Some of you may already know what a pop-up restau­rant is — a guerilla style din­ing event where the chef bor­rows a kitchen from another restau­rant and serves fancy dishes. It’s like, all the rage right now in LA, thanks to the charis­matic Chef Ludo.

Well there’s another fairly pop­u­lar pop-up series, called Hatchi. It’s hosted at the Bread­Bar in the Cen­tury Mall, and the chef changes every time. If you’re a ‘hot’ chef (or mixol­o­gist), you do a Hatchi — Mar­cel Vigneron and Michael Volt­ag­gio from the TV series Top Chef, Wal­ter Manzke (who used to cook at Church and State), Kuniko Yagi from Sona… In the chef series, they all have to cre­ate 8 8-dollar dishes (Hatchi/Hachi means eight in Japan­ese) — in short, it’s a show­case for poten­tial groupies and investors. This Hatchi was a show­case for Chef Makoto Okuwa, the exec­u­tive chef at Sashi in Man­hat­tan Beach. I wasn’t too inter­ested at first because Cen­tury City is faaaar… But then I found out that his theme was Power of Miso. So when Kevin offered me a spot, I pounced on it like a ninja.

I should take a moment here and tell you that soy beans are awe­some. Because of its high pro­tein con­tent, switch­ing up the fer­men­ta­tion method or agent can yield very dif­fer­ent prod­ucts. For instance, you can boil it and wrap it in hay to make natto (the gooey stuff), or add yeast and bac­te­ria to make soy sauce, OR add koji — basi­cally a mold mix that helps with fer­men­ta­tion — to make miso (okay, so it’s a lit­tle more com­pli­cated than that, but that’s the jist of it). In miso alone, just chang­ing up the mold mix or fer­men­ta­tion time will yield dif­fer­ent types of miso.
Which brings me to why I went to this Hatchi. I love miso. So much that I have THREE types in my fridge (I make my own miso mix plus use nor­mal ones for miso soup). I would prob­a­bly die (of bore­dom) with­out miso because miso makes my cook­ing life so much eas­ier — imag­ine what a pro­fes­sional chef can do with it.

So with­out fur­ther ado, I present to you 8 (+1) fancy ways to eat miso, per Chef Okuwa.

Epi with Miso But­ter (4). [nom nom nom…]

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