Science Friday - Ig Nobel Prizes, Koji Alchemy. Nov 27, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Laugh Along At Home With The Ig Nobel Awards We know traditions are different this year. Maybe you’re having a small family dinner instead of a huge gathering. Maybe you’re just hopping on a video call instead of going over the river and through the woods. At Science Friday, our holiday tradition of broadcasting highlights from the annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremony is different this year too. Rather than being recorded live in front of a cheering crowd at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, the ceremony was virtual this year. But one thing remains the same—awards went to a bunch of genuine scientists for research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. This year marks the ceremony’s 30th anniversary.  Marc Abrahams, editor of the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research and master of ceremonies for the awards, joins Ira to talk about Ig Nobel history, and to share highlights from this year’s winners. Koji: The Mold You Want In Your Kitchen When chef Jeremy Umansky grows a batch of Aspergillus oryzae, a cultured mold also known as koji, in a tray of rice, he says he’s “bewitched” by its fluffy white texture and tantalizing floral smells. When professional mechanical engineer and koji hobbyist Rich Shih thinks about the versatility of koji, from traditional Japanese sake to cured meats, he says, “It blows my mind.” Koji-inoculated starches are crucial in centuries-old Asian foods like soy sauce and miso—and, now, inspiring new and creative twists from modern culinary minds. And Shih and Umansky, the two food fanatics, have written a new book describing the near-magical workings of the fungus, which, like other molds, uses enzymes to break starches, fats, and proteins down into food for itself. It just so happens that, in the process, it’s making our food tastier.  You can grow koji on grains, vegetables, and other starchy foods, and make sauces, pastes, alcohols, and vinegars. Even cure meats. Umansky and Shih say the possibilities are endless—and they have the koji pastrami and umami popcorn to prove it. Plus, Urmansky and Shih share some of their favorite koji-inspired holiday dishes and leftover recipes—from turkey amino spreads to cranberry sauce amazake to soy sauce-infused whipped cream. Read more on Science Friday! Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, hoping you're having a safe and happy Thanksgiving. We know traditions are different this year, right? Maybe a small family dinner instead of that huge gathering. Maybe hopping on a video call instead of going over the river and through the woods. Well, at Science Friday, our holiday tradition of broadcasting highlights from the annual Ignobelle Award ceremony, that's a bit different, too. Rather than being recorded live in front of a cheering crowd, at Harvard Sanders Theater, the ceremony went virtual this year, just like everything else did. But one thing stays the same. Awards to a bunch of genuine scientists for research that first makes you laugh and then

makes you think. Joining me now is Mark Abrams. He's editor of the Science Humor magazine, The Annals of Improbable Research, and you know him as the Master of Ceremonies from the Ig Nobel Awards. Welcome back, Mark. Hi, Ira. Happy day after Thanksgiving. Happy to you.

And you know, I also noticed that this is your 30th anniversary year. This is our 30th anniversary year, too. Yeah, this is the 30th first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. And boy, was it different this year, which was both disturbing and a lot of fun. Well, for our uninitiated listeners who have not heard it, give us a thumbnail of what the Ig Nobel Prizes are. They're unusual prizes, because most prizes in the world are for the very best of something or maybe for the very worst. But with us, best and worst just are not relevant. With us, there's only one thing that matters. These are prizes for people who have done anything that makes people laugh, then think. If we've chosen well, everything we've done will make anybody anywhere laugh when they first hear about it. And then there's something about

each of these prizes that will stick inside people's head so that a week after you hear about it. You just want to tell your friends and talk about it. From the very beginning, we've been lucky and worked hard to have big public events where a bunch of the winners come at their own expense, because we don't have any money. A bunch of well-known scientists, several of them Nobel prize winners, come every year and hand out the prizes. And big audiences show up. The first four years, we were at MIT in Cambridge, and then we moved it down the street, the fifth year, to Harvard where it's been ever since. A big theater with 1,100 people.

And they spend the evening throwing paper airplanes at the stage and doing other stuff. And how do you duplicate all this stuff when you can't gather in a room? Yeah, it's very hard. I remember being in that balcony when you're throwing some of those paper planes. You have actual Nobel winners involved, don't you? Yeah. We always have a bunch. This year was especially sweet because one.

One of the people who's handing out the prizes this year was Andre Geim, who 20 years ago was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize because he and another physicist used magnets to levitate a frog. And then 10 years later, which is now 10 years ago, Andre Geim was given a Nobel Prize in physics. That was for discovering the first usable samples of graphene, the two-dimensional form of carbon. So this was his first time coming back on the other side of the transaction of physically handing out the prize. And I should mention that was a central thing for us. There were two things that we, in talking it over, we decided we have to find a way to keep doing this this year. One is the paper airplanes because everybody loves the paper airplanes. And the other is the magic moments, the 10 moments, when I introduce a winner, the winner steps up and then a Nobel Prize winner steps up and looks them.

in the eye and physically hands them the Ig Nobel Prize. And we came up with a way to do that. What we did was we made a PDF document. The theme of the ceremony this year was bugs. So we made a PDF document that you could print out and then assemble into the form of a box. And each side of that box or five sides of the six-sided box, each have a picture of a different kind of bug, a cockroach, a flea, Volkswagen, Beetle, some other stuff. And the sixth side of the box is instructions on how you print, fold, and attach this stuff into the form of a box. So every time I announced a winner, we did this by Zoom calls, which themselves were an adventure to organize. And each time I announced a winner, the Nobel laureate would say

congratulations or whatever, and then hold up the box that we had emailed to that. Nobel laureate who had assembled it and then shove it out the side of the video screen. And then you could see that the winner would reach out to the side of their video screen and pull in the box. And it was especially fun in the cases where we had a team of winners, say six or seven people who themselves were probably scattered on three or four different continents. And so you could see the Nobel laureate always kind of gleeful shoving this thing. out the side of the screen, and then you would see the winners, each pulling it in. But if you get

six or seven people, there's no way that you'll get all of them to reach to the proper side. So maybe five of them would reach out to the left and two of them to the right and bring the thing in. It was just really nice. I understand that you have a story about Francis Arnold and Science Friday. Yes, I want to thank you, all of you collectively at Science Friday for this. two or three years ago, when Francis Arnold was announced as winning a Nobel Prize, you guys managed to get her on your program within a couple of days. And at the end of the program, you asked her, now that you've got one of these great prizes, is there anything that you'll be able to do, that you weren't able to do before, that you want to do? And her

answer was something like, yeah, I want to be part of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. So, your producer sent me an email right away telling me about this and said, I think you had to get in touch with her. So I emailed Francis and she got back to me right away, right after your program. We had some nice discussions. Schedules were kind of crazy the next year or so. This was the first year. She was able to be part of it and she handed out two of the prizes. It was such a sweet thing all around that happening. That's terrific. We could use sweet things this time of the year, especially this year. All right, let's go through some of the awards like we do each year. I have you here with us talking virtually together about the awards. There were really some

interesting awards. And let's start with the Acoustic Prize first, because this really was wild. The Igneurbel Acoustics Prize goes to a team that represents the countries of Austria, Sweden, Japan, the USA, and Switzerland. The prize. The prize, is awarded to Stefan Reber, Takeshi Nishamura, Yudit Janish, Mark Robertson, and Ticomsa Fitch for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium enriched air. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Andre Geim, who himself has an Ig Nobel Prize awarded 20 years. years ago. Here is Andre Gaim. Congratulations guys. A great achievement. Do the same next time,

but a little bit better without I hope. Now hand them the prize, please. What's your prize, guys? Very good with something similar to very important things these days. Now let's Listen to the pre-recorded acceptance speech prepared by the winners. Thank you very much. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to show that also all the alligator sounds strange when inhaling a party balloon. Our question was whether alligators have vocal tract resonances like human speech. The key is that sound travels faster in helium. This makes the air passages seem shorter, making the resonances higher.

So if you breathe helium and the frequency shift upward, that shows that they're resonances. A hard part is getting an alligator to breathe helium. Our subject was a Chinese alligator. We recorded her inhaling normal air and heliox, a helium-oxygen mixture. And here we go. Here's one call in air and one call in heliox. They sound different, they look different, and this is evidence that also non-avian reptiles have resonances in their vocalizations. We're super happy to accept our ignoble prize! Yes.

Yeah. I think you don't want to listen to this one at a certain time of day when you're eating or something when they make those strange bellows. Let's move on to the Physics Prize. The Ig Nobel Physics Prize is awarded this year to Ivan Maximov and Andrei Pototsky for determining experimentally what happens to the shape of a living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency. The prize will be presented by.

Nobel laureate Eric Maskin. Here is the prize. Many congratulations to you both. Thank you very much. To you. Thank you. Until on all. The winners will now present their pre-recorded acceptance speech. Hi, I'm Ivan. And I'm Andre. Greetings from Melbourne. We are honored to receive the prize this year. We thought that it would be interesting to shake the worm like this. The body starts to wobble and we use light and a photodetector to measure the vibration. This should help us to better understand how the nerve pulse is propagated here and here. We had some difficult time trying to understand what this results might be good for. Then we realized that the body of the worm wobbles, very similar to the ripples on the water surface. We then estimated how stretchable the warm body actually is.

Just a sort, Ivan, do you think we should try to vibrate other animals? Now this qualified the shape of living earthworms and one vibrates the earthworm at a high frequency. see, I was thinking about this and saying the scientist was talking about what you could do with and I thought maybe a better fishing lure. I can put you in touch with them. They were so excited at winning their Ig Nobel Prize. And also, they were still very excited at the research they'd done. Because even for them, it was so unexpected that they ended up doing this and then the stuff they were finding.

Each year there's a theme and an opera. What happened this year? This year the theme was bugs. It turned out to be a good year for bugs. Well, let's give our listeners a taste of the opera. Is there a name for it, Mark? It's a dream little cockroach. There is a piece of dream little cockroach.

Maybe like him, I was at first. Raised in neglect. My life was cut. Then just like him, my fate reversed. What's just an insect, now I come burst. We need to take a quick break. We'll be back with more from Mark Abrams and the 30th first annual Ig Nobel Awards after this.

I'm Ira Dahl. Don't burst. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. I'm talking with Mark Abrams, editor of the Science Humor magazine, The Annals of Improbable Research, Master of Ceremonies from the Ig Nobel Awards. This year is the 30th year of the ceremony. Give our audience a bit of an idea. How exactly do you choose the winners? I mean, how do you find? It must take a tremendous effort just combing through all the journals because the winners all have published stuff online or in journals. How does that process? process work. Oh, that's just the start of it, what you described. We get something like 10,000 or so new nominations a year. Anybody can send in a nomination. About 10% or so of those, a typical year

of people who nominate themselves. They almost never win. If you're trying to win a prize, you're almost certainly going to fail. And we have a bunch of people, about a hundred of us, scattered around the world. We have lots of little meetings of various kinds. And we argue tooth and nail and then some about this stuff. Because we're trying to figure out, how do you choose 10 things that will be immediately funny to anybody, no matter how much or little they know about whatever it is? There's something about what they've done that's just so utterly surprising that it's funny.

And we argue and argue and argue and argue about that. And having people from around the world be part of this is a big part of why we've been able to choose prizes that work. around the world everywhere. Let's move on to the Psychology Prize. The Psychology Prize is awarded to Miranda Jackerman and Nicholas Ruhl for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Eric Maskin. Here is the coveted Ig Nobel Prize, and you turn it over to you.

congratulations. The winners will now present their acceptance speech by recorded video. Hi, everyone. We just want to say thank you so much for this award. We are very excited. We just want to dedicate this award to everyone who's done data-driven research and found themselves somewhere they never expected. There's been resistance, Mark, to the idea of the entire ceremony over the years.

I mean, one year from the UK chief scientist, right? Yeah. That was in 1995, Sir Robert May. As usual that year, as often happens, one of the prizes went to a British scientist, a team of British scientists. They had done an experiment to investigate how breakfast cereal flakes grow soggy in milk. And they were quite pleased at winning the prize. A few weeks after the ceremony that year, I got a letter on a very nice stationery from Sir Robert May, the chief scientific advisor to the British government, saying he had just learned about

the Ig Nobel Prizes, and this was a terrible thing, and we shouldn't do this. I didn't really know anything about him, so I asked some scientists, British scientist friends about him, and they all said, oh, he's a good guy. He must be joking. He's got to be joking. So I wrote him a letter back saying, I'm pretty sure you're joking, but just in case you don't know about this, here's what the prize is, and the scientists were very happy. He sent me back a second letter, far more angry than the first, saying, you should not give Ig Nobel Prizes to British scientists. even if they want them. So at that point, I just started telling people about this story.

And a lot of people I told are journalists who started writing about this. It was a good story. So this got attention around the world and it got editorials, you know, saying things like three cheers for the Ig Nobel Prizes. You know, this is a good example of how people do become interested in science. So we ended up being very grateful to Sir Robert May for that. Let's go to a really special one this year. the Peace Prize about the government of India and Pakistan.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the governments of India and Pakistan for having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other's doorbells in the middle of the night and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door. The winners could not or would not be with us today. Now, I got to say, if, you know, you ring each doorbell and you run away like we did as kids, and it's India and Pakistan, I think that's a better option than a nuclear war. Let's listen to the award in medicine. The Ig Nobel Medicine Prize is awarded this year to Ninka Wulink, Damien Denise, and Arnold von Lohn,

for diagnosing a long, unrecognized medical condition. mesophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Francis Arnold. I commend you on this truly impressive and important work, and I award you this Ig Nobel Prize. Thank you. I need to know, is there a cure? Yes.

We have a cure. It's the sound of slicking. It is alike the sound of stepping in the myth. And if you think it's stepping in the myth, you don't get angry. We all recognize these annoying sounds of people hearing humans smacking and slurping. But some of us, they develop a severe psychotic disorder. It's called misophonia. In misophonia, patients are obsessed with human sounds.

And they develop aggressive emotions and finally get socially up. isolated because of avoidance. At the Amsterdam University Medical Hospital, our team was the first to discover the full clinical picture and we traced it back to childhood. And we also found a specific brain circuitry responsible for these symptoms. And at the moment, we are exploring the genetics of misophonia.

It sounds funny, but it's severe. Patients become depressed, lose the jobs and relations. We developed an innovative treatment using sound manipulation and movie clips. Thank you very much for this wonderful prize and we are very happy with it and it's really a tribute to our patients. Thank you. Thank you.

Peter the Sist of Second. Hey, cool, guys. I like that you had a cure in that ceremony. Yeah, this, in this case, ever since then, I have been getting a small but loud stream of emails, angry emails from people in different countries saying, I have misophonia. It's a terrible thing you did with this prize. It's insulting to the scientists and to the people like me who have misophonia.

It's a terrible, terrible thing to endure. And I would explain to each of them that, yes, it's a terrible thing. And also, you know that you've seen people laugh at it. But the scientists were not insulted. They were pleased. They took this as an opportunity to make a lot of the rest of the world interested in this. Yeah, they did. Okay, let's move on to a really interesting one this year. Medical Education. Yeah.

The Medical Education Prize is awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andres Manuel Lopez Oprador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Ricep Taip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbangli Burmohemu of Turkmenistan for using the COVID-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can. the winners could not or would not be with us today. We want to offer special congratulations to one of the co-winners to Alexander Lukashenko. This is the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko. In the year 2013, the Ignobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Alexander Lukashenko

for making it illegal to applaud in public and to the Belarus state police for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. Congratulations again to Alexander Lukashenko. Let's go on to the Materials Science Prize. The Materials Science Prize is awarded to Meton, Aaron, Michelle Beber, James Norris, Alyssa Perrone, Ashley Rutkowski, Michael Wilson, and Mary Ann Raganti for showing that knives,

manufactured from frozen human feces, do not work well. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate, Marty Chalfee. Oh, congratulations to all of you, but before giving you the prize, I have a few questions about your work and I actually welcome this opportunity to get the inside poop. Did your colleagues feel this was a waste of your talents? To be honest, I think that this study is really going to go down in the anals of science. I'm surprised you didn't even get a whiff of success. Got a whiff of something. Yeah. So again, thank you. all very, very much and congratulations. We'll hear the pre-recorded video acceptance speech.

Hi there, my name is Meton-Aaron, and I just want to thank the Ig Nobel Awards Committee for this prize, and all of the co-authors of this paper also want to give a personal thanks. Thank you so much. This is truly a pinnacle of my scientific career. It is an honor to be an Ig Nobel Prize winner. Thank you for this award. Thank you so much for this award. It is such an honor to receive this award. Thank you so much for giving us this Ig Nobel Prize. I consider it a great privilege to accept this esteemed award.

Thank you so much. Thank you for recognizing how much hard work and personal effort I put into this research project. Once again, thank you so much. Now, after I listened to this and all those comments by the, the scientists and their acceptance speeches. I thought you must have a bonus prize for the corneous dad jokes and puns somewhere you could have handed out as a bonus to these people. Go to it. You can think of this as the prize that launched 100,000 puns. Among other things, Marty Chalfi, the Nobel Prize winner who presented this prize to the winners, himself spent a good 10 minutes

making that kind of joke during the presentation. We didn't have time to include it in the webcast, but he was not the only one around the world. Boy, a lot of people enjoyed the opportunity to make really bad puns because of this prize. Now, this next prize, the management prize, had a surprise ending for me. I didn't know where this was really going. The management prize this year is awarded to Shi Guangan, Mo Tianxian, Yang Kangsheng, Yang Guangxeng, and Ling Shian Si, five professional hitmen in Guangxi, China, who managed a contract for a hit job, a murder performed for money,

in the following way. After accepting payment to perform the murder, Xi Guangan then instead subcontracted the task to Ma Tien Shang, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Kangsheng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Yang Guangxeng, who then instead subcontracted the task to Ling Shian Sur, with each subsequently enlisted hitman receiving a smaller percentage of the fee,

and nobody actually performing a murder. The winners could not or would not be with us today. And so the hit job never happened. And I'm thinking, imagine wasting all those lawyers' fees for contracting and subcontracting. Yeah, on the other hand, you know, this might be a good lesson in economics textbooks of this is how the economy works. You know, it's not just the beginning and end of a transaction. There's a lot of stuff and a lot of people are kept employed, even on the simplest thing. I'm Ira Plato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Let's move to the entomology prize. The entomology prize is awarded to Richard Vetter for collecting evidence that many entomologists scientists who study insects, are afraid of spiders, which are not insects. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Rich Roberts. Well, Dr. Vetter, many congratulations. This is a well-won prize, and I fully understand anybody being frightened of spiders, but I hope you're not. And now we'll hear the acceptance speech from the winner. Hi, this is a spider, and I'm an arachnologist. I study people's spider interactions, mostly medical issues, but also arachnophobia. It always surprises me when my entomology colleagues

come up to me and confide to me that they're afraid of spiders. Considering the morphological diversity that insects present, ladybugs, butterflies, beetles, etc., that they would just assume a spider into the general orthopod body form situation. But they don't. They develop arachnophobic and they treat spiders differently than insects. So I ran a questionnaire study looking at the randomologists who are afraid of spiders. For these people, two more legs makes a big difference. Boogga, boogga! Any acceptance speech that ends in boogga,

deserves the win. All right, let's go to the last prize we can talk about, and that's the economics prize. The economics prize is awarded to Christopher Watkins, Juan Wattkins. David Leon Gomez, Jean Beauvais, Anyesha Zalanovic, Max Corbacher, Marco Antonio Correa Vareya, Anna Maria Fernandez, Danielle Wagstaff, and Samuela Bolgan, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries' national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth hissing. The prize will be presented by Nobel laureate Francis Arnold.

I want to congratulate you on this truly enlightening bit of work that will change our lives. I award you this. Thank you very much. The winners will now present their acceptance speech by a pre-recorded video. Thank you to the Ig Nobel panel for this award and to all my co-authors for their contributions to this cross-cultural research project. Our main finding is that national wealth explains cultural differences in French kissing frequency.

People from less economically equal countries report kissing their partner more often compared to people from more equal countries. An attempt to summarize our research in haiku form, mountains of kisses when the many have little, sharing alpine mouths. Thank you very much. There's obviously no social distancing or masking. involved in this study, right? Yeah, I'm not sure they could do that study now. It would be much more difficult to do it now. Unfortunately, the mirth must be over because we've run out of time. I want to

thank you, Mark, for taking time to be with us today. Happy holidays to you. And to you, and thanks for keeping things going during this very strange year, Ira. Well, it's the start of the second round, the second 30th year anniversary we hope to be together again. Let's do. Mark Abrams, editor of the Science Humor magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research, you can always go to their website at improbable.com. We're going to take a break and let me come back, a taste treat that probably wasn't on your Thanksgiving table, but maybe should have been. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If anything is certain in this stay-at-home pandemic, it's that people are cooking, like these listeners who called us to share their proud creations.

Since the onset of the pandemic, I've brewed three big batches of kombucha using a variety of teas, chai, Assam, and white. I've grown oyster mushrooms from a mail-ordered bag of my salial spawn and fermented two jars of sauerkraut. Through this quarantine, I've done a lot of bread baking and a lot of fermenting. I recently made a sauerkraut with red cabbage, beets, and carrots, and it was really, really good. and I have a whole bunch of ginger that I accidentally bought too much of. So now I'm going to make a fermented ginger paste and see how that works. So I made dandelion jam, pesto from the chickweed and dead nettle in my yard. I've been brewing kombucha.

I'm trying to make kvass. I've been using a mesophilic yogurt starter to make my own yogurt. It's really been great fun and a good way to pass time. Those were the voices of Morgan from Portland, Camille and Tanya from Arkansas. Thank you for your submissions to the Science Friday Fox Pop app. Maybe you've already done the sourdough or the pickles or the yogurt, right? My next guests have the perfect next step for you. It's called Koji.

It's a white, fuzzy mold, and it smells like fruit. And we can thank it for a splendid array of foods from East Asian cultures, including soy sauce, miso, and sake. And my next guest want you to join in to make culinary delights with the help of this magical mold, even beyond the traditional uses. Think Koji Shikudery or miso peanut butter.

Here to talk more about the transformation power of Aspergillus or Isay are my guests, the co-authors of the book Koji Alchemy. Rich Shee is a mechanical engineer by day and the exhibit engineer for NYC's Museum of Food and Drink, and Jeremy Umanski is a co-chef and co-owner of Larder Delacetessen and Bakery in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us on.

Thank you. I know I've already given the overview that Koji is a mold and has been used for thousands of years, but please, you've got to sell me on the idea of using a mold to make food, Jeremy. Why is this so delicious? Well, one thing to keep in mind is you're already eating this mold in one way, shape, or form. I'm willing to bet that virtually every listener today has some soy sauce in their house, whether it's a bottle of it or a little packet from Chinese takeout. And that soy sauce cannot be made without this mold.

So we already have it in our lives. We already eat so many different fermented foods that rely on molds, things like cheeses and sharkoos. We can lump yeast into that. They're both types of fungi. So bread, it's already exists there. So using it to make foods more delicious is pretty simple and straightforward. And is it the rice that we're really cooking with it, right? Exactly.

You can't just take the spores of the mold and make something delicious. You have to get it to grow first. So you grow it on rice or barley or actually any starchy substrate. So it could be wheat berries. It could be rye. It could be harmony. Give me an idea what it looks like. You know, I've seen photos.

It looks very pretty growing there on the rice. I think pretty is a lackluster word, Ira. It is, it is sultry and stunning. I mean, it's sultry and stunning. It really is, you look at it and you get lost in it. It is just so white and fun. fuzzy and fluffy. It's inviting, almost like, you know, you look at a picture of a sky with beautiful, like, cumulus clouds in it, and you're like, that just makes you relax and feel at home.

And it just, oh, I could, I could hug one of those clouds or I could lay down on it and take a nap. Koji kind of has that same effect on you when you look at it and it's growing fresh. And then you throw its aroma on top of that, which, you know, its aroma is, you know, green apple and champagne and hunting. honeysuckle, tropical fruit like mango and pineapple with a little bit of mushroominess there. Some people even say they pick up roasted chestnut. I mean, it's just absolutely bewitching and intoxicating from how it looks to how it smells to how it tastes. It's just absolutely incredible. You know, you sound like you're describing a fine wine.

Rich, does it do that for you too, make you feel that way? Yeah, I mean, I am not as externally. excited about Koji as Jeremy is, but internally, it just blows my mind. Koji is so simple. All you need is like a warm space with a little bit of humidity that can be achieved in an array of ways, very similar to setting up for breadproofing. And you just basically boil some water or you set up a steamer and you mix these ingredients in dust on some spores and you mix every 12 hours.

And who can't do that over the course of two days? I mean, you can go to work, come back home and do your mix. And at the end of the day, it's done and ready to go. And then all you have to do is add some water to it and some cooked grains. And you can make this amazing sweet porridge that you can also use as a marinade. That's the perfect marinade for any piece of meat or a protein you put it on. Because we often go through the exercises of making a marinade. such that you enhance the flavor of the core component itself.

Koji does that by default by taking the enzymes to break down the constituent parts of this food and creates, you know, basically what I like to refer to as, you know, an automatic barbecue sauce that has nothing, that is made with everything that's part of the food that you create it with. And Jeremy, does it have a taste of its own? If I put it on rice, for example, and I'm growing it on rice, I know what rice tastes like. Well, then the other flavor there be that of the mold. Yeah, so it's actually going to transform the rice itself.

So oftentimes we talk about one of the molds, Aspergillus Lucensis, that produces citric acid as it grows, not as a byproduct, but actually produces it as it grows. And if you were to eat some rice that had this mold growing on it, it would taste like sour patch kids. And we're talking just plain old rice here. And, Rich, are there different strains of Koji that produce different flavors? There are specific cogees that create different flavors based on their enzyme engines. SoJ has this, an enzymatic engine that is more on the protease side to break down proteins into amino acids. As these enzymes become active in terms of breaking down the base,

food substances, you get all sorts of, you know, interesting and funky flavors. I recall, you know, every time that I grow it on rye or even taff, I get these, you know, mushroomy aromas and as well as flavors. We're all familiar with soy sauce, for example, which is one of the many things Koji is used to make, as you said before. How does that process work? I mean, how do you start from a mold and get to a tasty soy sauce, Rich? Yeah, so to make soy sauce, you basically cook some soybeans, whether you soak them and steam them or you boil them such that in the state where they're cooked all the way through. So that's one part of it. The other part is you have toasted, cracked wheat.

So what you do is you basically have a one-to-one ratio of these two ingredients. You mix the ingredients together. You allow it to cool to a temperature that's, you know, pretty much to your body temp. And that's how a lot of Japanese makers gauge when you can actually inoculate it with the spores. Then you just, you basically sprinkle it lightly with spores. Once you grow the Koji, you put it in a basically a salt water brine and you allow it to ferment. And then you have a specific mixing schedule based on the temperature conditions and the stages of making it. So that's how it happens.

Yeah. And, you know, the only difference between miso or an amino. paste as we call them because they're pasts and they're rich in amino acids and an amino sauce like soy sauce is water content. So whether you decide you want to make amissu or gojejean or any of these pasts or you want to make an amino sauce, it's just varying degrees of water that they contain. So you can go in either direction just as easily. And sake, can you get alcohol? Oh my God, can you. You know, it's really interesting because of the breath, the types of sugars, like the oglios sugars and the glucose that's formed in an amazaki, which is a mixture of a cooked

starch, the cogi inoculated starch, and water, you can get a lot of alcohol. I mean, you can get upwards towards a 12% ABV without doing anything extraordinary, literally. just putting some yeast in and letting it sit and be happy. So you can get some fantastic alcohols. And some of the cogeys that produce these different flavors and aromas and some that produce citric acid can just add infinite layers of complexity to any of the alcohols you make. I understand you can make popcorn.

Rich, how did you come up with that? So I was kind of just looking around in my pantry to figure out, hey, what could I really play around with to create this accessible starch that could, you know, have these gaps such that the mold would grow in between because you need a level of air in between the grains. And I just saw this popcorn. And I said, well, when you pop popcorn, you're basically, you know, it's basically a pressure cooker for each kernel. And when it blows up, it uses the internal steam to blow it up to create a puffed condition such that the starch is very accessible. As we all know, when we eat it, it dissolves in our mouths. So I just decided that, hey,

I don't have to cook it. I can make it explode and create this accessible starch. And all I needed to do was not to make it too wet is just to mist it with a little bit of water. And there I had my accessible starch. I had plenty of air for the mold to grow. And I just, you know, to assure that it would grow well, I just dusted it with a little bit of flour in the spores. And it took off like gangbusters.

And for somebody who doesn't necessarily want to sit and wait for, your grains to soak or your beans to soak and you just want to try something? It's a pretty cool starting point. Can you use Koji as a quarantine experiment for all of us now? You most definitely can. Whatever level you want to plug in with, you can. So for example, traditionally throughout Japan, they use a product called Shio Koji, which is this porridge of the molded rice or barley with salt added. it. And that is used as a general all-purpose seasoning. So you can easily find that online and you can order a little package of it. It'll show up at your doorstep. You can rub it on some chicken or

some steak or saute some vegetables with it and see instantly the short-term drasticness that Koji brings to amazing flavor as you're working with it. So while it is straightforward, should you not want to grow the mold, there's several great companies. companies out there. Most of them are really small, family-owned businesses like Cold Mountain Koji, and you can buy pre-inoculated rice or barley from them. So if you wanted to go ahead and make an amino paste, like a miso or gojejean, you could simply buy the inoculated grains, mix them with a little water to hydrate them, open up a can of beans, mix those together with the inoculated grain and a little bit of salt.

We use 3% of its weight as a very minimum on the base, but you can go 5%, 7%, 10%, and let it sit. And you will have your own amino paste, something like a miso. Or you could simply order spores and just go all in and start growing the mold on everything like we do. There really are no barriers to entry for working with Koji. I'm Ira Plato and this is Science Friday. from WNYC Studios.

Does Richard, does playing with molds give you a new dimension about creativity with food? You know, we're talking about jams and pickles and pastos and vinegars. Now you have something new to play with? I think it's just the fact that Koji allows you to do so many multi-faceted things.

A lot of us focus on very specific fermented products like crowd or kimchi or, you know, yogurt. or a very specific beer from a very specific region with all these incredible malts and hops and specific water and a specific alcohol content. What we have to think about is they got to that point because somebody just left something out for a period of time such that it can be consumed at a specific time for survival. And people got tied into this idea of, hey, I really love that. I want to keep making it the same exact way because not only is it safe to consume,

but it's delicious. But our idea is to think about this in a much larger scheme in terms of that specific discovery can be with any food that you apply it to. I mean, granted, things can go wrong, but it's the adventure of all these possibilities that we have access to, whether it be the ingredients, technology, ideas, you know, or even, you know, past products that we know and love. that we can kind of change up and play around with. And that's the nature of what we love to do.

How does it go with pastrami? Oh, man. If I describe it, I'll be bragging. So I'll let Rich who's eating my pastrami describe it. So I think one of the things to understand about it is that, you know, through these, you know, through usage of, you know, creating these amino acids through the, you know, through the enzymes and these sugars, is you get this amazing flavor like that bounds,

you know, that's above and beyond what you could do in a traditional method. With a traditional method, you know, you have the slow process of heating such that you can create the food that is quite unctuous by breaking down the connective tissue and it makes it moist and it makes it very pleasing. And then you also have a brine to create this, you know, this salinity. But with the Koji, you can actually, create like this level of tenderness and depth of flavor without doing any sort of manipulation and it's just bringing it up a level of what it already is. I'm coming over. We'll save a seat

on the patio for you. We're not open in the dining room for a little bit. Yeah. Thank you both. This was quite fascinating. I hope we have inspired a lot of people to try some new cooking ideas. Rich Shee is a mechanical engineer by day and the exhibit engineer for NYC's museum. of food and drink. And Jeremy Umanski is a chef and owner of Larder delicatessen and bakery in Cleveland, Ohio, and their co-authors of the book, Koji Alchemy, Rediscovering the Magic of Mold-Based fermentation. Thank you guys for enlightening us and giving us something more to do as we stay home.

You're welcome. Ira, thank you so much. This has been a dream come true. Yeah, this is a pleasure. Yeah, thank you so much. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. If you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts, or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday.

And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, the question is, as we near the end of the year, we want to know what Science Friday stories impacted you the most this year. Tell us about it. What Science Friday stories impacted you the most this year? That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app, wherever you get your app. Have a great and safe weekend. I'm Iriflato.