Why I built kojiology.co

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working with Koji for a little over five years now. Growing it, researching it, selling it, and supplying restaurants that care deeply about the flavors. Based here in Turkey through Bu Ne Yemek (or BNY Food Biotech), my work revolves around koji-driven fermentation—everything from traditional techniques to experimenting with local ingredients like chickpea miso and lentil shoyu.

At some point, though, the usual advice stopped being enough.

Most resources tell you what to do—temperatures, times, strict ratios—but very little about why those numbers matter, or what happens when your conditions inevitably drift. Salt safety, bed thickness, heat generation, the delicate balance between protease and amylase... these are the variables that decide whether a batch succeeds brilliantly or quietly fails in the dark.

I got tired of approximating. I got tired of crossing my fingers and hoping the math worked out.

So, I started building tools for myself. Calculators that use actual water activity and WPS logic for salt. Models that estimate heat load and airflow in an incubator. Ways to visualize how temperature, moisture, and strain choice pull the enzyme profile in completely different directions.

Over time, those private spreadsheets and scripts grew into something bigger: kojiology.co.

What is Kojiology?

Kojiology is a free set of web tools built to bring precision to koji-making. It’s designed to step away from approximations and help culinary professionals and home enthusiasts master the underlying mechanics of their ferments. Every validated piece of science is grounded in Bu Ne Yemek’s research, and every unvalidated heuristic is explicitly labeled as one—no dressing up guesswork as hard data.

Best of all? It’s completely free, and no account is needed for calculators.

Here is what’s currently live on the site:

Salt Compass: Set your weight, water ratio, and duration to get a WPS-based target, automatically checked against pH, water activity, and botulinum safety floors. No more wondering if your salt-to-water ratios are safe.

Incubator Simulator: Size your koji chamber properly. Figure out safe bed thickness, vent count or door-gap width, and map a 3-phase heat timeline derived from mass balance and airflow physics.

Enzyme Balance: Turn the protease ↔ amylase dial. See how your strain, substrate, temperature, moisture, and bed depth pull your koji toward umami or sweetness—and find out which lever is actually doing the work.

Agitation Optimizer (Experimental): Working with vacuum-bag miso or shoyu using a backslop starter? Find out how often external kneading is actually worth doing before diminishing returns kick in.

Thermal Aging Simulator (Experimental): Age an already-made miso or tamari paste in a warm chamber, complete with solved salt/water targets from your target depth and a mixing schedule that accounts for true enzyme denaturation (because “hotter is faster” isn’t the whole story).

Ask (AI Assistant): Need quick, straight answers on safety floors, technique, or troubleshooting without digging through calculators? Chat with an AI assistant grounded in the same BNY koji science (free tier available, sign-in required).

Let’s Build This Together

I’m sharing Kojiology here because I want these tools to get better. If you make koji—whether at home or in a professional kitchen—I want to hear from you.

What feels genuinely useful?

What’s missing from your workflow?

What still feels unclear or opaque?

You can try everything right now over at kojiology.co. Take it for a spin, break it, test it against your usual batches, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ll be following up soon with more deep-dive writing on the actual physics, math, and thinking behind the numbers.

Thanks for reading—and happy fermenting,

— Ege