greenjanet, the fermentation process eats sugar so even the misos made from high carb products (eg, barley, brown rice, chickpeas, azuki beans) are low in carbs and sugar. A serving of one teaspoon of South River Organic Hearty Brown Rice miso has 1 g carbs, no sugar. They also have some versions that are naturally sweeter for people who can’t dig the funk and those have 2 g per tsp. My preferred brand, Ohsawa, sells the holy grail of low carb miso, organic soybean. It has a touch of roasted barley flour to feed the microorganisms during the two years it will spend fermenting before it’s ready to sell. The end-product has just .5 of carb per tsp.
All of these nice stats come from fully fermented, unpasteurized organic misos. There is a big difference between the probiotic-rich traditional product and the kind you find in regular stores. Read the ingredients and nutritional panel before you buy because I’ve seen some terrible carb and sugar figures in the more readily available mass-market varieties, and they also lose the wonderful gut biome advantages of fermentation when they’re pasteurized.
