Making Korean fermented soy sauce step 1

Okay, today we're going to make Korean soy sauce and Taejan. Taejan is basically the Korean version of miso. And to start with, we need a block of Meiju. Just pretty simple ingredients. It's basically soybeans that have been fermented and then dried into a block. Anyway. Okay, now what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to make a salt brine solution. Abby, no. No. Sorry. I need three and a half gallons of water. All right, I got three gallons in there. Now I'm just working on my half. That's about half. Now I have some sea salt. I have five and a half cups. I think that this will be enough, but I don't know. We'll see here in a minute. Okay, so now we stir this up. Certainly looks salty. Now I'm going to test this, see if I have enough salt solution. I got an egg. The egg is almost floating. So we'll put just a little bit more salt in there. So probably needed about six cups. All right, one more check. All right, the egg floats. Just barely, but it floats. Now I'm going to take my two blocks, put them in here. Now this one kind of broke up a little bit when it was being shipped to me. I'm just going to take the big pieces. The little pieces I'm not going to put in there. Drop them in there. And I'll take this block, put it in there. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take some of this charcoal. It's like lump charcoal. I'm going to sterilize it because we're going to use this. It's going to float on top and it will act kind of like a filter or something. Anyway, it's traditional to have charcoal in there. So we're going to do that. Now what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to get it blowing hot on each side. There, that's all I need to do. All right, so now we're going to take and we're going to put in some jujube berries. These are like a Korean date. And a couple of dried chili peppers. Now we're going to put our pieces of charcoal in there. And depending upon the weather and everything else, this needs about 45 days. Okay, I got some new instructions. My mother-in-law says that the pot should be out in the sun. And as you can see, today's raining, so on rainy days and stuff, you've got to have the lid on. But I have on here a cloth that's got a lot of holes in it. It's like a cotton cloth. What you would do is on days when it's going to be sunny, you take the lid off, let it breathe, but yet that keeps the bugs out. And she's also saying that in the fall, wintertime, it takes about 45 days, whereas right about now it should take around 20, 25 days. And we'll see you back in a few days.