Koji Rice Series 2 - MURI x Koan

Koan is Chef Kristian Baumann’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen. A koan is a riddle-like question in Zen Buddhism with no logical answer, designed to break boundaries and open the mind.

Kristian has been on a journey through his own “koan”: discovering and interpreting his Korean heritage. Adopted and raised in Denmark, he has created a restaurant that reflects that personal search for connection.

From our perspective, Kristian has done an extraordinary job of using his culinary skill to express emotion, identity, and his own personal journey.

MURI and Koan go back a long way. In October 2020, Kristian and his team started Koan as a pop-up at Empirical, where Murray used to work as a distiller. Koan became MURI’s first-ever restaurant customer.

Murray recalls: “We were just starting out. Those were some of the first bottles of Passing Clouds we ever sold. I remember having to cycle over last minute before service because some of the bottles had exploded after we messed up a pasteurisation.”

Despite witnessing some of our earliest mistakes and learning curves, Lasse Peder Nielsen, partner and sommelier at Koan, still remembers: “I was in love from the first sip.”

Passing Clouds has been on the menu ever since, and we’ve been building a great partnership.

At the beginning of 2025, Lasse reached out to us with a challenge: to create a new blend for one of Copenhagen’s most emblematic desserts and Koan’s signature, a milky oolong soufflé served with kombu ice cream, hazelnut oil, and caviar.

Our creative process began by asking how we could create a blend through Koan’s lens. We started with the meaning of the name itself and decided to use koan-like riddles as a way to spark ideas.

The aim was to break boundaries and open our minds to what we could create through the tools we know best: ingredients and technique.

Koji Rice Series 2 is the blend where we have taken fermentation to its limits and transformed ingredients in one of the most complex ways we’ve managed so far.

The blend is built around a lacto-fermented amazake made with our koji rice. We then layer it with a chamomile fermentation, which brings incredibly juicy notes of pineapple and banana. Finally, we add a shiso fermentation, giving the blend an elegant herbaceous profile and lifting the whole expression.

Koji Rice Series 2 is the culmination of many careful choices of ingredients and technique, and a partnership that stretches back to the beginning of both of our journeys.