Inside the Incubator Kitchen Collective in Newport, Sam Pellerito opens a blue, plastic barrel of fermenting soybeans and begins to stir them with a large steel paddle. The non-GMO soybeans inside are all sourced from central Ohio and trucked, by Pellerito himself, to Newport, where they are boiled for four hours, combined with toasted and cracked wheat from Carriage House Farm in North Bend, and inoculated with koji – sometimes referred to as Japan's national mold – that’s grown on fully cooked grains, in this case, rice. The mixture is then incubated for 36 hours in 90-degree temperatures and 85% humidity then placed in the barrels, mixed with a Pacific Sea salt-water brine and aged for four to six months.