When Silo opened its doors in Brighton 10 years ago, Chef/Owner Douglas McMaster set out to be the UK’s first zero-waste restaurant. “I felt like it needed to be done,” says McMaster, “because there’s a lot of waste in the world and waste is synonymous with an unsustainable, broken food system.” The original space utilised repurposed materials and the restaurant milled its own flour and cultured its own butter. The restaurant won Observer Food Monthly’s Best Ethical Restaurant in 2016 and by the time they relocated to the post-industrial East London neighbourhood of Hackney Wick in 2019, Silo was strongly advocating a tripartite zero-waste model through direct trade, whole food preparation and urban composting.
Five years later, the restaurant has achieved a synergy between the concept and the fare itself, upcycling waste into umami-rich garums, ferments, and misos, which feature throughout its menu. As a result, the Silo project has become more ambitious, having now turned to the opening of the Fermentation Factory, a production hub that is cultivating large quantities of koji using ‘pirate’ barley and rice shipped over from France. Koji is available to hospitality businesses for the in-house production of miso and ferments, with the aim to promote ecological and financial sustainability across the industry.
This didn’t happen overnight. “Six years ago, we started playing with Koji, really clueless,” McMaster admits. The release of the Noma Guide to Fermentation was “a real game changer, just in terms of educating ourselves, and just empowering us to do it ourselves,” he adds.” I just went hell for leather, making cuttlefish garum, and miso here, miso there,” allowing the restaurant to further decrease food waste.
Things stepped up a notch when fermentation expert Ryan Walker joined the team three years ago. Walker had taken a course on environment and sustainability in food and agriculture at Noma’s MAD academy, and only had one intention in terms of where to apply his knowledge. “I decided that Silo was the restaurant I had to be at, as no other restaurant and system seemed to have the impact that Silo does,” he says.
Walker’s interest in fermentation stemmed from growing up in the Isaan region of Northern Thailand, “a place with a deep cultural and historical connection to fermentation,” he explains. “This exposure not only sparked my passion for these techniques but also allowed me to learn more about myself, my heritage, and the generations of my family that came before me.” At Silo, he has the opportunity to expand this passion on a global scale, exploring fermentation practices across diverse cultures – from Japan and India to Denmark, the UK, and more recently, the United States and Canada.
“Along the way, I’ve encountered many artisans and experts who are preserving and rediscovering ancient fermentation techniques, demonstrating how these practices continue to support communities worldwide,” he continues. “It’s been inspiring to see how the wisdom of the past is being harnessed to shape the future of food.”
With Walker’s exploration running deep, the Silo’s fermentation wing was merged with Research and Development, which sparked a new approach to the building of the menu that they call ‘building back from the bin.’ “What this means is instead of looking at what’s local and available first as is common with most restaurants we look inwards first, we observe our surplus, our preservation and our ferments,” Walker explains. “We see what we produce too much of and think how we can utilise this for a new menu item; the goal is to thread together all these loose ends into a beautiful symbiotic menu that feeds into itself to then feed others.”
For McMaster, this has changed the menu altogether. “The food has got punchier,” he says, adding that this means putting less on a plate, and “more minimalism.” The current tasting menu showcases several elements inspired by their fermentation program, such as Koji quaver with treacle and goat’s cheese; Dragon egg tomatoes with koji caramel and hemp ricotta; Ikijime seabass with daikon and fig miso; and Pirate rice amazake ice cream with beetroot and raspberry cheong.
With the fruits of such labour being so vast, about a year ago, McMaster and Walker began dreaming bigger. “We realised that the fermentation in-house caused so much drastic change and in such a fast amount of time that we went from about 10% of organic matter leaving as compost to a little over 1% thanks to fermentation and its transformative abilities,” Walker explains. “This sparked the idea of what would happen if we applied this to a wider system, could we scale this to a town, or a whole city or a country’s food system?”
Walker’s role in this was to determine how the project could be executed from both a production and logistical perspective. They also led to the development of products that could be produced at scale using ingredients capable of making a real impact if diverted from waste. In addition, Walker took on most of the design work for the space, supported and guided by friends, experts, and Doug’s vision of what the system could become.
“We’re already growing mammoth amounts of koji,” he tells me, as we catch up on progress with the Fermentation Factory’s recent launch. “I think we did a 600-kilo batch and we’re building up to the ton.”
With customers taking notice, there are also some surprises. “There’s restaurants that would like koji to improve making a mole (a traditional Mexican sauce/marinade) or there are restaurants that want koji for things that we didn’t anticipate, which is really, really interesting and really cool,” McMaster remarks. One such request from a top-end client was for the production of black koji, which involves employing a slow Maillard reaction at relatively low temperatures (around 57 to 65°C), allowing the sugars to caramelise, creating rich, dark flavours similar to aged balsamic vinegar or black garlic, while still retaining the benefits of the microorganisms involved.
“We’ve had loads of other evolutions of what we want to do in the near future,” McMaster adds. As Silo is attached to Crate Brewery, one plan is to produce large quantities of spent beer grain miso, as well as liquid gold, a concentrated liquid made from fermented egg whites that tastes like aged comté (cheese). The aim is for these to eventually become available to the consumer market but for now, the hope is that restaurants taking on koji-based fermentation will start reshaping British palates, whilst dealing with the huge ethical issue of food waste.”
But how ready are Brits to start adopting fermented foods? “For more people, the only frame of reference that they have to that flavour is when they eat Asian food, or something containing MSG (monosodium glutamate) and all the different soy and shoyu and misos,” McMaster says. ‘Those flavours are pure umami.”
The aim is to get people to think “well, no, this is very British,” he suggests, and that “it couldn’t be more British,” citing the use of locally-produced raw materials to produce fermented products. The conceptual transition from British-made to British-flavour isn’t going to happen overnight, but he is hopeful in the long-term. “It’s the future of food here,” he says confidently. “The one thing that I’m absolutely sure of,” he continues, “is that this application is too good to not flourish throughout.” He circles back to the beginning of Silo and the idea of zero-waste. “Ten years ago, it was just me banging this drum and no one else listened,” he points out. “I’ve seen moments where people are like, ‘yeah, it’s bullshit, it’s a trend,’ but it’s never been more popular than right now.”
“Though you won’t have a restaurant like St. John’s saying shoyu on the menu, that’s not going to happen,” he admits. Still, it is true that there is already a thread of often Nordic-inspired modern-British cuisine that utilises fermentation – seeing it as a natural extension of British produce. What this might mean, McMaster hopes, is that with time, we’ll see menus using and labelling the likes of liquid gold and spent-grain miso on their dishes.
With the koji itself, the possibilities are endless. As McMaster puts it, “it makes everything better.” You can make koji flour, by drying koji and blending it into a fine powder, and dusting it over fruits, amplifying their flavour, as well as utilising it in baking to produce koji bread, koji crumpets and koji dumplings. The result is remarkable, enhancing the natural sweetness of the fruit or complexity of baked goods. Koji also shines in infusions and distillation processes. In the world of cocktails, one of the most significant game changers has been the use of shio koji – a mixture of salt water and koji. By pipetting shio koji into drinks, much like one would use bitters, it enhances the overall flavour profile, making every drink taste even better.
McMaster feels that thus far, he’s only discovered “no more than five percent of all the potential koji products,” making the future a very exciting prospect. Ultimately, the power of koji means it’s likely to develop in unexpected ways. “From brewers, to bakers, to baristas, to bartenders, all the Bs, koji is an indispensable ingredient to all of them, whether they know it yet or not.”
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