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We Love Fish Sauce, Fermentation & Koji - But What About Protease?
Using fish sauce & fermentation is a great way to add depth of flavor in a wide-array of recipes. Open your mind to the possibilities! At Suis Generis, we know the classics of cooking – but we like to put them in a centrifuge, explode them, and re-build our dish design from the ground up using an array of techniques and a focus on unusual flavor and spice combinations to build intrigue on the plate! Fish sauce is one of the vehicles that makes food taste better. It doesn’t need to be discernable in the finished dish – it
works in the background to make your taste buds sing.
History - Who Wanted To Ferment Fish?
People ask us why we would use fish sauce in a mediterranean style dish – and the answer is, we are just getting back to the history of how flavors were utilized. Most people think of fish sauce and other funky fish products as a primary component in many Asian dishes. However, fish sauces and other fermented foods were also made in the 3rd and 4th centuries BC in Greece, Rome, and across the Mediterranean. So, just like our zero-waste cooking model – the use of fish sauce and the fermentation process in European recipes is simply a return to the classics.
The original fish sauce was called Garum – which means “fish essences” but was often also made with meats. An offshoot of Garum became œnogarum, which is a wine sauce where fermented Garum is further fermented and finished with wine.[1] One key element of ancient fish sauces is the fish were simply chopped up and used whole with the organs intact - to get that volatile bacterial goodness going. Modern science shows that the ancients knew the benefits of nutrients and enzymes concentrated in organs such as liver stomach, pancreas and intestines. The primary enzymes found in fish (and other animal) organs are protease, lipase and amylase.[2] This is why traditional fish sauce involves the use of the entire fish – guts and all! And yes, it takes guts to ferment fish sauce (figuratively speaking of course).
Using Chemistry & The Fermentation Process In The Quest For Flavor
Knowing how proteins are digested is useful in considering how to make modern fish sauces and garums. Our bodies use digestive enzymes to break down proteins – namely, Amylase (breaks down complex carbohydrates), Lipase (breaks down fats) and Protease (breaks down proteins).[3] It should be noted that proteins are difficult to digest. This is where Koji comes in. We know that Koji is magical in its ability to tenderize proteins, but why is that true? Proteins are made of long chains of amino acids bound by peptide bonds. Koji has an amazing ability to break down peptide bonds, creating shorter chains of amino acids – which is what we perceive as tender meat![4] Koji is high in Amylase and Protease enzymes (for example it has 8% more Amylase and 20% more protease than brewer’s yeast).[5] Amylase breaks down starches into glucose (or sugar) and Protease breaks down protein into amino acids. That means koji creates extra sugars that accelerate the caramelization of proteins (called the Maillard Effect) and it promotes useful amino acids which our bodies use to create proteins that help regenerate body tissues and increase energy levels. So, Koji is both a flavor amplifier and a super-food!
Our Study On The Use Of Koji And Enzymes To Promote Fermentation In The Production Of Fish Sauce
In this study, our goal is to explore the effects of Koji and Protease Enzyme in fish sauce fermentation. Plus, Adrienne and I just went on a trip to Dauphin Island, Alabama, where we caught a bunch of little croakers to use for fish sauce. It should be noted that variations in fatty acid content in fish and fish paste components is a key aspect to flavors in the end result. We believe that using fresh croaker as our starter culture will yield an excellent re sult to our fish sauce production for thse trials. So, once we returned to the Tiki Food Lab, we prepared three batches of fish sauce, which are detailed below:
1. Traditional Fish Sauce (Our Control batch).
The traditional method of making fish sauce involves three components, fish, water and salt. The ratios vary widely in traditional recipes, many of which do not use any water, and a ratio of fish to salt of 3:1. However, our goal is to maximize the liquid fish sauce end product, and to minimize air pockets during fermentation, so a good ratio for traditional fish sauce is 1 part fish, 1 part water and .5 part salt (which equates to 25% salt to the total combined weight of fish and water). Over time, we have realized that lowering the salt content yields a more subtle product and increases the ability to salt our dishes as needed without imparting too much salt from fish sauce. So, we usually use 8-12% salt in our fish sauces. Here we used 12% salt in the control batch.
2. Koji Fish Sauce – Amino Ferment (our Koji test batch)
When adding Koji to the mix, a good ratio is: 1 part fish, 1 part water, .5 parts koji, .5 parts salt. However, again for this experiment we used 12% salt to the total combined weight of fish, water and koji to assure the same salinity among the batches. However, outside of the scientific context, you can reduce your salt percentage down to 5% or lower because koji acts as the protector, outcompeting bad bacteria and working in conjunction with a lower salt content. However, for our purposes here, we wanted to maintain a 12% salt ratio across all of the batches to eliminate variations in salt content, which would affect the ultimate flavors.
3. Protease Fish Sauce (our Enzyme test batch)
This batch is really interesting. Lately, we have been researching the use of stomach enzymes to accelerate or deepen fermentation flavors. Here, we selected Protease because of its particular efficiency in breaking down proteins. We have no idea regarding the amount of Protease that is ideal in fermentation, and plan to conduct further research on this topic. However, for our purposes here, we selected 6,000 milligrams of Protease to add to the mix. Thus, batch three consists of 1 part fish, 1 part water, 12% salt, and 6,000 milligrams of Protease enzyme.
And Away We Go - Which Of Our Fish Sauce Production Trials Will Taste The Best?
The control and two test batches were prepared with the same process, in the same containers and stored in the same place to minimize external variables. Now we do what we always do with slow foods – we wait. Our plan is to test the three batches periodically and report the results here as the fish sauces age. And yes, waiting is the hard part!
[1] The Project Gutenberg, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, Apicius, translated by Joseph Vehling, 8/19/09, at p. 22-23
[2] State of knowledge about biotechnological uses of digestive enzymes of marine fishery resource: A worldwide systematic review, Aquaculture and Fisheries, Vol. 9, Issue 5, 9/24, pages 812-824.
[3] Digestive Enzymes and Digestive Enzyme Supplements, Hopkinsmedicine.org, Dr. Morgan Denhard.
[4] Japanese Traditional Miso and Koji Making, Ken-Icho Kusumato, et al., J Fungi (Basel), July, 7(7) 2021.
[5] Id., at p. 10 & 11.
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