Also known as fermented soybean brick
Meju () is a brick of dried fermented soybeans. While not consumed on its own, it serves as the basis of several Korean condiments, such as doenjang (soybean paste), ganjang (soy sauce), and gochujang (chili paste). Meju is produced by pounding, kneading, and shaping cooked soybeans, and undergoes fermentation with Aspergillus oryzae and/or Bacillus subtilis.
~4 min read
Meju () is a brick of dried fermented soybeans. While not consumed on its own, it serves as the basis of several Korean condiments, such as doenjang (soybean paste), ganjang (soy sauce), and gochujang (chili paste). Meju is produced by pounding, kneading, and shaping cooked soybeans, and undergoes fermentation with Aspergillus oryzae and/or Bacillus subtilis.
== Etymology == The word meju () is derived from Middle Korean myejo (), which is itself derived from myeoju (), as recorded in the 1527 book, Collection of Characters for Training the Unenlightened. Earlier forms transcribed using hanja (Chinese characters) include miljeo () as recorded in Things on Korea, a 12th-century book on Korea written by a Song scholar.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).