Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Tsukemono!

I have been thinking about other traditions to prepare and preserve foods. A while back Jess and I had a great dinner at a Korean restaurant on the way home from work and the meal was served with a selection of lightly pickled vegetables. This led me to begin thinking about Asian influenced pickles in general and I remembered being served some umboshi once in the service. Umboshi are Japanese pickled plums and since we had so many plums this year the idea of pickling them sounded great. Well a bit more research later I learned that those are not the same types of plums but it also led me to the entire class of Japanese preserved vegetables called Tsukemono. One of the first things I found was a tsukemono press that is used to help brine and draw out water from vegetables like a weighted lid is used when making sourkraut. Since this seemed like an elegant way to make quick tasty salt preserved produce during the growing season and also make the occasional batch of sourkraut with, I ordered a press of Amazon. I know this is not terribly frugal but to be honest that has always been the biggest part of this life for me.

So to test drive the press we picked up some turnips and a bit of dried seaweed known as kombu. I first peeled and cut the turnips and quick rinsed the kombu and cut it into strips. I then added them to the press with around a tablespoon of pacific sea salt and closed the press and cranked down the plunger. I let them sit overnight in the press in the refrigerator. Sure enough there was liquid by morning.






To me the result after around a week tastes a bit like the sea. The smell takes me back to the smell of the ocean far out at sea and the pickles taste like licking your lips after an afternoon swim off the coast with a bit of a radishy crispness. Not bad at all!



I will definitely be trying this again this spring and summer with various vegetables. I can hardly wait to get some kale into this thing.

In other non-pickle notes.
We went to meet with the folks from Transition Northfield on Saturday morning and found them to interesting people. They sent us away with a book to read and some suggested videos to view. We also heard about a permaculture class that they were sponsoring at the co-op on Monday night.
Sunday I decided to build a cold frame out of some straw bales and old storm windows. This will be the subject of a future post once I can clean it up a bit.
Jess and I decided to stop by the co-op early on Monday and picked up some milk for cheese making and some Sunchokes to see if we liked them before adding them to the list of veggies to grow this year. We attended the lecture and ran into some of the folks from TN again as well. Then we came home and made our very first ricotta cheese with the milk we picked up. We can't wait to make lasagna this year with our own pasta, tomato sauce and ricotta and mozzarella cheeses.

6 comments:

Ruth Trowbridge said...

Excellent post, thanks for the links. I am very interested in this. Sunchokes grow like weeds, some years I eat them, some I don't but they are always pretty flowers. Peace

Aimee said...

I'm interested to see how you like sunchokes. We got tons from our CSA last year and tried various recipes. We just never liked them. We ended up boiling them till they were soft and feeding them to the chickens!

Jessica said...

Really excited about the tsukemono! The sunchokes weren't that bad - I actually thought they tasted like like artichoke hearts (only in a potato-like form). Although, we did understand why they are sometimes referred to as "farty-chokes". Yeah.....

Frustrated Farmer Rick said...

Ruralrose- thanks. The windbreak and cosmetic aspect of Sunchokes were half of our reason for considering them.

Aimee- We cut the chokes thin and sauteed them in duck fat. They had a nice nutty starchy flavor with hints of greenness that we liked.

Jess- love your post on our first cheese making and yes I can confirm that the chokes were a bit rough on my digestive system.

Stonehead said...

The tsukemono press sounds temping. We make quite a lot of brined pickles and using a press would be a lot more convenient than boiling a large stone, then using it to press a plate into a bowl. And it would be less likely to break the plate, too!

As for sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes as they're known here), we grow a lot of them. Some of are for us, but most are fed to the pigs.

Frustrated Farmer Rick said...

Stonehead- It is definitely easier than boiling a rock. I am not sure yet if it will be as good. I will let you know once I get some more types of vegetables into this thing. I already have plans for daikon radishes this spring.