San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
These misos are changing the game
Bay Area chefs are obsessed with S.F.’s Shared Cultures’ surprising fermentations
Finn Stern, chef and owner at Oakland restaurant Daytrip, described his first encounter with tamari from Shared Cultures, a small fermentation outfit in San Francisco, as a moment of clarity. He had never tasted such concentrated flavor before. Intense umami swirled with molasses-like sweetness.
“A little drop on my tongue changed the game for me,” he said. He wound up buying a pumpkin miso from Shared Cultures to mix with butter for a pasta sauce that carries surprising depth for such few ingredients. It became one of his restaurant’s most popular dishes.
Shared Cultures has quickly emerged as a darling of the Bay Area food scene. Chefs say they’re drawn to the company’s use of local, seasonal ingredients — a common mantra in Bay Area restaurants but a rarity in products like miso and soy sauce. After selling for the first time during the pandemic, the company is now bringing products to top restaurants all over the region.
Over at Oakland’s Snail Bar, for example, chef and owner Andres Giraldo Florez combines the cashew miso with cultured butter and garlic, an umami-rich bath for the snail dish that’s a mainstay on a constantly changing menu. The miso consistently adds richness to dishes at San Francisco’s all-vegetarian restaurant Greens, and the ferments are constantly featured on tasting menus at modern Vietnamese pop-up Claws of Mantis and Japanese fine dining restaurant Nisei.
While their techniques are traditional, Shared Cultures founders Eleana Hsu and Kevin Gondo employ unexpected ingredients. They make shoyu out of quinoa and lentils instead of standard soybeans and wheat. They incorporate roasted corn into miso for a sweet, nutty and summery flavor, while a chocolate-y cacao nib miso begs to be baked into brownies. They ferment different varieties of mushrooms, sometimes with surprising results: a funky lion’s mane mushroom miso tasted like dried scallops.
Already, Hsu and Gondo can’t meet the demand for their products. They work from a shared commercial kitchen in the Bayview, growing koji — a fungus traditionally used to turn soybeans into soy sauce — in a converted refrigerator and fermenting misos in a closet-size room. They don’t have the space to significantly increase production, nor any employees. The upfront investment is hefty given some products take as long as eight months to ferment before they can be sold.
They’ve looked at warehouses in the region, but options are few and rents are high.
It’s remarkable Hsu and Gondo are even in this predicament given how different their lives looked five years ago. Hsu worked in real estate and Gondo was an investment banker on the Peninsula. They were both unhappy.
Hsu said she felt lost, wondering why she was having trouble climbing the corporate ladder. But her world started to change one fall day in 2017. While on a run in Palo Alto, a small cluster of yellow mushrooms caught her eye. They were beautiful.
She snapped a photo and spent three hours identifying them: chanterelles, the prized, funnel-shaped mushrooms with an apricot-like aroma.
“I feel like the mushrooms found me,” she said. “Fungi saved me from my depression.”
She became hooked on foraging, first hunting mushrooms and then other edibles like wild berries and acorns. Musings over how to best eat foraged treasures turned into how to best preserve them. She read about koji, bought some spores and started fermenting for the first time at home. She found “The Noma Guide to Fermentation” mind-blowing in how it challenged the idea of miso, how you don’t have to use soybeans to make it. She wondered why more people weren’t fermenting products professionally when there’s a whole world of flavor to explore, when so many combinations still haven’t been attempted.
The home hobby turned serious, and Hsu began spending her weekends working for Far West Fungi at the Ferry Building and the farmers market to embed herself in the food
“All these living food items, they have their own taste and their own unique qualities because they’re made in the Bay Area.” David Yoshimura, Restaurant Nisei chef-owner
community. Gondo became engrossed in fermentation as well. The couple used an old wine fridge to grow koji on rice, fanning it by hand to ensure the fungi didn’t overheat and selfdestruct.
In January 2020, about two months before shelter-in-place orders hit the Bay Area, Hsu quit her job to dedicate herself to fermentation. Gondo, who had just shut down a failed startup, followed suit.
They initially sold to family and friends, including David Yoshimura, chef and owner of Nisei and Gondo’s former roommate. He became the first chef to work with Shared Cultures’ products, showcasing them during a pop-up dinner at Mister Jiu’s in 2020. Since then, he said, the ferments have gotten better and more consistent. He uses many of their misos, shoyu and shio koji (fermented rice malt) at his restaurant.
“All these living food items, they have their own taste and their own unique qualities because they’re made in the Bay Area,” he said. “You can’t get the same taste as you would in Japan.”
Greens executive chef Katie Reicher stumbled onto Shared Cultures on Instagram. She became a huge fan, buying products for her personal fridge as well as making sure they’re always featured on the restaurant’s menu. It was a no-brainer, she said, to support small local artisans who source produce from local farms. Plus, miso helps Reicher create big flavor when she can’t use meat.
“For vegetables, you have to have a lighter hand and you have to build complexity more thoughtfully,” she said.
Ultimately, chefs are chasing umami, that difficult-to-describe taste sensation that comes from select compounds like glutamate. Stern described these amino acids, common in meat and fermented products, as “flavor magnets to our tongue.”
“It creates those moments of satisfaction that keep you eating the entire plate of something and wanting more,” he said.
The misos aren’t cheap. Tubs at a grocery store might run $5, while Shared Cultures’ jars often cost $18. Moving into a warehouse and scaling up probably won’t lower the price, either, because Hsu and Gondo want to pay employees well. But $18 for one jar can be worthwhile given its potential for boosting flavors — and given all of the work that goes into it.
A 250-pound batch of miso requires hours of soaking, washing and steaming rice before putting it in a chamber with koji spores until the rice grows fuzz and sticks together to form a firm mat. Then they cook and cool beans, blend them with the koji rice, and grind the mixture in a meat grinder. They form balls and hurl them into a large barrel in an effort to remove as much air as possible, then pile on heavy rocks to further press out air.
Hsu and Gondo don’t just stay at home while a batch ferments for eight months — maintenance tasks bring them into the kitchen most days of the week.
Hsu hopes home cooks aren’t put off by the price. After all, it’s rare to find this kind of experimentation outside of fine dining restaurants, which tend to ferment products on a small scale.
“You don’t have to have a $300 tasting menu to try these flavors,” Hsu said. “You can be the chef.”