The end of the rainy season coincides with the beginning of the true summer days. The cicadas start singing full blast, the dusks and the dawns vibrate with the beautiful and typical sounds of the かなかな蟬kanakanamushi (Tanna Japonensis), probably above all my favorite animal sound… the humidity goes slightly away and the heat climbs up to another level… it’s a short time of the year that lasts just a very few weeks, before the typhoons arrive. The heat brings some kind of slowness to our home, and some restlessness because all I think about is going swimming. But there is much to do too.
What do you think is the very first thing I do when the rainy season ends in Japan?
Well… it’s easy, it’s drying my umeboshi. Gently taking them out of the brine on a nice morning one by one and lining them in the sun. Turning them and doing it another day. I must say that I am getting better at picking plums and the worries of the first attempt are now all gone and I am more confident. This year for the first time I also added red shiso to some and I am quite please with the result.
So if you had pickled plums this year, it’s gonna be about time to dry them and enjoy them. Keep the brine for the summer energy drink. Add a bit to a large glass of water to pack on salt and minerals.
On a rainy Sunday like today we met with what would be our little hideaway and resting place. (More about how we ended up here here)
Hydrangeas in our garden
The few things that I found charming as soon as we arrived was the hydrangeas, in full bloom under the rain, with their vibrant gradation of blues and purples. The abundant plum trees covered with fruits, and the lush green of the Japanese maple trees, the gingko, the pine and the azaleas. Everything that makes a Japanese garden, Japanese. I obviously didn’t see many thing that were also there: the loquat tree, the strawberry tree… After 8 years I now know pretty much all, even if I am uncertain about the 3 or 4 different types of plums we have, and every year I harvest more fruits than we can process! In particular the plums and the strawberry tree fruits. So I give away a lot. This year 15kg of plums went to my secretaries at the university!!! And used 5kg for syrup and 3kg for umeboshi. The rest is for the birds, the worms and the ants ;).
June garden harvest: plum, loquat, potato, strawberry tree fruits
After years of struggle making umeboshi and failing, I realized umeboshi are not so difficult to make if you have the proper instruments. I use to make them with whatever I had, before investing in a proper pickle box, that is wide enough and has a lid with a spring where you can apply sufficient pressure and get rid of the heavy stone, the overflowing ume juice and the failure… largely due also to the fact that I cannot check them every day. So if you plan to make umeboshi I highly recommend you invest in the proper recipient. I use a pickle box called Picre.
Umeboshi
2kg of Japanese plums (yellowish rather than greenish)
360g of salt
If your plums are really hard or toi greenish, dip them in water a few hours before starting.
Wash them and pat them dry carefully. Remove the stems.
Sterilize your recipient. It should be 3-4 times the volume of your plums to avoid overflowing accidents. Set half of the salt in and create an even layer. Organize the plums on the layer in order to remove space between the fruits as much as possible. Sprinkle a bit of salt. Create a new layer on top remove space as much as possible between all fruits. Sprinkle salt and repeat until all plums are well organized in a compact manner. Sprinkle the remaining salt on top.
Sterilize the lid and set on top to gently squeeze the plums. Set a heavy weight or pressure on top. After a few days the liquid from the plum will start to be released and a brine will be created. This is umezu. A precious liquid to use for pickling, energy drinks etc… after a week, the liquid should be about the height of the plums. It will continue rising and can be 2-3 times the height of your original plums height hence why choosing a recipient big enough.
Leave that way until the end of July. And see you then for the next step!!!
Plum work: after overnight in the water, day 0, day 7
As I was reading the Japan times the other day I discovered they have a monthly column called Japanese kitchenwith some cooking tips and recipes and found an old recipe of natto and umeboshi pasta. Neither A. nor I are fans of natto but it was time to prepare lunch and I was planning to make tagliatelle but I wanted to eat umeboshi, so wafu pasta naturally, and the recently read recipe made me create this super simple version: replacing natto by seasonal vegetables, and using some soya sauce for dressing the pasta. As I mentioned in my earlier post on the topic, wafu pasta are something of their own kind that may be ignominious to the purists but once you have tried them they are quite exquisite and the mariage of flavors can be exceptional. I loved the one of this recipe. I hope you will too.
Umeboshi, nanohana and shiitake tagliatelle (serves 2)
180g of fresh tagliatelle
5 nanohana
3-5 shiitake depending on size
3 plain umeboshi medium size
1tbs of soya sauce
A ponch of sesame seeds
Wash and slice the shiitake. Wash and cut the nanohana in 3. In a large pan slightly greased (I used sesame oil, but anything works) start cooking the vegetables under cover at low heat. In the meantime boil the pasta. Drain the pasta and add to the pan. Stir well. Add the soya sauce, the sesame seeds, the flesh of one umeboshi, stir again and serve. Top each plate with an umeboshi, enjoy!
In the late spring and early summer, back then when we lived in France, my mother would often cook a potatoes salad with green beans or broad beans and new onion. Or she would prepare broad beans with tomatoes. Broad beans, or Morocco ingen モロッコインゲン, are very easy to find in Japan. In Isumi they seems to be growing quite easily, it’s on the farmers market stall from early June. (Oh! By the way, it seems that the name “ingen” comes from the name of a monk that imported green beans to Japan a few centuries ago!!)
Like my mother, I like to prepare broad beans, and a potato salad is always handy because it can be prepared ahead of time and doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Perfect lunch for a busy day. Though I live the dressing my mother prepare for this salad – her classic recipe is here – I wanted to test the new katsuo flakes from Katsuura I bought recently and I am also trying to finish the last umeboshi from last uear to make space for the new ones that will be arriving in a few weeks. The dressing for my potatoes and broad beans salad was all set. The mixture of flavors, familiar yet newly combined made this recipe really super easy and delicious. So here it is.
Japanese flavors potatoesand broad beans salad (serves 2)
150g of new potatoes
200g of broad beans
1 large umeboshi
A handful of katsuo flakes
1tbs of soya sauce
1tbs of olive oil
Boil the potatoes and broad beans. Do not over cook the broad beans. Drain. In a bowl add the vegetables, extract the flesh of the plum, scatter it on the vegetables. Add the olive oil, the soya sauce, top with the katsuobushi. Serve at room temperature or cold.
Remember, I told you about my pathetic failure with one batch of umeboshi a few weeks ago… well when we came back to Tokyo I had a little surprise: I had a tasting set of umeboshi!!! Three types of red shiso umeboshi, with slightly different preparations and different kinds of plums all prepared by K. san. I think she was sympathizing with my failure… Her recipes are slightly different than mines so it was interesting to try them. One is very juicy and pink, the two others are more traditional, yet delicious and juicy. Of course they are umeboshi from the year nothing to compare with the 25year old umeboshi I got from my neighbor which are much drier. All to say that umeboshi may be something that seems first weird, too salty or too sour… But they are a very traditional Japanese food, rather unique, super healthy and side products have many virtues. I am sure that among the many varieties there must be one for everyone’s palate! If you don’t like the juicy and flush flesh jumbo ones, try the small and crunchy: karikari ume カリカリ梅. They are personally not my favorite but I like them too.
Also to get used with the taste maybe try ume flavored food. I use to like the ume potato chips, but I stopped buying potato chips 5 years ago… I’m sure there exist other snacks of the like: age mochi, kaki no tane with ume flavor, it can be a good introduction. I any case never buy cheap ones and those with non natural coloring or other ingredients than just salt and plum and shiso.
Like every year in June I did my share of plum works. With a garden that produces a lot more fruits that I can handle, I actually spend more time picking fruits to give away rather then cooking them. This year I prepared umeboshi like every year, one for Tokyo and one for Isumi, one plain, one with red shiso. Things were looking really good with both until 3 days ago when I discovered that my preparation in Tokyo was covered with mold. And way too much of it to attempt any rescue operation. Everything went down the thrash… Hopefully the one in Isumi seems to have been doing well and with the beautiful hot weather this weekend it was the perfect day to take them out to dry.
One other thing I made this year was plum and red shiso syrup. Usually I prepare plain syrup, but this year I had some extra shiso so I decided to use it in the syrup. Plum syrup is delicious with cold or hot water and with sparkling water too. With the shiso I find it is much better cold. I gives a beautiful color to the drink too. A nice pink.
Finally, there was one thing I didn’t tested before but I have heard so much about is ume-su 梅酢, not to mistake with ume-shu 梅酒. Ume-su is the liquid you obtain when pressing the plums with salt and in which umeboshi bath until drying. It is basically a mix of fermented plum juice and salt. Ume-su is well known to combat summer heat and because of the salt and mineral it makes the perfect recovery drink. It is used like syrup diluted in water. The salty and plum flavors are super delicious, the one with shiso also. Now that I have tested it I love it and often use it together with syrup to have a good balance of sweet and salty flavor, a perfect drink to use after long time gardening in the heat or playing tennis!
The ume-su can be used to pickle vegetables: cucumber in plain ume-su, daikon, turnips, myoga… in the the shiso one. It will color the vegetables in pink so it’s better to use white vegetables. The ume-su can be kept indefinitely in the fridge for further use, so don’t trash it! If you didn’t have a chance to pickle plums this year, you buy ume-su only at JA shops and local coop shops.
Recently it’s been pretty busy both at work and at home. A new job for A. some new challenges and experiments for me, our days in Tokyo pass through without noticing. And when in the countryside it’s very much the same… when we are not working we have a lot of projects inside and outside the house, some waves to catch, the garden to prepare for the autumn and the winter (there are so many trees to trim!), some landscaping I would like to do and some renovations I had in mind that needed to be done. In the end little time for cooking, or only access to some rudimentary gears (I decided to redo our kitchen top… which I’ll explain later). So cooking wasn’t my priority these last few days and it’s been a lot of simple meals, and a lot of rice and umeboshi, the one I made in June-July this year. I live that simple combination because either you eat it with a nice warm plate of roasted vegetables or with a fresh salad of tomatoes and chopped fresh shiso and soya sauce, it is always good, easy to prepare and quite quick! Rather than using a rice cooker, when in a rush just cook in a normal pan, it takes only 15min and requires no care, which leaves the hands free for doing something else. The problem I realize now is that if we continue like that we will not have enough umeboshi to finish the month!!
Now about kitchen top… when we did our kitchen 6 years ago I wanted a wooden kitchen top. At that time the only thing available and that our kitchen maker would be ok to use (it’s been complicated to deal with Japanese workers because there are things they do and some they don’t want too) was an ikea wooden kitchen top. I was ok with it, it was simple to use, just a bit of oil once in a while. And it was ok until last winter… then suddenly it started to get really sticky… like really very sticky… and to mark when cleaning, and actually not being able to clean it properly. So I was tired of it and after a lot of thinking decided that I would wax it instead with a vegetal natural wax. So I sticked some sand paper and waited for a rainy day to start. My plan: start right after breakfast and finish by noon… Optimistic! it was without counting that this stupid oil would not go with just a bit of sand paper, it would for a glue in a second and polishing would not work… I had to strip it off… putty knife in hand I started to strip… but it didn’t work well until I realized that the oil would go easily if the surface was moisten. Things got much easier but still I under estimated the work for removing all the oil… in the end it took the whole morning and part of the afternoon and A. helped me when I got really to tired. The result with the wax is really nice, super smooth and not too shiny, but better equipped we could have done a much better finish… Anytime soon when we can borrow a hand sander!!
After a day of rain this week the weather as turned from end summer to early autumn. The cicadas voice is getting harder to hear and the wind gets chilly in the evening. Even though I am slowly shifting to autumn vegetables, tomatoes and eggplants have my favors to hold the summer a little bit longer, and when I saw these broad beans I couldn’t help taking them and prepare a meal that would still feels like summer. I chose for that a Japanese classic preparation boiling them in a dashi of konbu, just enough so that when they were cooked the liquid was alsmost gone (katsuobushi, or a mix of both is also perfect) and added okra sliced and jute mallow. I finished with light colored shoyu. Served it with rice and umeboshi and an omelette with finely chopped green shiso.
The week has been incredibly busy with many various things going on at work: the book I was mentioning, the organization of a workshop in January, classes, experiments… drinks with friends, party and MarioKarting with the lab, skipping lunch for tennis… and without even noticing it is the last night before the departure, it’s getting winter cold and days are at their shortest! So now I need to shop for some presents to bring to family and friends and pack everything!!! And I also need to cook!!! These days, as often before traveling, I have cooked a lot of very simple and light meals, with pasta, tortellini or risotto, but for the last night it can only be Japanese of course! So I’m thinking of rice, umeboshi, and some colorful vegetables (broccoli?) and may be some half dried salmon. Which reminded me of that excellent simple dinner I cooked last weekend with some roasted vegetables, pork cutlet from Isumi, plenty of pickles and rice. It was colorful with the fancy pink pickled daikon, the roasted carrots and the pure white of the rice. It was tasty with the sour salty umeboshi, the sweetness of the sweet potato and the carrots, and the caramelized pork… It was one perfect dinner for a cold evening!
Next time I’ll write I will be in Florence, hopefully with some Italian surprises! Have a beautiful weekend!
