauces and soups or head on over to our recipes for some MiSOgood inspiration!

Blog