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>> ANTHONY BOURDAIN: In this episode, David Chang explores two simple ingredients-- tofu and miso.

Travels to Japan to visit a tofu shop.

>> DAVID CHANG: The way of making tofu hasn't changed since the beginning of time.

>> BOURDAIN: And a miso factory.

Compares tofu and mozzarella with the Torrisi boys.

>> Very similar to us.

>> DAVID: Very similar.

>> BOURDAIN: Chef Christina Tosi makes a burnt miso apple pie.

>> CHRISTINA TOSI: What the hell do you put on a dessert menu at a restaurant that serves kind of everything and nothing?

>> BOURDAIN: And Rene Redzepi shows Chang a very un-miso miso.

>> RENE REDZEPI: Looks Momofuku-ish.

>> BOURDAIN: Enter the mind of a chef.

Tofu and miso.

Most Americans either completely misunderstand or completely ignore these two ingredients altogether.

For most, tofu is the spongy flavorless stuff vegetarians and hippies order instead of steak.

And miso is the soup at the local sushi restaurant.

While both are technically true, the fact of the matter is that both miso and tofu are extremely versatile.

And both are central ingredients in much of Japanese and Asian cuisine.

>> CHANG: This is awesome.

>> BOURDAIN: Every morning throughout cities in Japan, the simple, beautiful task of making tofu is happening.

>> CHANG: Tofu is a wonderful thing, and there's a simplicity to it that I think underlies the Japanese philosophy of very simple but deceivingly complex.

This place makes tofu for the neighborhood.

Well, first step, you have to find the right type of soybean.

Not all soybeans make tofu.

Raw soybeans are not inedible.

You can eat soybeans, but it has an enzyme in it that makes it sort of indigestible.

It basically makes you fart all the time.

But once you cook it out, it inhibits that process, that enzyme.

So this is the de-farting process.

Well, first step, it's dried and you rehydrate it.

And so you cook the soap beans, and then you make a puree out of it.

And you strain that out.

And the liquid that comes out is soymilk.

I mean, this is the real soymilk.

Not that crap that you buy in the supermarket that's vanilla, chocolate flavored.

Why you put this in coffee is beyond me.

This is a modern way of making tofu.

Not modern, but the equipment is modern.

The way of making tofu hasn't changed since the beginning of time.

Once this coagulates enough, they're going to put it in there, and that's the first pressing.

How much he presses it depends on the firmness of the tofu.

So when you see silken, it's, like, barely pressed.

When you see extra firm, that means they pressed the (bleep) out of it.

You press it, and then you store it in water.

When someone doesn't like tofu, or they feel like it's gross, I immediately assume they're some hardcore weird neo-conservative.

This is the final product.

Just cut.

And it's delicious.

So we're here at Torrisi Italian Specialties.

And we'd be foolish if we didn't get a lesson on how to make fresh mozzarella.

Can you show us what the process is and why it happens?

>> We take the milk, and we add more bacteria to it by adding a very small amount of cultured buttermilk.

And that bacteria will acidify the milk.

What we then do is take our rennet, bacteria from the gut of an animal.

>> CHANG: The same bacteria you find in yogurt, buttermilk.

>> Sure.

Anyway, we add the rennet and what we end up with is solid curd like this, floating in the whey.

The whey is the liquid, the runoff.

And what we're going to do is take a knife.

And what you're looking for is this clean break here, this curd that is a fairly firm gel.

And cut it up and start to move it around.

So this sits overnight.

We eventually end up with something like this.

We're going to strain out the whey.

So once we have our curds here, we'll let them drain, press them a little bit, and eventually you're left with a product like this.

>> CHANG: You're going to show us how to take these curds and turn it into liquid gold.

>> MARIO: Liquid gold.

What you want is to keep the curd at room temperature, and water just under boiling, and you want it salted, because curd tastes like nothing.

So now you basically corral these little curds into one pile.

So instead of pulling the curd, we just kind of knead it, and you just kind of knead it onto itself.

And in a couple of seconds, it gets really nice and shiny.

And literally, that's it.

It's done.

>> CHANG: That's the most beautiful thing in the world.

>> MARIO: Thank you.

So this is just made olive oil from this year's harvest, DaVerra, in Sonoma, and then some coarse salt.

That's the guy.

>> CHANG: You guys made the mozzarella that is so delicious here.

We make our own tofu.

The process is very simple.

In a similar vein to the mozzarella, you take just soymilk.

This is un-pastured soymilk, but it's not the soymilk that you get at the market that's flavored with vanilla.

This is magnesium chloride, it's a sea salt.

It just coagulates things.

>> MARIO: Are you eyeballing that?

>> CHANG: Italian grandma style.

What the salt's doing is what the rennet does.

It's actually making the proteins in the soymilk sort of adhere to each other.

And you keep on stirring and stirring and stirring.

You actually take the whole thing out.

Depending on how much you add, and if you press it, just like you press your mozzarella curd, you can get from silken to firm to hard.

I love tofu because it can take on any flavor.

So even fresh tofu is delicious to me, with just soy.

And some type of oil works really well because oil helps carry the fat on the palate, and makes it more delicious, I think.

>> MARIO: American olive oil.

>> CHANG: American olive oil.

Just a bit of lemon juice.

And some of your fine, fine, sea salt.

>> MARIO: this is looking very similar to ours.

>> CHANG: Very similar.

If we firm that up more, you could actually form it into a ball, and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference.

>> MARIO: Really easy to make and super easy to (bleep) up.

>> CHANG: Yes.

100 percent.

>> BOURDAIN: Miso.

Here are the basics.

Step one, steam rice.

Step two, add spores of the mold aspergillus oryzae, which turns the grain into the main star of the show, Koji.

The Koji is then mixed with salt.

The salted Koji is mashed together with cooked soybeans.

Finally, this mixture is placed in wooden vats and left to ferment for three weeks, all the way up to three years.

Kyoto, Japan.

Here, as almost everywhere in the country, making miso is an ancient and serious tradition.

Chang and Chef Yoshihiro Murata of the restaurant Kikunoi visit Murata's favorite local shop to sample some of the best miso Japan has to offer.

>> CHANG: And that's just rice.

Not soybean.

He's making Koji.

>> CHANG: So they're steaming rice at 100 Celsius.

>> CHANG: In Kyoto it's, like, very stringent in terms of keeping tradition, but it's little by little incrementally pushing the envelope.

Some food cultures that doesn't happen.

It's just like, "We have what we have and we're never going to change it."

>> CHANG: It's so hard for people to taste really good miso.

Like, very few people have ever tried it.

>> CHANG: I want to do it.

I want to make miso.

>> CHANG: I just want people to know that there's another level of miso, and when you taste that, you can't go back.

Okay, what we're going to make right now is a dish that we serve in the summer when we have great local corn.

It's the number one selling item.

It even outsells, like, pork buns, to my amazement.

This is miso butter.

Basically the miso in America sucks.

I'm sorry for all the miso producers in America because, they... you suck.

It's terrible and... it doesn't suck.

These are strong words.

But when put side by side next to Japanese shiro miso, American miso looks like... just... it tastes like crap.

All right, I guess it does.

Because it's so high in sodium.

The only way to make it taste somewhat like the good miso and not salty was just cut it with butter.

Unsalted butter can actually balance it out.

But first we're going to add some bacon.

And this is Benton's bacon from Allen in Madisonville, Tennessee.

Incredibly smoky.

And I didn't necessarily want to add bacon.

But it sort of adds to maybe this succotash-like thing.

It has nothing to do with the pork.

It has more to do with the flavor and the smoky element.

And I don't like corn on the cob.

It just gets in your teeth.

You go on a date, you look like crap.

I think it's easier to just cut it off.

I'm pan roasting the corn.

You want to get a nice caramelization.

So I'm not adding any salt, because again this is very high in sodium.

What we have here is some of our ramen stock.

And that was the idea, was we were going to need something to deglaze the corn-- why don't we deglaze it with the ramen stock?

I'm not going to add pepper to this.

People add pepper to everything.

And this one I don't want it to be spicy.

I want people to taste the sweet.

Once it's roasted, we add the butter.

Added the ramen broth.

You want basically every kernel coated in a sort of thick, like, gloss of the miso butter.

Garnish with some scallions.

This is the dish in its purest form, very simple.

Here's a slow poached egg.

This is a very humble dish.

And I think the egg yolk adds decadence that you really can't replicate without, no matter how expensive a product.

I just think the egg yolk is one of the most amazing things.

One of the things I did when I came to the house was check out what was in their larder.

And Rene made a fermented yellow pea miso doenjang-like product.

And I just cooked it in a pressure cooker and then I folded just in the miso.

Not miso.

I don't know what to call this.

>> REDZEPI: Well, the inspiration is miso.

>> CHANG: Yeah, the inspiration is miso.

>> REDZEPI: But it's not a miso, of course.

>> CHANG: It's not a miso.

It's just a bean puree.

This is all it is.

>> REDZEPI: Let's call it not-miso.

>> CHANG: Not-miso.

And it tastes Asian-ish.

>> REDZEPI: Yeah, it's delicious.

It tastes like you've added miso to it.

>> CHANG: Right, but we haven't made miso.

Rene did an event once, hosted it here, and I wanted to make sure that our creative ceiling was if my grandfather and ancestors moved to Denmark, what would our food turn out to be like?

And could you replicate certain flavors?

And I think the answer is absolutely yes.

>> REDZEPI: Yeah, sure.

>> CHANG: I put this on basically a cell pat.

So we have a crisp.

And we have the mahogany clam, the 200-year-old mahogany clam, that to me tastes a lot like abalone.

Also what I found in the lab, what I thought was really innovative, they've made cucumber powder.

So they've taken cucumber and they desiccated it.

It doesn't look like cucumber, obviously.

>> REDZEPI: It's a spice.

>> CHANG: It's a cucumber spice.

>> REDZEPI: We just dried everything at different temperatures to see what happens.

And we had all these different powders of dried foods.

And it looked like a picture from a Middle Eastern market.

I think cucumber and miso pair very, very well together.

So I took the clam and quickly blanched it.

But you only really use the trunk part on that type of clam.

So what we have here is, as you can see from the liquid, I just salted the leek.

Now we'll put it all together.

I have no idea how it's going to work.

We're adding the soft clam.

The raw mahogany clam.

And I didn't even blanch these peas, because they're so sweet right now.

We don't even have to cook them.

You got these beautiful pea shoots.

>> REDZEPI: Why do you think you ended up putting these ingredients together?

>> CHANG: I don't know.

>> REDZEPI: Why the shellfish in it?

>> CHANG: Shellfish and miso, it's like my chicken soup.

My comfort food is beautiful, simple, and that's why I wanted to serve it.

And pea juice.

That would be it.

Nordic miso.

>> REDZEPI: It looks Momofuku-ish.

Momofukish.

>> CHANG: Momofukish.

>> TOSI: It was very hard original to come up with desserts for Momofuku because it didn't really have a dessert menu.

What the hell do you put on a dessert menu at a restaurant that serves kind of everything and nothing?

And some people think it's Asian, and it's not really anything, but it's everything.

So we wanted to do a deep fried apple pie.

And we knew it needed depth and kind of toasty-ness.

And I started thinking about using miso.

We take the cheapest white shiro miso, and we just spread it out on a silpat lined pan.

We're going to toast it in a 325 degree oven for 20 or 30 minutes, until it's almost coal black.

So once its cooled, it's going to look like this.

It can go a little darker than this in your oven, but I'd say no lighter.

So to make the miso sauce, we blend it down with a little sherry vinegar, some Mirin, and light brown sugar.

We're going to get that going on a medium speed in your blender.

All right, transfer it to a container.

You don't need to refrigerate it.

You want it to be viscous and spreadable for when you're ready to plate up your dessert.

So Allison, the lovely Allison Roman, is going to make some cinnamon apple filling for the deep fried apple pie.

>> ALLISON ROMAN: In here already going I've got some apples cut up already, and some cinnamon sticks, some light brown sugar, some granulated sugar, and a little bit of brown butter.

>> TOSI: We're using Granny Smith apples today.

We also use Empire apples a lot to cook with.

The big "no-nos" on apples are, like, your mushy grainy apples.

The red ones they hand out at school cafeterias for lunch are not apple pie apples.

So the deep fried apple pie dough is not exactly your average pie dough.

It has a ton of water, because our end goal is to deep fry it in oil.

We use these nice little tartlet shells.

Any little pie shell will do.

Clearly the rectangle plays a little McDonalds apple pie homage.

But having the bottom removable is pretty key.

So any shape will do.

You want to be able to kind of see through it, but not paper-thin.

You still want to be able to work with it.

You're really trying to get in every nook and cranny, so don't be afraid to get the tips of your fingers in there, so that it really gives you a perfect rectangle for your apples to sit in.

And then we adhere the top.

And then we're pinching the corners just like you would your apple pie.

Old down home apple pie.

You're pinching it and then you're also separating it from your pie dough.

Our pies get frozen, and then we fry them from frozen.

It helps keep the outside really crisp.

And if you got your bottomless pie shells it's even easier.

Just dust the flour off a little bit.

We heat up oil to 350 degrees and we just stick the pies right in them.

When you put your pie in, at first it's going to sink to the bottom, and then as it starts to rise up it's a great telltale sign that it's almost done frying.

Oh, yeah!

>> ROMAN: Oh, my god.

>> TOSI: Look at her!

Golden brown.

Just what we're looking for.

Exactly the color you'd want to pull your apple pie out of the oven at.

And then we're going to douse it in cinnamon sugar.

So when you weren't looking, we made some sour whipped cream.

Sour cream is pretty cool.

It will whip up like a whipped cream.

To plate the dessert, we take our miso sauce, and we give it a smear.

All right, it's hot.

Be careful, be quick.

Plate, and then you're just going to do a dollop of your sour whipped cream.

look at how pretty that looks.

>> BOURDAIN: As non-vegetarians, it would be easy to dismiss tofu and miso, to ignore their simple beauty.

But both are delicious.

Of course, most of the world knows this, but for those who don't, it's time to open your mouths and maybe give them a try.