tsukemono

Different types of Japanese tsukemono pickles, and how some may not be worth the hassle to make yourself

maki — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:24:33 +0200

Periodically, someone asks about Japanese pickles - those crunchy, salty, sweet-sour, even spicy bits of goodness that accompany a traditional meal, especially breakfast. There are a big variety of Japanese pickles, and sooner or later you might consider making them.

Some time ago I did a week-long series on making instant, or overnight pickles. These pickles can be made very quickly, usually with ingredients that are easy to get a hold of. If you want to try your hand at Japanese style pickles, I recommend starting there. There are also a couple of cookbooks in English dedicated to quick and easy pickles, both of which are quite good: Quick and Easy Tsukemono: Japanese Pickling Recipes by Ikuko Hisamatsu, and Easy Japanese Pickling in Five Minutes to One Day: 101 Full-Color Recipes for Authentic Tsukemono by Seiko Ogawa.

However, the type of pickles that you are likely to be served in a high class traditional inn in Japan, or even the type you can buy in vacuum sealed packs at a supermarket, are a bit more complicated to make, especially outside of Japan. Here are some examples.

Umeboshi or pickled plum

Umeboshi or pickled plums (the reddish lumps pictured above) are arguably the most famous Japanese pickles. The just-ripened fruit of the ume tree, which belongs to the prunus family of fruit trees (which includes the various kinds of Western plums, apricots, peaches and cherries), are pickled in a very time consuming and prolonged process. Here are the basic steps involved:

In the spring, ume fruit are carefully washed and de-stemmed, so as not to prick or damage the fruit.
The fruit are salted in lots of salt, then weighted down and left for about a month or more in a disinfected container. The weight is changed during this process according to how much liquid is extracted from the plums.
In June when red shiso leaves are out, the leaves are salted and then added to the salted ume. The whole thing is disinfected and weighted down again.
In July to early August, when the sun is hot, the ume are taken out and dried out in the sun. (This is the hoshi part of umeboshi, which means “dried”).
Sometimes the umeboshi are further marinated in a flavoring liquid. An important by-product of umeboshi making is the ume vinegar, the salty-sour liquid that is extracted from the ume.

Besides the time it takes to make umeboshi (a surprising number of people in Japan do make it, including my mother - it’s sort of like a yearly ritual) you can probably see the difficulties presented in trying to make it outside of Japan. First, where to get a hold of ume? (I’ve often thought about the possibility of using apricots as a substitute, but apricots ripen at the wrong time.) You’d have to get a hold of red shiso leaves too - the only way to do that that I know if is to grow them yourself from seed. And finally, you probably need to live in an area that gets as hot as much of Japan does in the summer for the umeboshi to dry out properly.

So, to make umeboshi, you’d have to start by planting your own ume trees. It’s often said that Tokyo and Atlanta have similar climates. Anyone in Georgia want to give it a go? :)

Other pickles that use ume vinegar

Ume vinegar is a pretty important ingredient in many other pickles. Shibazuke (pictured above) for instance, the bright purple pickles you can buy in vacuum packs, is a mixture of cucumber and eggplant (aubergine), picked in ume vinegar with additional red shiso leaves. I did try to make this once, but found that it really needs the small, firm Japanese or Asian eggplants and cucumbers. Red pickled ginger (benishouga 紅ショウガ）is also picked in ume vinegar - and requires young, tender ginger root. Ume vinegar is sold at supermarkets in Japan, and is becoming more available outside of Japan these days, so if you can get a hold of the base ingredients you can give them a try.

Nukazuke, pickling vegetables in fermented rice bran

Another major ingredient used for making pickles is rice bran or nuka (糠）. This of course is what is polished off rice grains to produce white rice. Rice bran pickles or nukazuke (糠漬け） are what you usually get at traditional restaurants, many of whom pride themselves on the quality of their homemade ＿nukazuke_.

To make rice bran pickles, a special moist rice bran bed called the nukedoko is made. This rice bran bed is the key - it’s salted, flavored with various things that hold lots of umami, and slightly fermented. Fresh vegetables are buried for a couple of days in this moist, living bed and allowed to lightly ferment themselves. Taking care of a nukadoko requires time and skill. It’s rather similar to taking care of a sourdough starter, except it’s much more high maintenance, even more so than a desem starter. You can’t easily go away on a long vacation if you want to keep a rice bran bed alive and happy. (And you must never, ever let any animal products near your nukadoko.)

Unlike umeboshi, most rice bran pickles are not long-keeping; like instant pickles, they must be refrigerated and eaten within a few days.

Dried vegetable pickles

Another category of pickle is the dried vegetable pickle. These pickles are probably very ancient in provenance. Freshly farmed whole vegetables are hung out in the open air to dry out, then they are salted and pickled. One of the most well known ones of this type are takuan or takuwan, bright yellow, slightly sweet pickles made from half-dried daikon radish (pictured above). (The yellow is not artificial food dye when made using traditional methods; it comes from turmeric, called ukon in old Japanese.) Nozawanazuke or takanazuke, dried greens that are pickled, are also of this type. These kinds of pickles require a lot of time to make, and really only make sense if you have the space to make them in bulk - like if you have a daikon radish farm.

I’ve thought off and on about making a rice bran bed (you can buy rice bran at Japanese grocery stores). But it won’t happen this year, since I have a lot of things to do, will likely be doing a lot of travelling and basically just won’t have the time. Maybe another year, when I’ll have enough time to grow lots of my own vegetables. In the meantime, I’m going to stick to storebought pickles and made-in-a-few-minutes instant pickles.

5-a-day lemon honey mustard salad pickles

maki — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:26:34 +0100

To finish out the week of instant tsukemono or pickles, here is a mixed vegetable pickle with the rather non-Japanese flavors of lemon juice and honey. Despite these flavors it does go pretty well with a Japanese meal, though you can drizzle a bit of soy sauce on top to make it more Japanese-y. It can be made in a batch, stored in the refrigerator, and eaten like salad until it’s gone (though you should try to finish it within 3 or so days.) Using lemon as the acid is a nice change from the usual vinegar, as is the honey as the sweetener.

I’ve called it 5-a-day pickles because that’s the recommended number of fruit and vegetable servings you’re supposed to eat every day, according to the UK National Health Service, but I often hear people complain that it’s hard to eat that many servings. A good sized serving of these mild, salad-like pickles would do the trick in one go.

I’ve used some winter vegetables since we’re still at the tail end of winter (and it’s been snowing hard here all week), but any vegetables in season can be used. You could use cauliflower florets, chard stalks, turnips, kohlrabi, celeriac, cabbage, etc. In summer I’m thinking of fresh cucumber, still-firm de-seeded tomatoes, green beans, peppers… Always blanch the tougher vegetables for a short time. Putting it in the marinade while still warm helps the vegetables to absorb the flavors better.

I love the idea of a big bowl of this ready and waiting in the refrigerator, so at least the veggie part of dinner is done.

5-a-day lemon honey mustard salad pickles

For the marinade:

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 Tbs. honey
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. dry mustard, reconstituted with a little water to form a paste (optional)
1 bunch flatleaf parsley, stalks and all
1 Tbs. peppercorns
1 Tbs. red pepper flakes (optional)

The vegetables:

1 medium fennel bulb
2 medium carrots
1 small head broccoli
1 celery stalk from the inner parts
1 medium cucumber

Combine the marinade ingredients in small pan. Stir over low heat until everything is dissolved. Take off the heat.

Heat up a large pot of water.

Slice the fennel bulb thinly. Peel and cut the carrots into matchsticks. Cut the broccoli into small florets, and peel and cut the stem part into matchsticks. Cut the celery stalk into matchsticks. Deseed and cut up the cucumber into…more matchsticks.

Blanch the carrots and fennel in boiling water for 1 minute. Add the broccoli and boil for another 30 seconds. Don’t overcook - they should still be very crispy! Drain well.

Put the hot vegetables in the marinade and toss well. Add the celery and cucumber and toss some more.

Leave in a non-reactive container, well covered, in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours or overnight. You may want to stir or shake it around occasionally. Here’s my favorite container for this kind of thing, a big Pyrex Prepware 8-cup measuring cup with flexible, tight-fitting lid. (I have 3 of these jugs because I’m so afraid someone will break it and I wouldn’t be able to buy it again.)

To serve, scoop out some and eat like a salad.

Notes

If you’ve made the tsukemono seasoning mix, substitute 2 teaspoons of that for the salt, for added flavor.

If you examine this recipe you’ll realize that it’s very much like European or American style pickle, except that there’s no laborious canning and so on involved. In this day and age, unless you are dead set on only eating vegetables you’ve grown yourself or something and need to preserve your harvest for the winter months, there’s not much incentive really to put up jars of pickled vegetables for long-term storage. There is an incentive to make things like jam and tomato sauce for the freezer, but these fresh pickles taste much better than ones that have been sitting around in a dark corner for months. Plus it assembles in minutes. That’s been the main point of this week’s recipes - to encourage people to re-discover the sour-sweet-salty pleasures of pickled vegetables, but without the fuss. Perhaps, like Manne, you’ll be inspired to re-discover the pickles from your heritage.

That’s the last pickle recipe for now, though I’m sure I’ll be posting more as other vegetables come into season. I hope you enjoyed them!

All natural instant pickling (tsukemono) seasoning mix

maki — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 18:39:12 +0100

If you browse the aisles of a Japanese grocery, you may run across various instant tsukemono mixes. These come either in liquid or dry form. The dry granules in particular are very handy to have around, and they can make sokuseki zuke in a hurry. However, they usually contain MSG, preservatives and such.

Scouring around the Japanese parts of the interweb, I came across several pages that had recipes for a homemade instant tsukemono mixes, such as this one. They all used MSG or dashi stock granules though, and I wanted to come up with a mixture that was made up 100% of natural ingredients.

After some tinkering around and almost ruining the motor of my food processor, here’s the mixture I came up with. To up the umami quotient it has a full 100 grams of finely chopped konbu seaweed in it. It also has some interesting very Japanese ingredients in it such as dried yuzu peel and yukari, dried powdered red shiso leaves.

All natural instant tsukemono seasoning mix

This makes about 2 cups.

100 grams / 3.5 oz. of sheet konbu or pre-shredded konbu (kizami konbu)
200 grams / 7 oz sea salt
30 grams / about 1 oz dried yuzu peel or yuzu powder
30 grams / about 1 oz yukari, dried red shiso leaf powder
50 grams / about 1.75 oz sugar (optional)
1 Tbs. red chili pepper flakes (optional)

Equipment needed: a food processor

If you are using sheet konbu (or whole konbu leaves), cut them up as fine as you can with scissors. Good konbu looks like the picture here (click to see a larger view), with a whitish powder on the surface. That whitish powder is not dust, it’s full of umami, so don’t wipe it off.

Put the cut up konbu in a food processor and process until quite finely chopped. Since the konbu is rather hard the food processor’s motor may heat up; in that case, stop it for a couple of minutes to let it cool down then resume.

When the konbu is as finely chopped as you’d like, let it rest with the lid of the food processor bowl on for a few minutes. If you open it right away the powder from the konbu will be flying all over the place. Let it settle back down before proceeding.

Add the rest of the ingredients. Process until completely mixed.

To use, add about 1 teaspoon to every 300g / 10 ounces or so of cut-up vegetable. Always add a little, and taste before adding more. Toss and squish around in a plastic bag. Commercial instant tsukemono powder has citric acid in it, so add a squeeze of lemon juice to the instant pickles and mix well just before serving.

You can leave out the red chili pepper flakes from the mix, and add it to taste to whenever you want a spicy pickle. You can also leave out the sugar if you like, and add a sweetener of your choice as needed.

Store the mix in an airtight container in a cool, dark place.

Instant daikon radish pickle using the mix

Here I’ve cut about half of a thin daikon radish into very thin slices, and tossed and squeezed it with the tsukemono mix, plus a squeeze of lemon juice. It’s ready to eat immediately. Very refreshing!

Notes

Below is a closeup of yuzu peel (left) and yukari.

The yuzu powder brand you are most likely to find in your local not-in-Japan grocery store is one made by the ubiquitous S & B. Look for it in the condiment/spices section. Yukari may be sold as “shiso furikake” - try to get a kind that’s all shiso powder if possible. You may find this in the furikake area, or the seaweed area. (For European readers, Japan Centre does carry them both.)

Both yuzu peel and yukari have very distinctive flavors. If you can’t find them, just leave them out - as long as you have the kombu, plus the chili pepper flakes, it will still taste good.

You can use ordinary table salt, but using a salt that actually tastes good will up the yummy factor.

Celery with chili pepper pickles (Serori no pirikara zuke)

maki — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:23:36 +0100

Celery isn’t a very Japanese vegetable, but with the addition of the right flavors it can be turned into a refreshingly crunchy pickle that goes well with white rice, which is the base criteria for determining whether a pickle fits a Japanese meal or not. Besides, I always seem to have some celery in my fridge (who doesn’t?), and this is a good excuse to use some up.

This is a nice salad-like pickle, that’s best eaten with some of the pickling liquid spooned like dressing over the top. There’s a nice bite and a color zing from the thin slivers of red chili pepper. (Pirikara means spicy-hot.) There’s a little sake and mirin in the dressing, which gives it a twist.

Since celery is more fibrous than cucumber, it needs to marinade for a bit longer. Give it at least 3 hours, or overnight. It doesn’t keep too well at room temperature, so reserve this for eating at home. It assembles as quickly as the other quick pickles in this series.

Celery with chili pepper pickles (Serori no pirikara zuke)

For the pickling liquid:

2 Tbs. soy sauce
2 Tbs sake
1 tsp. mirin
1/4 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. sugar
3 Tbs. rice vinegar

The vegetables:

4 medium length celery stalks, preferably the tender ones from the heart
1 mildly spicy red chili pepper

Addition at the end:

Toasted sesame oil

Equipment:

2 plates of equal size with flat bottoms
A weight of some kind, such as a can of tomatoes
Ye good old plastic ziplock bag

Combine the pickling ingredients in a small pan. Heat up while stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. Let come to a boil (to evaporate some of the alcohol) and let cool.

Wash and cut the celery stalks into short lengths, and cut them into matchsticks.

Cut in half, de-seed and devein the chili pepper. (Don’t use a very hot chili pepper like habanero…you want something with bite but not mouth-numbing.) Julienne very finely.

Put the pickling liquid and the vegetables in a plastic zip bag, close up and toss well. Lay it down flat on a plate, distributing the celery out fairly evenly. Put the other plate on top. Weigh down with a weight on top of the upper plate. Let marinade in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours but no more than a day.

To serve, arrange on a plate, spoon over some of the pickling liquid, and drizzle with a little sesame oil.

Sweet and sour cucumber and wakame pickles (kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke)

maki — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 15:52:52 +0100

This Japanese sokusekizuke method of letting vegetables marinate in a vinegar-based marinade is similar to Western pickling methods, but there’s no canning and sterilation and things involved since these are meant to be eaten within a couple of days like all quick pickles. The vinegar marinade is simply meant to enhance the flavors of the vegetables rather than preserve it for long keeping.

These cucumber pickles are sweet, sour and a bit salty all at the same time. The flavor is quite mild and fresh, so I can eat these several days in a row and not get tired of them. The wakame seaweed can be left out if you prefer, but makes a nice contrast to the cucumber while adding its own umami to the marinade.

The pickles can be eaten anytime from a couple of hours after putting them in the marinade to about 3 days later or so, if you keep it in an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Sweet and sour cucumber and wakame pickles (kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke)

Note: this amount of marinade is enough for one large English-style cucumber - the long, relatively thin kind that often comes shrink-packed in plastic. If you’re using other cucumbers, aim for about 4 to 5 cups cut up.

The marinade:

8 Tbs. rice wine vinegar (not sushi vinegar - read the label)
1/2 tsp. dashi soup stock granules, OR 1 4 inch square / 10 cm square piece of kombu seaweed
1 1/2 Tbs. sugar
1 tsp. sea salt
4 Tbs. boiling water
1 whole dried red chili pepper (optional; leave out if you don’t want any spiciness)

Combine and mix until the sugar is melted.

The vegetables:

1 large English-style cucumber
2 Tbs. dried pre-cut wakame seaweed (fueru type or the kind that just requires soaking)

De-seed and cut up 1 English-style cucumber or equivalent other kind of cucumber. (Japanese cucumbers don’t need de-seeding.)

Put the marinade in a small glass, ceramic or plastic bowl (not metal) or the good old ziplock plastic bag. Put the cucumber and wakame seaweed in. Stir or shake around, seal well and let marinade in the refrigerator for 2-3 hours or overnight.

Drain off the marinade and serve in small bowls. This should be eaten within 2-3 days.

Notes

You can reuse the marinade once: let it come to a boil, cool off, and put in fresh vegetables.

Besides cucumbers try sliced turnips, carrots, daikon radish, regular radish, etc.

Quick and spicy Chinese cabbage tsukemono or pickle (Hakusai no sokusekizuke)

maki — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:44:50 +0100

This has to be one of the easiest and tastiest ways of preparing Chinese or napa cabbage (hakusai) that I know of. All you taste is the fresh essence of the cabbage, with the heat of the red pepper and the slight twist of the orange zest.

Did I say easy? Wash and chop up the leaves, mix together the flavoring ingredients, dump all in a plastic bag, shake then massage. That’s it. It’s ready to eat right away, though the flavors to meld a bit better if you can manage to keep it in the fridge for at least an hour before eating.

I’ve used ingredients that anyone should have, even if you aren’t stocked up on typical Japanese ingredients. Adjust the amount of red pepper flakes up or down to your taste.

Quick Chinese cabbage pickles (Hakusai no sokusekizuke)

About 2 lb / 1 kg (a small whole head or half of a large head) fresh Chinese (napa) cabbage (about 6 cups cut up)
1/2 tsp vegetable stock granules (or about 1/2 a Knorr-sized stock cube)
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. red pepper flakes
1 tsp. orange zest in thin strips
Optional: 1 tsp. lemon juice
Optional: 1 tsp. dark sesame oil

Equipment needed: a large plastic zip bag

Wash the cabbage leaves, and discard any discolored parts. Dry by spinning in a salad spinner or in several layers of paper towels. Chop up roughly.

Mix together all the dry ingredients and orange zest in a bowl. If you’re using a stock cube, crumble it up finely.

Put the cabbage in the plastic bag, and the dry ingredients + orange zest. Close the bag with plenty of air in it (so it’s like a balloon) and shake all around until the ingredients are evenly distributed. Open the bag, expel as much air as you can, and close again. Massage and toss the bag around, bruising the cabbage. Quite a lot of moisture will come out of the cabbage and melt the salt etc. Try not to burst the bag with over-enthusiastic kneading.

You can eat this right away, or leave in the refrigerator in the bag for about an hour (you can do it over night too).

To serve, drain off the excess moisture (which is delicious, but rather salty…though some people like to drink it off!). Drizzle with the optional lemon juice or sesame oil. Serve with any Japanese style meal. Makes a great bento box item.

Introduction to quick Japanese tsukemono (pickles)

maki — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:07:12 +0100

In Japan, tsukemono or pickles are used as hashi-yasume, literally “chopstick resters”, side dishes that have a totally different texture and flavor. So for instance if you had some grilled meat with a sweet-savory sauce as the main course, you might have some simple, crunchy pickled cucumber slices to go with it.

This week I’ll be posting some quick Japanese vegetable pickle recipes. Japanese pickles can be very loosely divided into three kinds: the kind that take some time to ‘ripen’, but then last indefinitely, rather like Western style pickles; the kind that is ready in a few days, but which require a pickling bed that takes time to make and to maintain; and finally, the quick and easy kind that can be made and eaten within a day. The last two kinds do not keep well - just like fresh vegetables, they must be eaten within a short time.

Quick pickles, called sokusekizuke (instant pickles) or ichiya-zuke (overnight pickles) depending on how long they take to come to full flavor, are very easy to make as their names suggest. They are a great way to prepare vegetables without having to add any additional fat, though a few recipes do call for some oil.

Key components of quick Japanese pickles

The vegetables. Choose very fresh vegetables, preferably in season. All kinds of vegetables can be used alone or in combination. The most popular pickling vegetables are Chinese / nappa cabbage, regular cabbage, cucumbers, turnips and daikon radish, but many other vegetables can be used - carrots, celery, various greens, etc.
Salt. Salt is used to extract the moisture from the vegetables as well as for flavor.
Umami ingredients. These are added for extra flavor and to bring out the natural flavor of the vegetables. The most common umami ingredient used is kombu seaweed. Other ones include tiny dried shrimp, bonito flakes, and dried shiitake mushrooms. Sometimes instant dashi granules or ajinomoto (MSG) are used too.
Other flavoring ingredients. Varying these can give character and interest to pickles. Some common flavoring ingredients include: shiso leaves, fresh or dried; various citrus zests, flavored oils, citrus juices, vinegar, and aromatic vegetables like ginger and green onions.

Pickling book

I’ve only found one book in English totally dedicated to quick Japanese pickles: Quick & Easy Tsukemono: Japanese Pickling Recipes by Ikuko Hisamatsu. It’s pretty good with lots of colorful and helpful photos, and given the price I would recommend it to anyone who likes the flavor and concept of an alternative way to prepare fresh vegetables besides making a salad. It is a translation from a Japanese book though, so you do see some ingredients that are commonplace in Japan but aren’t elsewhere. There’s no explanation of those ingredients so it could be a bit confusing.

I’m going to try to stick to ingredients that are fairly easy to get outside of Japan, or at least can be easily bought from mailorder sources, for my recipes this week (as always).

Care with instant pickles

I’m repeating myself but just to emphasize: instant pickles are not meant to be kept for a long time. They should be eaten within a day or so, and stored in the refrigerator.

Most instant pickle recipes are rather salty, so if sodium intake is a concern you may want to decrease the amount and increase other flavoring ingredients, or add a bit of vinegar or citrus juice.

tsukemono

Different types of Japanese tsukemono pickles, and how some may not be worth the hassle to make yourself

Umeboshi or pickled plum

Other pickles that use ume vinegar

Nukazuke, pickling vegetables in fermented rice bran

Dried vegetable pickles

5-a-day lemon honey mustard salad pickles

5-a-day lemon honey mustard salad pickles

Notes

All natural instant pickling (tsukemono) seasoning mix

All natural instant tsukemono seasoning mix

Instant daikon radish pickle using the mix

Notes

Celery with chili pepper pickles (Serori no pirikara zuke)

Sweet and sour cucumber and wakame pickles (kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke)

Sweet and sour cucumber and wakame pickles (kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke)

Notes

Quick and spicy Chinese cabbage tsukemono or pickle (Hakusai no sokusekizuke)

Introduction to quick Japanese tsukemono (pickles)

Key components of quick Japanese pickles

Pickling book

Care with instant pickles

And here’s the whole series