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WHAT IS KOJI
AN AMAZING JAPANESE INGREDIENTS...
"KOJI" is a traditional and an essential ingredient for producing miso, sake, soy sauce, and other Japanese condiments in Japan's unique food culture.
It is made of cooked rice that has been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, a mold that’s widespread in Japan. For sure, Koji mold is totally harmless, and safe to eat.
When the cereal is cultured by Koji mold, it produces many kinds of enzymes such as amylase and protease. Those enzymes are the key to transform the starch in cereal into sugar as well as dissolving the protein to amino acid (which is called "Umami" in Japanese.)
PROTEIN
STARCH
KOJI ENZYMES
DISSOLVE PROTAIN/STARCH
AMINO ACID
SUGER
THE MOST FUNCTIONAL INGREDIENTS...
Koji is not eaten on its own, but when the food is cooked/marinated with koji rice, the koji enzyme helps to bring out the flavor of food and improve the tenderness of meat.
This is why KOJI is the most functional ingredients in any culinary culture.
Recently, Western chefs are catching on to the power of Koji in their cuisine. Noma (the two Michelin stars restaurant, located in Copenhagen) is well known as the collaboration of European cuisine with Koji.
THE BENEFIT OF KOJI
1.Koji enzyme helps digestion
As you see above, Koji contains many kinds of enzymes, and those enzymes dissolve starch and protein. After all, it helps digestion and absorption of nutrients, your body efficiently ingest the nutrients of the foods.
As a result, it improves your gastrointestinal function by smooth digestion.
3.Recovering from fatigue
As it's mentioned in No.2, Koji produces vitamin B2 and B6. Those vitamins are helping to recover from fatigue.
In addition, Koji breaks down starch into glucose, glucose
is the most popular nutritional support for recovering your energy.
2.Produce multiple vitamins
4.Improving probiotics
Koji works actively under the certain temperature (the most active temperature is around 30-40℃ which is almost same as our body temperature). When it's active, it produces multiple vitamins such as vitamin B2, B6 and niacins.
Those vitamins are well known for improving your skin turnover.
Oligosaccharides is one of the sugar which is also produced by dissolving from starch. Oligosaccharides plays an role to improve the intestinal environment since Oligosaccharides activate probiotics in your intestine.