So like I said I would expect to do, I tried, at least, to eat the first vegetables to come out of the nukadoko - way, waaaaaaaay too salty. Inedible, actually. I wonder if the recipes I referenced called for too much salt, or if the starter vegetables are supposed to soak up some of it in the beginning? I have a feeling I just put too much in. At this point, I could just keep putting more vegetables in to soak up the extra salt, but I think that could end up taking forever - I might have to get rid of some of the nuka and replace it with new, unsalted stuff instead. Bummer. I stopped trying to clean the mush off of the peppers I pulled out after a point, since I realized I'd probably have to take some out anyway, in order to get rid of some of the excess salt. Other than that, though, it seems to be going well - the peppers actually added to the garlicky, spicy smell. It's beginning to smell 'pungent', but I wonder what it would smell like if I hadn't put in garlic and chiles. Talk about a visceral experience, though - digging through a giant bottle of soft mush looking for wilted pepper slices... now I know not to cut things up too small, unless I want to spend a lot of extra time trying to find them all in the end. Having clear glass bottles helps a little, so at least I can sort of see what I'm doing - it means I have to make sure that I keep them in a dark place, though - I'm sure that sunlight would be absolutely no good for this stuff. I've got eggshells washed and drying, waiting to go in, too - it sounds a little odd but 'everyone' says that it's good to put them in there. Calcium stabilizes the nukadoko, or something. Who knows. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here or anything, so I'm going to keep going along with what others suggest.

nukadoko yet? can't tell

I have two big glass mason type jars under the sink right now, about 2/5 full of brown mush. They have to be pulled out and stirred by hand every day, at least once. The texture is sort of too mushy for bread dough, but finer than oatmeal. There is something satisfying already about taking care of the stuff, but every time I stick my hand in, random spots on my arm sting slightly, and I always have to remember that there's actually a lot of salt in the mixture that I keep forgetting about. I originally bought one jar, but found out that sticking my forearm in to stir a full jar of the stuff was just too crowded, and it's only going to get worse when I actually start throwing full sized vegetables in there, too. It's been several days now, and it's definitely beginning to smell ...different. In the beginning it just smelled like warm grain mush, but I did put garlic and chili peppers in, which started to show up in the odor after a few days. I also split a bottle of beer between the two of them, which is supposed to speed up the start of fermentation. Yesterday, I think, was the first day it began to smell like more than just grain and garlic. Everyone who blogs about this stuff just describes it as 'pungent', and my own memories of eating these pickles in Japan are blurry, so I'm hoping that instinct will tell me that it's a good fermented smell rather than a bad fermented smell. Just tonight I cut up a few old peppers and buried them in the nukadoko - I read that you need to pickle 'throwaway' vegetables just at the beginning to help get it going - they're not really supposed to be very good to eat, since things aren't quite up to speed yet. I think I'm going to have to eat them in a couple of days anyway, though, just to monitor what the hell's actually going on in there. And I've already flapped my gums and told a friend with a Japanese wife that I'm starting to make nukazuke at home, so now I have their hopes up, and need to follow through properly and make sure I have pickles I won't be insecure about sharing with other people who know what they're really supposed to taste like.

nukazuke

So fermented pickles (with rice) have been ~the~ basic low-rent staple as long as there have been poor people in Japan, and it's a pretty accurate example of what I ate most of the time when we ate home cooked food in Sasayama. Fermented food in general is considered to be very healthy, and fermented pickles are just good anyway. I'm not sure how they're made around here, but at Tsuji we had a pickle pot for making this particular kind (called nukazuke) which I never really got involved with, but should have. I was a little late on the uptake, and now of course, am itching to make my own. The vegetables are buried in a damp mixture of rice bran, salt, 'good' bacteria that comes from hand-stirring, and random things for flavor/sanitary reasons. Just for a day or two, though- the process goes fast. Chiles ward off the bugs, and daily stirring keeps it fresh. People keep their nuka going for years, decades, even longer - like sourdough cultures passed down through generations. You can start your own from scratch, though, if you have no one to give you a cup from their pot, and that's what I'm going to do.

I bought a huge glass mason-type jar with a rubber gasket and have four bags of rice bran that I found at a Japanese shop in Medford. I tried about 5 other places with no luck before I finally went out there. (Medford has always been like a psychological no-man's land to me so it was a stretch). I heard in Japan you can get it for free from places that mill rice and remove the bran. So anyway, now that i have it, I need to wet and salt it, add things like mushed bread or beer to get the fermentation going, chiles, crushed eggshells, garlic, and kombu (seaweed), and put in some starter vegetables that need to be replaced frequently. I looked this process up on several websites and there is a little variation in the advice that different people have posted, but this is all pretty much standard. Some people put in ginger slices, others put in fish flakes- the possibilities are almost endless. I am going to keep it pretty basic, at least in the beginning. Once the pot gets going, vegetables only need to be buried in the nuka for a couple of hours to a couple of days, depending on how thin or delicate they are. These are actually highly perishable pickles, not at all like the ones we're used to eating, so only really firm veggies like large chunks of daikon radish can handle being pickled for more than a couple few days. This is going to be interesting - we only pickled a few things at the farm, and we weren't incredibly vigilant about it despite the need for daily turning over (I think it was at least a week and a half before I even learned of the pot's existence) but if I can make it work it will be, well, pretty cool.


People who are serious about their nukazuke will actually travel with their pots, to make sure that the daily mixing is not interrupted. Considering that the cultured nuka improves over time and can be kept like a living family heirloom, that isn't actually so hard to understand.


Photos coming in an edit.