Making Miso Out of Everything

The first time I tried chef Dennis Yong’s food, it was a piece of toast with jam. 

The bread was shokupan – a fluffy Japanese loaf made by local bakers, Akimbo – smeared with moss-green, pearly kaya, which is a Malaysian jam made with eggs, coconut and sugar, and often flavoured and coloured with pandan leaves.

While Yong’s kaya looked classic, the recipe was not. Instead of eggs, he used overripe avocados he’d bulk-rescued from a market stall with an unsold surplus.

It was the first product he sold under his Furrmien brand – a side-project to his full-time chef career – and it was a velvety, light and delicious version of something he grew up eating.

When I talk to Yong, he’s pixelated and crackly on his mum’s laptop at their family home in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 30 minutes from Kuala Lumpur.

Yong’s unwinding after temporarily closing his Melbourne restaurant Parcs (“scrap” backwards) earlier this year. It was described by critics as a low-waste, “fermentation-focused bar” that took scraps and offcuts from nearby restaurants, and excess produce from local farms, and turned them into fairytale meals. 

Yong has spent years thinking about how to convert food waste into tasty condiments to sell, but now he’s thinking of the “bigger picture” – holding workshops to help people incorporate food waste into their lifestyles and cooking rosters. 

VICE: What was the first thing you ever fermented? 

Yong: The actual thing that I started doing on my own was probably growing koji in my bedroom.

Koji is the Japanese technique of inoculating food with a type of mould called Aspergillus oryzae. It’s usually grown on steamed rice or cooked soybeans to make soy sauce or miso, but it can be grown on anything – Yong has used the fungus to make miso out of stale sourdough, brioche trim, browning avocados, potato peels and probably every legume under the sun. 

Yong: I was living in a small sharehouse and I was working in Amaru, it’s a two-hat restaurant.  

My room was kind of like a living room, so it's quite big – one of those kinds of pretty dodgy rentals, but I was like, ‘Alright I'll get a big space’.

On my off days, I just get really tired and want to sleep, but back then I really wanted to do fermentation and I hadn't done koji before, so I looked it up and how you actually grow it. I went to the market and got a styrofoam box and did a really bootleg set-up. 

I thought it was really funny and fun. It’s really cool to see everything grow. That really got me into fermentation. 

It was a classic rice koji, it took two days, so I made miso out of it. But then I got more experimental: I grew one using cashews, and then I was watching David Chang [Momofuku chef-owner] who grew koji on pork and called it buta-bushi.

I got a whole fish and literally buried the fish in koji and I started to grow mould on it. It was a pretty wacky project. 

What was the result?

The fish was pretty mouldy, that’s for sure. It turned completely white, but it was really interesting. 

Why did you want to try koji?

There are a lot of types of fermentation. There's alcoholic (yeast eats sugar, converting it to alcohol), there's acetic – that’s for when you’re making vinegar – and lacto-fermentation, which is very common. That's pretty much what you use for everything, you know, Kimchi and sauerkraut. Pretty much everything, like the foundation. 

And then you have koji. Koji is where everything gets interesting because I think koji is an amazing tool to solve food waste. The enzyme koji produces has a lot of effects. It can break down fat, starch and protein, so imagine if you applied it to food waste - you could just break down everything into, like, anything.

What’s the most hectic thing you’ve made? 

When we first started Parcs we visited a sunflower farm on the way to Ballarat … I was kind of sussing around, just for fun, and I had this idea because I was looking at this chef Dan Barber, and he was working with sunflowers, the entire plant, and straight away I was like, ‘Yo, this is crazy’.

I spoke to the farmer and was like, ‘Yo, can I get some?’ – I was kind of interested. She was about to move her fields, so she was like, ‘I'll make you a deal, you come in next week with a van you fill up, and I'll give you a good price’.

I got a car and got my two other chefs and drove two hours there with a machete and a cleaver and started going crazy. 

The whole van was full of sunflowers – the whole plants. It was pretty hectic. We were there for four hours. I was under the sun with a crazy amount of spiders. It was fun, but at the same time, it was shit. 

So we go back to the kitchen and start deciding what we're gonna do with this. First of all, the petals were salted and [we] put them in fried rice. But the core (the soft centre of the sunflower stem, called sunflower “marrow” on Parcs’ menu) was one of the worst jobs in the world. You have to split it in half and then scrape it. It was not fun. It took literally 12 hours. We turned that into a puree and served it with a Chinese doughnut. The rest of the stem scraps we turned into a treacle, that was pretty cool. 

And the centre part of the flower, the disc, we turned into kombucha. But when you hear kombucha you're like, that’s meant to be non-alcoholic, right? So I did a big batch, it's about 80 litres in a big barrel. 

When I first did that, the third day I tasted it and was like okay, maybe you could do one more day. And the fourth day I tasted it, it was like a beer. It’s an alcoholic beverage. 

I was like, ‘We gotta market it as a wine now; sparkling wine’. 

I’ve had it and I swear it’s more delicious than most wines I’ve ever drunk.

Yeah, actually that’s not too bad of a fail. You just gotta improvise. Shit always goes wrong with fermenting but you gotta make it work. 

And what have you learnt? From all that improvisation?

I think I'm pretty good at, like, you just give me whatever and I’ll make something with it. You could just give me three ingredients and I'll just make some shit up. I think that’s a really important skill every chef should have. Rather than looking at foie gras all the way from France, I have carrot peels and I'm gonna look at that. That's my main dish.

What’s one thing you’ve made you’re really proud of? 

I really wanted to work with SCOBY (which stands for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast” and is known as the living “mother” that ferments and sustains fermented liquids like kombucha). So I candied a scoby and it was like jelly. I added it to the oyster. It was like a similar texture, kind of creamy, sweet and savoury. I think that was my biggest achievement, I really liked that.

What’s the worst thing you’ve made?

Fermented asparagus. Do not ferment asparagus. 

I had a garum I made from crickets (garum is a fermented liquid condiment that dates back to Ancient Greece. The fish sauce you buy at the grocer today is a type of garum, but it can be made out of any protein) and I brined asparagus in it and it was the worst thing I've done in my life. With the cricket. Oh my god. You could probably die just looking at it. 

So what keeps bringing you back to fermenting and learning more?

I think the process is very magical. If you have a clear jar [with something fermenting inside] at home, you walk past every day and it changes every day. I think that's what really fascinates me.

What should our readers try fermenting at home? 

Recently I made this drink with leftover syrup from the cherries in a can, mixed it with coffee grounds, diluted it with water, sugar and I just added baker's yeast to it. And in 10 days you have a wine that's truly sick. It’s a great party hack. You got a party coming up? You can make alcohol in 10 days. Free alcohol. You don't have to buy it. 

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Aleksandra Bliszczyk is the Deputy Editor of VICE Australia. Follow her on Instagram.