coraa | Food: Various Pickles

Note: I posted this on Dreamwidth yesterday, but the crossposter didn't crosspost it. I'm not sure if it was being buggy or if I did something wrong. Either way, manual crossposting is go.

Today I started three batches of pickles. Yay!

The first is pickled ginger, which I'm making in preparation for a Japanese dinner on Friday. It's also the simplest: I just thinly sliced some young ginger, dissolved a little sugar in salt in rice wine vinegar, and mixed the ginger, vinegar, and a piece of kombu in tupperware. After a few days of soaking up the vinegar solution, the ginger will be pickled.

The second is a batch of green bean dill pickles, the second-simplest. These aren't marinated pickles, like the ginger, but brined ones: they'll get sour by attracting a colony of lactic acid-encouraging yeast, much like homemade sourdough starter. For these, I mixed up a saltwater solution, added the green beans, and then added the seasonings that make them dill pickles -- fresh dill, dill seed, and garlic. They'll (hopefully) start to ferment in two or three days, and be fully soured in six to ten.

The third is a batch of tsukemono, or Japanese brined pickles. Like the dills, they're fermented by creating a salt brine and then allowing wild yeast to colonize it; unlike the dill pickles, though, I'm making it out of ingredients that are 'wet' enough to produce their own brine. So for this one, I shredded cabbage, carrot, onion, daikon radish, and ginger, added some coarse salt, and let it sit until the shredded veg started to soften and release liquid. I then occasionally squeezed and pressed them throughout the evening to release more liquid. Finally, once there was enough brine in the bowl to just cover the veg when they were pressed down, I stirred in some sesame seeds and a pinch of red pepper for seasoning, and put a plate on top and weighted it to press them further. They'll ferment gradually like the dills, but they should get sour faster, because there's more vegetable surface area at play. The last batch I made were nicely seasoned in three days.

Yay pickles!

(I keep wanting to get myself a Japanese pickle press, but Uwajimaya was out when we were there this weekend. Or at least, I assume they were out -- there was a big sign that said "Make Tsukemono!" hanging over a shelf of... rice cookers. I have to assume they'd recently sold out. Either that, or it was just a random suggestion. ;) )