Lacto-Fermentation

This is one of the easiest techniques of pickling in the repertoire.

All you need is salt, water, and time.

Plus, a mechanism to keep the vegetables below the water line. The CC recommends a Japanese pickle-press which is designed to do so. Even if you don't have one as long as you are committed to just shaking the container daily, you're good to go.

Pickling is an exercise in hygiene and cleanliness. Something that is very relevant to our times. Most of the hard work of pickling lies in sterilization. You are trying to get rid of all the bad bacteria and fungi and introduce the good ones.

There has never been a pickler in history who has said "My workspace is too clean."

Anal-retentives, please report to the front of the class!

There are just a few steps:

[1] Pour boiling water over your jar to sterilize it.

[2] 5% of salt by volume at the bottom. (Don't sweat this percentage thing. Just don't under-salt!)

[3] Scrub and clean [ and cut ] your vegetables.

[4] Boiling water over the top.

[5] Seal and store in your refrigetator - there's a reason for this.

Your vegetables are your babies. They will "burp" so every day, you will need to "burp the baby" — open the seal, "burp", close the seal again.

They will settle down just like babies.

Crispy vegetables e.g. carrots take longer to ferment. Rest work faster.

On the safety issue, as one FDA commissioner said and the CC quotes loosely, "There has never been a recorded case of illness [ due to lacto-fermentation ] in the entire history of the FDA. It's the safest technology we know."

Constructing a Meal

(This article was written earlier but Blogger has a rather annoying "auto-save" feature and the article got deleted. The CC had to rewrite it from scratch.)

One of the things that perennially bugs the CC is that neither home chefs nor professional chefs give any insight whatsoever into how a meal is actually constructed.

This has something fundamentally to do with the "recipe" format of cookbooks. One really needs an entirely alternate model that works at the meal level.

Cookbooks also rely on the entirely unreliable fact that people just magically absorb knowledge by "osmosis" and "culture". Both of these seem to be demonstrably false assertions. Since one is not always granted the luxury of an Italian nonna or an Japanese obaachan and since kids are not born knowing complex culinary logic when yanked from the womb, one is left with the inescapable conclusion that all knowledge is learned.

That means one should be able to both teach it and learn it.

The CC is going to use himself as an example.

The only thing planned before the Saturday was that the meal would be Japanese and it would feature some form of clams - either asari gohan (= あさりご飯 = clam rice) or asari no miso dashijiru (= あさり味噌汁, clam miso soup.)

The CC arrived at the farmers' market on a frigid Saturday morning only to find that most of the vendors were missing. It was already turning into a disaster.

Thankfully there was one vegetable vendor and the fishmonger was around.

Cauliflowers were obtained (purple, romanesco) as were some carrots. The CC noted that he had exactly two Italian flat beans and two cherry tomatoes at home. This was going to be a tricky operation.

The CC noted that there were no scallions at home and none at the market neither. However, he did have some homemade furikake already prepared. That put paid to the idea of the asari gohan (because of the black furikake) and hence it was going to the be the clams with miso soup.

(Note how we rarely make decisions. They are made for us already.)

Luckily, the CC still had one of the last of the late summer cucumbers so a quick sunomono (vinegar pickle) was added to the mix. The CC still had some pickled ginger in his cabinet. The vegetables were steamed and combined with a modified tare sauce that the CC just loves. The dish can be made ahead of time and is actually better at room temperature rather than warm.

The CC needed a fifth dish (rice doesn't count) and he had carrots so he made the classic quick stir-fried dish with carrots and hijiki.

The meal follows the entirely Japanese principles of washoku (= 和食) — there are five vegetables of different colors, five methods, five tastes, etc.

The rules above might have a Japanese origin but they are not laws of nature. They are just an excellent set of rules-of-thumb to ensure nutritional completeness and stave away boredom. The CC finds himself using the rules even if he's making a classically French dinner or an Indian one.

Dinner is served.

Five autumn vegetables with modified "tare" sauce
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Clam miso soup
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Cucumber sunomono
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Sweet-sour hijiki
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Pickled white ginger
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White rice with furikake

Japanese Dinner

Tuna croquettes (マグロのコロッケ)
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Baby potatoes fried in duck-fat with gomashio ♥ Truffled foie gras
♦ ♦ ♦
Oyako Don (親子丼)
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Miso soup with acorn squash & ginger
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Greens with calamansi vinaigrette
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Homemade Japanese pickles — carrot; watermelon radish; ginger ♥
Winter vegetables in tare sauce.

Green Peppercorn Pickles

The CC is not the sentimental type and he's certainly not the rhapsodising type but if there ever were something to send him into a Proustian "madeleine" moment, it would be these pickles.

What are they?

Fresh green peppercorns that have been pickled with just salt and lime.

A good friend of the CC's used to eat them with yogurt-rice. He couldn't cook if his life depended on it (still can't!) so these were "a lifeline for kitchen failures and the lovelorn". Bit of a harsh judgment on the CC's part.

Back to the peppercorns.

Only going to work with fresh peppercorns which are hard to find. Ideally, you would use just salt but you need lime to get the pH of the liquid down to the right level. The lime does not participate in the final product as a taste since the canning process neutralizes it.

If you're going to make truly great steak au poivre or the classic Thai green fish curry with green peppercorns (พริกไทยอ่อน), these be the peppercorns that you want to use. In a wondrous world, you'd have fresh peppercorns all year around but it's not a wondrous world. We can just make it a little more wondrous with food technology.

Ingredients

(based on your canning jar size)

500 grams green peppercorns
8 tbsp sea salt
4 limes (juiced and passed through a sieve)

water

Note: Canning jars come with a sealant. The sealant is activated when inverted in boiling water.

Recipe

Wash the peppercorns really carefully. Set aside.

Bring water to a boil. Dump the bottle inside and fish it out. You are just sterilizing the bottle. In this bottle, drop the peppercorns, the salt and the lime juice. Add enough cold fresh water to top off the jar.

Add the sealing mechanism and seal carefully. Gently put the bottle upside-down in the boiling water. Bring to a boil and let it boil for about 5-6 minutes.

Fish it out and let it sit.

Takes about 2-3 weeks to pickle. Once you open the bottle, you must keep it in the fridge. Use a clean fork/spoon to fish out the pickles. Add more salt and water to cover them when you do so.

Pickles

It's not well known but the CC is crazy about pickles.

Broadly speaking, the world of pickles is divided into two kinds — acid-based and oil-based.

This has everything to do with botulism which is a bacterium that grows in the absence of oxygen. You need some technical chops to make oil-based pickles.

Acid-based pickles are vastly easier. Firstly, the acid prevents the growth of bacteria in the first place, and secondly, they're just tastier by the CC's taste buds. So life is easy for the CC.

The CC has grown up with pickles. He used to make them routinely as a kid with his grandmother and his great-grandmother (!) growing up. Looking back, it seems painfully clear that the grandmother wasn't that particularly interested in them. She continued for a few years after her mother died but that tapered pretty quickly. The family was even less interested which leaves the CC as the sole flag-bearer. And so it goes.

Except for the absolutely amazingly awesome green-peppercorn and lime pickles, the CC doesn't care for any of them. (They were mostly oil-based. Except the one that the CC likes. Hence the bias.)

The Indians and the Japanese have an vast tradition of pickling. (Other cultures obviously do too but the CC is just pointing this out as a compare-and-contrast.)

It's quite extraordinary. It was much more needed in the Japanese case because of the short growing season. It was completely unnecessary in the Indian case but the CC assumes they just loved the taste?

Fast forward to the modern world and the Japanese have an amazing device that allows you to make pickles without mistakes. It's just a plastic doo-hickey that presses down. It serves two purposes. It allows you to keep the vegetables below the water line, and if necessary, it presses down to allow vegetables to release their juices.

It works like a charm.

The absolutely simplest pickle involves just three ingredients — four, if you count water.

It's called 塩漬け (shiozuke - salted pickles.) The konbu and the salt combine to add a magical umami to the final product. Salt lowers the pH. They are acid-pickles in all but name.

The firmer the ingredient, the easier it is. It's pure magic with such things as the stalks of rainbow chard or watermelon rind.

Theoretically, the hard stalks of kale or broccoli should work but the brassica family simply doesn't taste that great. The CC has tried it. It basically sucks. Let it go.

These pickles are best eaten within three to seven days because the ingredients will continue to soften but you want that crunch!

Ingredients

rainbow chard stalks
4 tbsp salt
2 small cuts of konbu

boiling water

Recipe

Cut and wash the stalks. In a clean sterile container, layer the konbu followed by the stalks. Top with the salt.

Pour boiling water all over it. Figure out a way to make sure that the ingredients stay below the water line.

Ready in three days.

Weekend Menu

Two meals. Recipes to follow.

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Soufflé with snails, tomato sauce & chinese chives

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Japanese meal

Fresh bamboo-shoot rice w/ sanshō
Okra ohitashi
Scallop sashimi
Miso soup
Pickles (lotus-root amazuke, carrot shiozuke)

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Weekend Menu

Three meals. Recipes to follow.

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"Shirred" eggs with snails, persillade & tomato paste

♦

Filipino Meal 

Kinilaw "Guisado" with bamboo shoots, dried shrimp & kale Umami rice
Salt pickles

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Sautéed pea-shoots with garlic & soy sauce Lobster ravioli in vanilla butter sauce

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Bacterial Overload

Recently the CC went to one of those outdoor street fairs where there was a pickle stand. They were also selling some of the pickled juice blended with tomatoes as a "Bloody Mary Mix". The vendors kept apologizing and warning clients who wanted to buy it that it was not pasteurized.

And the CC was completely nonplussed, "So it has come to this?"

It doesn't need to be pasteurized!

There is a fundamental lack of understanding by people who work in food about our relationship with other bio-agents and particularly the organisms that we are deeply symbiotic with namely bacteria.

At this point in time, advertising agencies have basically convinced consumers that bacteria are "evil" but nothing could be further from the truth.

The standard mechanism of cultivating bacteria in the lab is creating something called a "culture". Basically, a swab of bacteria are grown on a substrate and then examined under a microscope. Based on this, it was estimated that something like 1% of a human mass was actually bacteria. Little did people know how wrong this estimate turned out to be.

In the early part of the 21st century, the price of DNA sequencers fell precipitously. What used to be an expensive tool became dirt cheap. Scientists had the entirely brilliant idea of not measuring bacteria by mass but by what percentage of DNA of our body was made up of bacteria. Turns out the answer is between 90-99%.

Remember the two estimates are of different things. One is by weight and the other is by percentage of DNA that is non-human. They are different things but the latter estimate is clearly the more important.

To put it differently, we humans exist for the benefit of the bacteria not the other way around. Of course, we are extraordinarily symbiotic with them. We provide them the food and they provide us both protection by repelling all the "bad bacteria" and do significant portions of body work for us.

In fact, the bacteria on your left and right hands are completely different.

So why did the earlier scientists get it so wrong? How can the estimates be so off?

You should be able to guess the answer. Not every bacteria can grow in the "culture". In fact, they can only survive in that localized environment inside the body that they have adapted to.

The answer is even more complex. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad" bacteria. It's contextual. You move the "good" bacteria from the right spot where they are supposed to be into the wrong spot and they will become "bad" bacteria. The context is completely important.

The bacteria that we are the most symbiotic with is a family called lactobacillus. Every time, you eat yogurt, eat or drink miso, eat pickles, cheese, kimchi, drink beer or wine, you are basically consuming them in vast quantities. They do the fermentation for us, and in turn, they repel other harmful bacteria for us. We are completely reliant on them.

So now maybe you can guess why the pickled juice blended with tomatoes did not need to be pasteurized?

The lactobacilli would repel any invader which there are not that many of to start with because of the acidity of the environment. The lactobacilli are the rare family that has adapted to the acidic environment thanks to their symbiosis with us.

Fermented foods have a long history of being considered "good for you". It was just an empirical observation over large swathes of human history in vastly different regions and contexts but they all came to the same conclusion.

Only in the 21st century is science able to actually dissect how all these various extraordinarily-complex mechanisms actually work.

But the CC's point is a lot larger. How have we gotten to a point where the most basic food interaction is fraught with anxiety? The answer is that Madison Ave. has made you paranoid.

The CC never relies on the expiration dates for milk. Just smell it. It's pretty obvious. Sometimes it will go bad before the expiration date!

The same goes for fermentation and fermented products. They work in a complex way and made correctly will last forever. Experienced picklers never throw out the juice. They use a cup of it to start off the next batch because it has the complex blend of bacteria all ready to give the next batch the right start.

Pickling is one of the greatest achievements in food technology. Just remember that for most of human history, humans were food deprived. Our modern calorie-rich environment is an extraordinarily recent development barely 50 years old. Pickling was the trick that allowed humans to store food for the winter. It also gave variety and complexity to their diet and the symbiotic relationship with the bacteria made for healthier humans.

The CC hopes that this explanation convinces people not to think of bacteria as "evil" but our necessary partners in the game of life. We need them; they need us. We can't actually function without them.

So the next time you're at the fair eating a pickle-on-a-stick, you should not think to yourself "Ooh! crunchy cucumber", you should really be thinking "Ooh! Tons of bacteria with a side helping of crunchy cucumber!"

Tsukemono (漬物)

This is a world of discussion so a blog post can, at best, just be an introduction to the concept.

The word is widely translated as "pickle" but that is a bit misleading. Pickles, at least in the American concept, refer exclusively to vegetables that are preserved in either a brine or an vinegar bath. (Both of which are acidic in nature.)

Tsukemono would better be translated as "preserved vegetables" or as in the original, "fragrant vegetables". Pickling is encompassed as a side-category.

The world of "preserved vegetables" globally is a little broader in its conception of what it means. The Japanese concept encompasses extremes where things are "lightly pickled" for as little as a few hours to everything that requires pickling for a few months. It also encompasses a style where vegetables are lightly cooked and then steeped in a marinade for a few hours.

That is a very broad range indeed.

The idea is to produce versatile side-dishes as accompaniments to the meal which are complex in nature and yet have an intense flavor either intrinsically or one that is drawn out from the vegetable in question.

The nature of the "preservation" also means that these dishes will last for a few days in the absence of refrigeration which can be rotated by the combinatorial game.

You "preserve" whatever is available fresh in the markets always rotating the ideas and serving different combinations at different meals that way keeping the meal fresh while still not wasting anything and sticking to the seasonal concept.

O Grandma! (Or in this case o-baachan — お祖母ちゃん.)

Them bitches be clever. What else is there to say?

Modern technology has really enhanced the ease of making these pickles particularly with the concept of a "pickle press". It's basically a plastic container with a lid and a screw press which allows you to compress the vegetables below the water line — a key concept in pickling without which they would rapidly spoil via fungal decay.

Japanese-style pickles are classified by what you are pickling with. The choices are multitudinous:

1. Shiozuke (塩漬け) — pickled with salt
2. Misozuke (味噌漬け) — pickled with miso
3. Suzuke (酢漬け) — pickled with vinegar
4. Amasuzuke (甘酢漬け) — pickled with sugar and vinegar
5. Shoyuzuke (醤油漬け) — pickled with soy sauce

There are other serious pickling techniques like nukazuke (糠漬け) but those are much more akin to a discussion of serious sourdough techniques so the CC will skip them for the present because they require a level of commitment that is unlikely to be found among the current readership.

All of the above pickling is taking place in an acidic medium with the explicit (miso) or non-explicit (salt and/or vinegar) introduction of the lactobacillus family of bacteria with which we are deeply symbiotic. They are salt-tolerant and feed on the sugars present either explicitly or implicitly (vegetables) producing lactic acid which is deeply hostile to other microbes and particularly fungi. The result is, you guessed it, preservation.

The simplest pickles are the ones which only have salt. They are typically made with vegetables which will give off a large quantity of water, e.g. cucumbers. You salt the vegetable and compress it and as it gives off water, it both ferments and inundates itself below the water line. After that you pull it out and enjoy its concentrated flavor which has been modified by the bacteria. The solution is solidly rich in bacteria and you'd use it going forward to inoculate your next batch of "pickles".

The Japanese being Japanese, the concept of umami is never very far from the palate. The bacteria naturally produce intense umami flavors but they can be enhanced by the introduction of konbu or mushrooms or both. The result is lip-smackingly delicious.

The others all follow roughly the same principles. The combinations are traditional and the mixing and matching is largely a matter of style matched to the nature of the vegetable.

Hard vegetables (like burdock — ごぼ) are suited to the shoyuzuke style whereas watery vegetables like cucumber fit the simplest shiozuke style.

The CC loves making misozuke which can range from the simple to the hauntingly complex.

There's a world of exploration out here!

Rice Bran

Bet you didn't know that the rice bran had a tiny amount of fat in it from which can be extracted oil. It's frequently labelled as "rice oil" but it's really from the bran.

It has a very high smoke point being devoid of solid material, and has a neutral flavor. Hence, it's very much preferred in Japanese cooking since they harvest a ton of rice to begin with.

Rice bran (nuka) is a big thing in Japan. It's used to make a super turbo-charged, on-steroids version of sourdough except in the form of pickles (nukazuke.)

These pickles require a lot of love. They need to be turned daily twice a day so that they don't spoil. Supposedly, the pickles are insanely good, and like good sourdough the base material basically lives on forever but anything that requires love twice a day is way more commitment than even the CC can manage.

Moroccan Preserved Lemons

As crazy as it sounds, the current depths of winter are the "season" for citrus.

Surprised?

Locavore tendencies be damned, most of the citrus fruits come from areas where the produce season is currently peaking, and hence, the markets are just overflowing with citrus fruits.

Time then in the snowiest winter recorded to go a slipping and a sliding, and put the overflowing bounty of Meyer lemons to good use. Sadly to say, it's "use it or lose it" since you can't easily find them here in the rest of the year.

The CC bought six pounds and turned them into preserved lemons.

If you've never eaten a preserved lemon, you have missed out on one of the great joys of life. It's ancient "culinary technology" at its very best — making lemonade out of lemons, metaphorically speaking.

A preserved lemon is more about the rind of the lemon than the juice. The preserving process both intensifies the lemon-ness of the lemon, infuses it with a complex spice mixture, and brings out an intense umami from the pickling process. The final product is silky and sensual, an ethereal counterpoint to the vegetable, chicken, lamb or fish dishes that it generally accompanies.

The important word here is "generally". Good luck waiting to cook the dishes. The CC has seen hordes demolish the product straight out of the bottle like crack-candy! Add the pickling juice to a "bloody mary" and you'll thank the CC for the rest of your life.

Naturally, there's a catch. That's called pickling. It takes about a month to make after which it will pretty much last forever. Experienced picklers don't even empty the jar. They just keep adding more lemons, lemon juice and salt to the jar, and the stuff will just keep on truckin'.

If you've never pickled before, let's start with the basics. Pickling involves storing food for an extended period of time. There are only two broad ways of pickling — pickling in an acidic medium, and pickling in oil (which is a lot harder.)

The simple story is that if the medium is acidic enough, no fungus or bacteria can grow in it (except for the highly beneficial and omnipresent lactobacillus.)

Pickling requires only one real skill. That's called obsessively washing everything in hot water. The actual recipe is a detail to the act of cleaning that goes on before and after. The reason most pickles are acidic is that you don't need to be as careful as when you do it in oil however pickling remains a key testament to actually understanding the science of food. (Yes, your grandmother did it seamlessly but you are not your grandmother so ...)

Preserved lemons are very easy to make. All you need is a mason jar, lots of lemons, some spices and tons of salt. The overwhelming acidity of the medium makes this a particularly easy "preserve" to make for beginners. There is only one important thing to note. No part of the lemons must "stick out" above the water line. You must press them down and/or squeeze them until all components are submerged below the acidic water line.

The other important note is not to skimp on the salt. More is fine (can be washed later, and the recipe adjusted) but less would be disastrous.

Before the CC provides a recipe, he will just note a caveat. This all depends on the size of your jars, etc. so the recipe below is necessarily approximate, and in any case the most important detail has been stated above — submerge the lemons in the lemon juice completely.

Ingredients

24 Meyer lemons
6 tbsp salt
1 stick cinnamon
1 tbsp cloves
2 tbsp coriander seeds
2 tbsp peppercorns
2 bay leaves

Recipe

Reserve about 6-8 lemons for the pickling process. Juice the rest, and strain the juice through a sieve.

Quarter the reserved lemons till about near the bottom but make sure you don't cut all the way through. Squeeze them a little for the juice (they will not float if you do this,) and salt them liberally on the inside. Set aside.

Wash the jar with extremely hot water. Pour boiling water into it until just before starting the pickling process.

Pour out all the hot water.

Layer the salt to about 1/2" at the bottom. Add all the spices, and the reserved lemons. Pour the lemon juice all over mixture. Make sure everything is submerged. If not, press down until it is. (You are really squeezing the lemons to bring their density below that of the lemon juice.)

Store for 30-40 days in a cool dark place.

Pikliz

This is a Haitian condiment/dipping sauce that packs a fiery punch.

First, the vegetables and spices are layered (cabbage, peppers, cloves, peppercorns, thyme, onions, peas, habañeros, garlic, french beans, carrots) with sea salt thrown in every few layers.

The dish cannot be made without habañeros so if you can't find any, don't bother to make it.

Over this is poured boiling vinegar and the whole lot sealed. It can be refrigerated and will last a long time.

(Oh, and the boiling vinegar stinks up the house but the pickle is worth it!)

Fresh Turmeric Pickle

Technically it's not a "pickle" because it hasn't really been fermented but it's so delicious, why argue?

Ingredients

fresh turmeric
sea salt
water

Recipe

This is what fresh turmeric looks like. You can see for yourself what it resembles!

First, you need to peel it.

The peeling process will stain your hands. Consider this as a "Badge of Honor" for your dedication to the culinary arts. (Do not let it stain your clothes. They will be ruined, as all of South Asia knows!)

Cut them up into rounds (or whatever), and toss sea salt on top of it. (Do not skimp on the sea salt.)

Cover it completely with water, and let it steep for at least 24 hours. You can put it in the fridge but strictly speaking, it is not necessary.