Miso: The surprise ingredient you didn't know your cocktail needed

The biggest challenge when making miso at home is patience. According to this how-to article, the fermented soybean paste takes "two days of active time and six months of inactive fermentation time." And there's no way to speed up that process.

"The essence of miso-making is time -- it's an ingredient in itself," says Sebastian Tollius, the beverage director at NYC's three-Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park and its new upstairs cocktail den Clemente Bar. "The timeline depends on the ingredients and the depth of flavor you're aiming for."

Tollius uses the umami-rich paste -- crafted from fermenting steamed soy beans with salt, grains and koji (a type of fungus) -- in various cocktails at Clemente Bar, including Real Talk (Kings County Coffee Whiskey, Amontillado sherry, Amazake, pretzel miso) and Against the Grain (Glenfiddich 12 Year Single Malt, shochu, plantain, barley miso). "By creating our own misos, we've developed flavoring in our cocktails that mirrors the depth and umami found in traditional seasoning misos," Tollius says. "Miso contains glutamates -- similar to MSG -- so we're able to naturally replicate umami-rich flavors. These compounds enhance aromatics and introduce more nuanced, rounded flavor profiles, softening the sharper notes often found in cocktails. Essentially, it acts as a natural seasoning system."

One thing to note is there are several types of miso, ranging from shiro (slightly sweet) to aka (red miso that's bolder and saltier) and awase (a yellow miso that's somewhere in the middle). "When we first experimented with miso in our cocktails, we used shiro as our starting point," Tollius says. "At Clemente Bar, we typically ferment with yellow koji as the starter. We've also experimented with black koji, which imparts a more citrus-forward profile. The choice depends on the base ingredient we're working with."

While the Clemente Bar drinks are admittedly too technical and complex to easily replicate at home, using miso in cocktails is actually pretty easy. Basically, you're taking miso paste and incorporating it into sugar syrups. Then you let it steep and strain it for clarity. "One of the great things about making miso is it doesn't require expensive equipment," Tollius says. "We typically use sterilized glass jars."

And you can experiment! Clemente Bar's base miso recipe is koji, salt, water and "a dried version of the featured ingredient." Which means it could include something like dehydrated plantains and barley or cacao powder and coconut flakes.

Admittedly, you could just buy miso paste and make a cocktail quickly, but Tollius thinks the effort of making your own pays dividends. "By fermenting your own misos, you can gain more control over the flavor and texture of the drink," he says. "It allows you to fine-tune the intensity and characteristics of each batch. Unlike store-bought miso, our custom varieties give us the flexibility to align the miso's profile with the specific cocktails we're crafting. In the Against The Grain cocktail, for example, we used a miso made from plantain and banana trim to create umami-driven complexity, and for the Real Talk cocktail, we created a pretzel miso to channel the quintessential flavors of New York."

While Clemente Bar's homemade misos are admittedly too complicated for the home mixologist, this recipe from Namiko Hirasawa Chen gives detailed step-by-step instructions with accompanying photographs.