Comprehensive Microbial Starter Manufacturer AKITA KONNO CO.,LTD

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What is mold?

Speaking of “mold”, we can say we have never good impression about it.

Mold is omnipresent on the surface of foods, wall and bathroom, etc. which causes serious problems for hygiene in addition to its bad appearance. It is not too much to say that mold is really hated by everyone.

There are not many medicines that are produced These bad impressions of mold are actually undeniable truth, but, without saying the example of penicillin, it is also obvious that a lot of medicines have been produced with the aid of various molds. Further, fermented foods that is representative of Japan and contain dried bonito, miso, soy sauce, rice wine and distilled spirit, are all produced through the help of mold. Resultingly, so to speak, we eat molds in an indirect manner, and they play an important role in terms of our health and life.

Speaking of the mold, they had come to Earth much earlier when compared with us human beings. Since it has been estimated approximately five hundred million years ago, mold is, in other words, our senior on earth.

The word “mold” is written in one Chinese character as “黴” and there is a firm evidence indicating the presence of this difficult character in 2 thousand years ago.

There is one passage described about the character in the Shuowen Jiezi which is known as the oldest dictionary of Chinese character and was edited during the era of Emperor, Hé di in the Eastern Houhan Chinese dynasty. You can see comprehensive analyses of such Chinese characters in terms of their structure in this dictionary.

Within it, the meaning of the character was described just as things suffering from  discoloration with blue-green color after exposing to the rain for a long time and the structure of the character was as a combined letter from two different ones with “黒” (which means back and this letter forms in its part) and “微” (which means too small to recognize). Both were seen as the part and abbreviated form in the new character, respectively.

Accordingly, it sounds right that the new character has an suitable structure by which we can easily suppose such things as being black and small and arising due to the elevation of humidity.

Whereas, the character “黴” is a term referring to certain types of the form found in the fungus and a vernacular term of a grossly-visible colony of microbes. Then, when used in a marrow sense, it has the form of filamentous fungi, and consequently, it can be said to be a fungus having a body with mycelia. These fungi form a circular colony with fluffy mycelia under a clean condition and a large number of sporulation are found on their surfaces. Spore germinated by koji mold is called koji starter. In general, koji mold for brewing in Japan has no sex differentiation and taxonomically belongs to Deuteromycetes, and it has a simple cyclic life history in which spores become mycelia and become sores again. The spore of koji mold has a diameter with the range of 3 to 5 microns, and the dimension of about 100 lined up spores is equivalent to that of an eye of a needle. Further, 10 billion spores weigh approximately 1 gram. Since so many spores produced by koji mold secrete individually not only proteolytic but diastatic enzymes which are essential for amino acid synthesis and saccharification in the brewing, respectively, their enzymes, in a way are something like sweat produced by koji mold when they grow on steamed rice (or barley).

Koji mold functions as the core of brewed food in Japan, and the reason why it has been applied in the field of food manufacture is that koji mold has the potential to alter the ingredient, taste, flavor, color, etc. of foods.

Aforementioned enzymes catalyze reactions to produce various amino acids from the protein and glucose from starch, respectively during the brewing process.

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