#0 — Introduction — How I started cooking with fermented foods, and the wonderful changes it brought to my life

Introduction

My name is Maki. I’m the founder of Gohan Japan Corp and a registered dietitian in Japan.

“I’m tired every day.” “No matter what I do, my body feels heavy.” “I want to do something for my health, but I don’t have the time.”

If that’s how you feel right now, Gohan Japan’s The Fermentation Journal was written for you.

What made me want to write The Fermentation Journal was something I went through myself a few years ago.

I was about 30 and had just given birth to my first son. He has a disability, and even after his first birthday he wouldn’t eat his meals. He also slept so lightly that he woke up again and again during the night. On top of that, I was struggling with terrible constipation myself.

My husband, meanwhile, was extremely busy at work. He was dealing with badly irritated skin and a sudden increase in gray hair, and he caught colds easily.

Since I’m a registered dietitian, I did pay a fair amount of attention to what we ate. Even so, I often bought chocolate, ice cream, cake, and the like, and we ate them as a family.

That’s when, in a souvenir shop on a trip, I happened to come across amazake. Amazake is a sweet, non-alcoholic drink made by mixing rice koji, rice, and water and letting it ferment. I knew it was good for you, but I had rarely drunk it until then. Still, I thought, “Maybe my son will drink this,” so I bought some and took it home.

My guess was right. He gulped the amazake down, and I can’t tell you how happy that made me.

When I looked into it afterward, I learned that TANICA’s YOGURTiA, a fermented food maker, was the most popular fermented food maker in Japan, and that it could make all sorts of things besides amazake. I bought a YOGURTiA right away and started making yogurt, of course, along with shoyu koji (soy sauce koji), shio koji (salt koji), miso, natto, and much more.

To my surprise, my son loved every one of those fermented foods. He was especially fond of fried eggs topped with shoyu koji. He began eating more and more, and his weight started going up steadily.

Cooking with fermented foods brought all kinds of other welcome changes as well. Probably because my gut health improved, my constipation cleared up, too.

My husband’s skin also improved to an astonishing degree, and he even has less gray hair. He tells me people often say to him, “You look younger every year,” so I think it’s fair to say it had a real anti-aging effect.

What surprised me even more was that my husband, who used to come down with a cold at the drop of a hat, hardly catches colds anymore. I believe that bringing a variety of fermented foods into our meals improved his gut health, and that this built up his immunity. The same goes for me and for both of our sons; I think the children have simply become less prone to colds.

There’s more. When our younger son was little, he had tantrums so intense that once he started crying he would keep going for two hours or so, and it was very hard on us. But once I started feeding him fermented foods as well, the tantrums stopped and he became a very calm child. Our older son began sleeping well, too, and no longer wakes up in the middle of the night.

That change in temperament truly amazed me. I had heard that the gut is called the second brain, and that a person’s disposition can brighten when gut health improves. I remember thinking, “So it really is true.”

By the way, the amazake you can make with TANICA rice koji or Amazake Enzyme is wonderfully sweet and delicious, so at our house we use this amazake (concentrated amazake) in place of sugar to make healthy, sugar-free treats for the kids: amazake smoothies, amazake yogurt, amazake ice cream, amazake chocolate, and so on. As a result, we no longer buy store-bought chocolate, ice cream, or yogurt at all, the way we used to.

And from rice koji you can make not only shio koji, shoyu koji, and miso, but also delicious homemade seasonings such as consommé koji, Chinese-style koji, kimchi base, gochujang, and doubanjiang, so we’ve stopped buying store-bought seasonings as well.

Cooking with fermented foods is what changed our diet, our bodies, and our lives this much, for me and for my family.

Koji, the food that has kept Japan healthy

Koji is Japan’s “national mold,” treasured by the Japanese for more than a thousand years. Miso, soy sauce, mirin, sake, amazake, pickles: much of the Japanese food we eat without a second thought could not exist without the power of koji. In other words, koji lies at the root of our food culture, and it is an irreplaceable presence that has supported our health.

Yet in the rush of modern life, we had forgotten what koji gives us. Fast food, instant meals, eating out: in exchange for convenience, we had been throwing our gut health out of balance and wearing our bodies down.

I wrote The Fermentation Journal to help you rediscover koji, this wonderful ally. Koji is not difficult at all. You don’t need special tools or advanced knowledge. With dried rice koji from a supermarket or the official Gohan Japan store, you can make an all-purpose seasoning in just 10 minutes. And simply by adding a little of it to your everyday cooking, your body will steadily change.

In The Fermentation Journal, I’ll explain everything in a way that’s easy to follow: the scientific reasons koji is so good for the body, exactly how to use it, and how to work it into your daily life. I won’t use difficult words. Whether you’re not much of a cook or too busy to find the time, everything here is something you can put into practice.

If you’ve opened this article in The Fermentation Journal, I imagine it’s because part of you wants something to change, or wants to feel more energetic. I want to do everything I can to answer that feeling.

By the time you finish reading The Fermentation Journal, I’m sure you’ll be thinking, “I had no idea koji was this easy, or this wonderful.” And I’m sure you’ll want to take a small first step, one you can start today.

So let’s open the door to a life with fermentation together. Your gut changes, your body changes, and your everyday life changes. That first step begins right here, right now.

This article provides general information about everyday eating and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition. If you have a medical condition or allergies, please consult a physician or registered dietitian.