I figured Thanksgiving, as a fundamentally North
American holiday, did not have an analog in Japan. Lately, upon
seeing searches for Thanksgiving in Japanese
and the symbol
for Thanksgiving in kanji
, I figured that, if they were written at
all, Japanese Thanksgiving wishes would be expressed in katakana: ハピサンクスギビング (hapi sankusugibingu
).
Upon looking
it up though, I was surprised to find that there is a kanji
expression for Thanksgiving
: 感謝祭 (pronounced kanshasai
).
それから、いい感謝祭をな。
Last night I mixed up the pickling medium, built on a case of rice
bran I ordered from Open
Harvest. Aside from the pickling tub, the rice bran, or nuka,
was the hardest thing to get ahold of. In three different Asian
groceries in Lincoln I got the same response: Rice bran? Nuka?
At least the shopkeeper at
Jung's
Oriental Food knew what I was talking about
once I told him I wanted the bran to make pickles. He suggested using
cooked rice as the fermentation medium. He said his wife uses this
method and it works well. I've also heard of using oatmeal in lieu of
nuka.
However, I'm still trying to reproduce my Japanese tsukemono experience, so I was determined to find some rice bran.
So my nukadoko consists of the following:
I boiled the water and dissolved the salt in it. While it cooled (I put the bowl with salted water in a cold water bath to accelerate the cooling), I prepared the other ingredients and put them to the side.
When the water was around room temperature, I started adding it a little at a time to the nuka, stirring it in by hand. The nuka had a pleasant nutty-earthy-yeasty smell. When all the water was stirred in, I tossed in the peppers, kombu, and split a 12 oz bottle of Sapporo three ways: 1/3 for Barbara, 1/3 for me, and 1/3 for the nukamiso to kickstart the fermentation.
Once all that was incorporated, I buried several tired carrots—cleaned, peeled, and halved—in the nukamiso to start the maturing process. It's okay that they were past their prime, since the first few batches are generally discarded. I'll remove them tonight, stir the nukamiso, and bury some old turnips we got from the CSA. I'll repeat this process of adding and removing old veggies or cuttings we have lying around for about a week, at which point the pickling bed is declared ready, and I'll try for my first real batch of nukazuke. I'll use Joi Ito's instructions for maintaining the nukadoko.
Along with Joi Ito's nukazuke method, egullet also has a good
recipe. There seems to be no one universal right
way to
produce rice bran pickles, but it looks pretty easy to come up with a
wrong way, resulting in suffocated nukamiso or a runaway fermentation
process.
Another mouth to feed...