soy sauce, results six months from now

I should not watch cooking documentaries.  The newest Chef's Table season has Korean nun Jeong Kwan as on of the people they feature.  I find that that her relationship with food inspiring.  I was already fermenting many things but when she talked about fermenting soy sauce I was "you can do that?"  I am doing it.  The research is not even hard.  Yeastie Beasties and time.  It is what it takes to make soy sauce.  That is most of my life so it fits.

I started with 12 ounces of wheat and roasted it until golden.  I took out my stone flour mill and ground the berries into a flour

 

I cooked soybeans so I had a pound of cooked soybeans.  I mashed them into a paste.

I mixed the soybeans and flour together.  

I put the soybean and flour mixture into a ziploc bag with damp paper towels and let it sit on the counter for a week.  I had to bleed off the gases that the fermentation created a couple times.  

After the fermentation had started for a week, I took the soybean flour mixture and put it into a large glass cookie bin.  I added 8 ounces of salt.  I used Real salt. I also added 1 gallon of water.  I mixed well.

I covered the mixture.  Put is on a shelf.  I stir it once a day for the first six weeks.  Then I will stir it once a week.  In six months, I should have soy sauce.  I can let this continue to ferment even after that so I may just take a little as needed and let it go.  It will be like the pu-erh tea I like to drink.  The flavor will change over time.  The fermentation will continue.

Time.  Yeastie Beasties.  A strange and interesting adventure.