I received a surprise gift from my brother Sam to help me with my pickling adventures!
Unfortunately the instructions are in Japanese, I am Sansei I don’t read Nihongo!
But I don’t want to let my brother down so I tried to make pickles without direction from memory of watching my dad and from my discussions with my brother.
These are couple of cucumbers from a friends garden with some salt a little miso and the secret ingredient. She and her husband are not Japanese but love Japanese food and are my guinea pigs this go around This is after about one hour. The pickles need a slight pressure so you turn the handle and the little platform comes down and applies pressure. The way my dad used to do this is he get a plate, a clean rock, put the plate on top of the vegetables the rock on top of the plate and voila there was the necessary pressure.
Here are the pickles after about three hours!
They turned out a little too salty I had to rinse them off thoroughly add a little mirin (a Japanese sweet wine) and some more of the secret ingredient and let them press for about 12 hours. I thought this was a pretty good result slightly sweet slightly salty slightly a little of the secret ingredient slightly crunchy. Perfect for eating with hot rice! I’ll let you know what the secret ingredient is when I have the results of the tasting from my friend.
sanseilife 