Natto

Soak a bag of garbanzos/chick peas overnight. Boil the chick peas gently until fully cooked, around 90 minutes.

Dump in a pack of natto, defrosted. Stir into the beans well, and then put it into an oven with only the pilot light on. If you don’t have a pilot light, wrap the pot in a towel, for insulation. Cover it with a lid, but use chopsticks or spoons to prop up the lid, to allow a big gap for air. Age it in the oven for 24 hours.

When it’s done, and the beans are covered in a fuzzy “fur” of natto, dump it into a plastic container with a lid. Age it in the fridge for 2 to 3 days for full flavor.

Hummus

In a blender or food processor, add a lot of hulled sesame seeds. Aim for 1/3 of the final volume, or so. Add some water, and blitz, to make a sesame paste. You can add a little sesame oil, or a bit of olive oil, to add flavor and smooth it more.

Add 2-3 cloves of garlic. Blitz. Add some olive oil and lemon juice, and blitz more. Add chickpea natto, and blend. Add water if it’s too thick. Keep adding beans and water.

If it’s too full, remove half, and add some water and beans, and blitz more, until you have a good batch.

Then do the same for the portion that was removed.

This hummus tastes like regular hummus. There’s a hint of natto nuttyness and bitterness, but it’s overwhelemed by the garlic and lemon.

The post Garbanzo Bean Natto and Hummus first appeared on 🍙.

Over low heat, heat half a cup of fat in a frying pan. You can use anything, but lard seems to be the one used in the cubes. I tend to use whatever I have around, especially if it’s used oil that’s been used for frying once. If find that tastes better because it has some smokyness.

Add a fist or two of flour. It’s around half a cup. If you add too much flour, just add more oil until it’s runny again.

Using a turner, “fry the flour” until it bubbles, and then until it almost stops bubbling. Then stir and cook it until it’s a pale, tan color.

Add an equal amount of curry powder. It should be half a cup to a cup.

Stir around to get it all mixed up, and then turn off the heat. Keep stirring to mix, and you should get something resembling a brown, crumbly, oily powder.

That’s your roux and curry mixture.

To use it, bring a small saucepan of water to a boil, and add a few tablespoons of the mixture. Stir it until the flour cooks and thickens.

Adjust the texture by adding the roux-curry mix, or adding water.

Add chopped vegetables and simmer over low heat until it’s cooked.

Alternatively, you can cook the veggies in the water, and add the curry-roux until it’s the desired thickness. Add a spoon, then stir a few minutes to cook it. Test, and then add more curry-roux to thicken it for a couple minutes. Repeat until it’s just right.

To flavor it, I use soy sauce, to taste. It usually takes at least a quarter cup of soy sauce.

The post How to Make Japanese Style Curry Roux first appeared on 🍙.

Futomaki and inari (without complicated fillings), is the OG Japanese American sushi from the early 1900s to the 1980s. The other common one, which seems to be the main sushi at temple and church bazaars until the 1990s, was chirashizushi, which is more like a mixed rice pilaf/salad with sushi rice. The 1980s and later, it’s nigiri like they have at restaurants.

There really isn’t anything “authentic”, except what people consider authentic.

Prior to the 1970s, Japanese people in America were largely disliked and suffered racism, and the culture and food were denigrated. So “authenticity” was what people in a largely segregated community considered authentic.

The big three:

Futomaki

Inari

Chirashi

This isn’t exactly how we made it, but it’s close.

The post Authentic Sushi first appeared on 🍙.

A thread about the risks of pedestaling anti-imperialist POC as inherently progressive, even when they aren’t.

The Origin of Japanese Kare

Originally 2023-11-05

https://www.diasporaco.com/blogs/journal/japanese-curry-the-curious-journey-of-colonization-and-globalization-that-led-to-japan-s-favorite-dish

It’s fascinating that curry was associated with the British. Then, later, Indian Curry became a thing, but less common. In a different article (which I need to find) it says the curry restaurant was owned by a guy organizing for Indian independence, and got Japanese VIPs to align with Indian nationalists against the British Empire. That’s to say, the movement to liberate India from British control was aligned with the Axis.

Anti-Western Imperialism and anti-Communist

Something I didn’t know, but articles like the above had me wondering about Japan collaborating with anti-British movements in Asia. This describes an Axis-enabled diplomacy by Japan with the Muslim world.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/managing-muslims-imperial-japan-islamic-policy-and-axis-connections-during-the-second-world-war/33287B638F0B1E22AA46B26C5AB1FA31

The following is more of a shit-talker page, but it has some info about Axis support for Palestine. The page is anti-Palestinian, trying to link Palestinans with Nazis.

https://www.instagram.com/arabreich/

One thing I thought was interesting was the post about swastikas on oranges from Palestine being sent to Germany. The Germans were offended that their symbol was being used for advertisement. (The irony is that, in the US, before WW2, the swastika was used for advertisement all the time.)

This trade made me think of a story my mother told about getting stuff during WW2. She was in Japan, and a child. One thing they got was a bunch of scarves. They had the fishnet pattern, like the khufiya. They also got sugar.

During wartime, everything was in short supply, so Japan turned to countries not as directly involved in the war at that time, or were hostile to Britain. This included some parts of the Arab world.

Japan and Jewish Refugees

Despite being aligned with Germany, Japan took in Jewish refugees during WW2. However, it wasn’t totally altruistic. The roots for this were in Japanese Imperialism, to settle Jewish people in Manchuria.

The weirdest part of this story is that some Japanese leadership had believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and were expecting the refugees to be wealthy, and maybe even set up a secret government that would move western money into Japan. They refugees were not only not wealthy, they were poor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire

USSR and its Jewish Oblast

Stalin was paranoid about Jews, and created an area, a kind of “homeland” for Jewish people, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast

In the USSR, they wanted the area to be a buffer against White Russians attacking the USSR. Ironically enough, Japan also wanted Jews to be a buffer, against Chinese, mainly Chinese Communists. Japan supported White Russians as part of their anti-Communist goals.

There’s some more info here: Imperial Japan and Islam; Uncommitted; Hillside Villa

The post Nationalist Right-Wing anti-Imperialism, Curry, Kare, Colonization first appeared on 🍙.

I’m going to set it outside, and see if that fixes it. The sunlight might cause it to ripen.

Small bits of mold are still on the plums, so I consider the batch “ruined”, and hopeless.

I took the softest plum, and took it apart, and tasted the flesh around the bit. I tasted just a slight hint of alcohol, and the strong flavor of ripening fruit. So maybe there is some potential to correct it.

The outer skin was firm, almost tough.

The spotty black mold is tough. It ruined much of the first batch, and even a bleach+water solution didn’t seem to remove it. Maybe it killed it, but the black dots were still on there. Avoid it by sanitizing everything.

The white/blue bread mold, however, seems to be easier to wash off.

Maesil-Cheong progress

I saw a post that showed someone putting a hole into the fruit, using a toothpick. So I figured I’d try that, as well. Maybe the insides would leak out.

The syrup tastes good!

My mix is brown sugar, rather than white sugar. So, it tastes like brown sugar, molasses, and fruit.

Other than that, I’ve been busy, and unable to keep working on the other parts of the project. I’ll get to them.

The post Alcohol Didn’t Fix the Mold first appeared on 🍙.

Here in the San Gabriel Valley, nearly everyone eats something connected to this plant.

Mexicans use chamoy sauce, which has a name almost identical to xi muoi. History says it’s the same thing. They also eat saladitos, dried salted plum, which is the same thing.

East Asians and Southeast Asians drink plum wine. That’s wine infused with the flavor of this plum.

Hawaiians talk about Li Hing Muoi (a Chinese name) or Crack Seed. It’s the soft, sweet version of saladitos, which is muoi.

Japanese eat umeboshi, which has become a huge fad food.

Koreans, I’ve just read, do all kinds of things with it, making beverages, sweet preserves,

Drink for the day: salted lemonade + beer + Tajin chamoy

A lot of the lemonade, made from mashed preserved lemons (preserved in salt), Micheloeb ultra, and a few squirts of Tajin chamoy lite.

Record of Plums

The post Prunus Mume, lost in translation first appeared on 🍙.

They both had some moldy plums, so I pulled the moldy ones.

The mold problem wasn’t that serious. It was very little bread mold, and small spots of black mold. So, I tried to wash off the black mold. The ones that released their mold got put into a tumbler:

I added to this, layers of salt, and then filled it halfway with some of the sugar and sake mixture, and swirled it around. I figured the alcohol would keep the mold down.

Then, I put a pint glass full of water on top to press it down and expel more juice (aka vinegar). (I didn’t use any of the juice for this batch.)

The plums that were good were put into big jars, salt added (because @koreatownclass said it looked like it wasn’t salted enough) topped off with the vinegar (by which I mean juice), and then weighted down with water filled-jars, and the big jars gently shaken on a soft surface, to get the fruit to settle. After a couple hours, the fruit was completely submerged.

I wish I had pictures, but I forgot to take them.

Small Batch Redo

I was concerned that the small batch I made wasn’t salted enough, and might be moldy, so I dumped the plums and juice out into a big plastic bowl, and inspected.

Fortunately, it wasn’t moldy, but 2/3 of the fruit was hard, and didn’t appear to be salted enough.

My salting technique has been to sprinkle salt on damp ume, but I thought that wasn’t working, because I’m using coarse grained salt. So I added regular salt, and mixed it with my hands, to coat everything.

Then I repacked it, into the same green tupperware, with the hard fruit on the bottom and soft fruit on the top. I figured, that the hard fruit would be under more pressure, with more salt, and more juice surrounding it.

The jar went back on top, and was taped down.

Chamoy?

I tasted the sweet maesil liquid, and it tasted like chamoy, without the chiles.

This has to be the origin of chamoy. I recently saw a video from Mexico showing how to make chamoy from umeboshi, but I’m pretty certain this sugar preserve is the actual origin of chamoy, because I’ve had chamoy candy from small markets (not the tamarindo pulp, but little sugared balls), and it’s the same flavor.

Also, the brown sugar tastes delicious.

I added more sugar to the big jar, and weighed it down with a pint glass of water, until the fruit was completely submerged under the liquid.

For reference, this medium/small sized jar of Vlasic pickles, and the generic pint glass, fit together perfectly for this.

The jar will hold around 20 fruit.

I don’t even need to move the fruit from the pressing crock to the storage.

For the rescue ume, I used a large Arcoroc tumbler, and a pint glass. It works okay, but I don’t think this combination is as good.

I had a coffee jar with some of the maesil in there, but repacked it into a smaller plastic jar, so that it would be “taller”, and packed more sugar on top.

In this taller jar, the liquid submerged more of the fruit.

Korean-ish Michelada Time

I had a can of Micheloeb Ultra, so, I used it to rinse out the sugar from the coffee jar.

I poured it into a pint glass, and then sprinkled some Korean chile on top. Then I finished it off with a squirt of lemon juice.

The chili was Wang Red Pepper Powder (Coarse). It’s not that spicy. 5000-10000 on the Scoville scale. It’s more bitter and smoky than hot, and tasted good with the bitter beer.

I stirred it up, and it was delicious. It was fruity, sweet, sour, dry, and bitter. It wasn’t salty like a michelada, because there’s no Clamato in there.

(I looked up if someone else had done this. Kenji Lopez-Alt did one, but didn’t use ume-infused sugar. His was more about chile.)

The Moldy Ones

I’m taking the fallen fruit and dropping them into a bucket of water, to allow them to ferment, so the flesh will come off easily.

The moldy fruit will be dumped into different buckets, for the same purpose.

I took the moldy fruit and let it rest overnight in water, with a little bit of bleach in it. In the afternoon, around 1/3 of the fruit was pretty clean. 2/3 was still covered with enough mold that I didn’t trust it.

I’m leaving them out for a day to finish ripening up.

Once they’re ready, they’ll go into water buckets.

As the flesh comes off, I’ll prepare them for germination, and refrigerate them.

The post Umeboshi and Maesil Rot first appeared on 🍙.

My mom and I clashed over how to do this. She was of the “press large batches”, don’t clean too much, and salt enough school of thought.

I’m of the “remove the stem”, wash with alcohol, and “press small batches” school. I’m not Mr. Clean, but I do the bare minimum, in my opinion.

She also believes that if the ume contact stainless steel, it’ll ruin it. I didn’t see the logic in that, but there might be something to it. The stuff is acidic.

So we are a week in, and one big batch is ruined. It’s a few pounds. The two culprits: black mold, and blue mold.

Black mold around the stem.

Black mold grew around the stem.

Blue-white mold, which looks and smells like bread mold, spread in spots here and there as well.

I managed to salvage a cup of ume pulp, and have salted it to make ume paste.

Causes of Mold?

I think it’s a few different things:

1. Not removing the stem! The way I remove them is to soak the ume for an hour or so. The stem gets soft, and can be pushed aside with a chopstick or toothpick point. See photo above.
2. Wrapping it in a bag. My mom used a plastic bag to line an enamel pot, because the pot had chipped paint with exposed metal. I think this was a good idea, generally, to avoid the rust, but folding the bag over was a bad idea, because it didn’t allow the ume to breathe. Also, she didn’t sterilize the bag (it was a shopping bag). She just washed it out, and probably didn’t use soap. Photo is below.
3. Not rinsing it with alcohol. She just doesn’t do it. I use vodka, or even sake, to do a rinse or soak, to sterilize the surface. I think it also arrests ripening if the ume is cut or broken.

Here’s a picture of the bag it was in. In this picture, I’m washing away some of the salt and mold, and hoping to desalinate it a bit, in preparation for removing seeds.

This is the press setup in the kitchen. Yeah, it’s out in the open. But this had no mold. These haven’t been cleaned too much, but, they also were not put into any stainless steel. So, maybe there’s something to that. However, I think the fact it can breathe helps avoid some mold. The ume surface is always drying out.

I also have another batch sandwiched between the two blue dish pans. This doesn’t breathe, but, so far, no mold. I prepared this batch by cleaning it off, removing the stems, but did not rinse it with vodka.

I am NOT recommending the dishpans. I don’t think it’s a good way to press, because the pressure is spread out too much. I actually like this, so far:

This is a jar of water, pushing on a plastic lid, that’s pushing down onto a batch of ume in a tupperware. The painters tape is to hold the jar in place.

My prior attempts at umeboshi were done in similar, jar-like arrangements.

Here’s another, tiny batch, in a pint glass, with a narrower plastic cup pressing down on the five ume.

This one is a little weird, because most of these have been infusing a jar of vodka and sake for several months. In the past, they formed some mold, and I wanted to try and fix them.

The alcohol treatment worked, but maybe too well. The plums stopped ripening. Some were hard, and some were soft. So I put them into the glass, salted them, and pressed them under a glass of water. Some of the liquid came out.

Basically, these ume are dead. They’re sterile.

With the help of @koreatownclass, I was taught how to make sugar-preserved ume. These are rescued ume. I took fallen fruit, which cannot be used for umeboshi, and the more damaged looking fruit, cleaned off the nastiest parts, and soaked them in sake. Again, the alcohol seemed to arrest the ripening.

I thought it would taste good with sugar, so I added a lot of brown sugar.

@koreatownclass told me to remove them from the alcohol, pack with sugar equal to the weight of the ume.

I removed the alcohol, for the most part (I didn’t rinse them off, and re-used the jar).

The first batch after 1.5 days:

The fruit was ripening, and packing down, and dissolving the sugar. I don’t think I added enough sugar. It smelled both good and funky, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.

I added more ume, and more sugar.

I also started a small batch from the rest of the sake-cleaned fruit. (I also washed and removed stems!)

This will require more sugar.

The infused sake was sweet and alcoholic, and tasted a lot like tamarindo. I had to dilute it and add ice, and a little lemon. It’s really tasty.

These sugar-preserved ume are sitting on the counter. They will ferment at room temperature, and be ready in three months, I have been told.

The bad ume are going to be salvaged in this way:

I’ve soaked and rinsed away the salt that I could. Some (that weren’t too moldy, and partially ripe) were salvaged to make an experimental ume paste of semi-ripe ume and salt. I used about 3% to 4% salt. I figure this will eventually ripen and become edible. Or it’ll grow horrible mold and be inedible.

The rest were kept in the bag and put into a plastic bucket, and I added a little splash of bleach.

I figure that the salt will continue to leach out, and then the bleach will kill the surface mold. I’ll drain it off after a day, and maybe I can wash the fruit off, and set it out to ripen. Once it’s ripe, I’ll dump them into a bucket of water, to ferment.

Once it’s fermented, I can rub the fruit off and recover the stone. I’m going to then try and grow the stone into a tree.

Likewise, some fruit is still dropping from the tree. This fruit is being tossed into a bucket of water, in the sun, to ferment. Once I recover those stones, I’ll try to grow them as well.

The post Umeboshi Misadventures first appeared on 🍙.

If you have a pickle press, it’s easy to make takana with mustard greens (they have them at the Chinese store if you don’t have a Japanese store nearby).

Separate and soak the leaves for a few minutes in warm water, rubbing them to remove any dirt.

Remove any rotting bits of leaf.

Sprinkle a teaspoon or so of salt on the bottom of the pickle press crock.

Put two layers of leaves in the crock. Shake some salt onto the leaves.

Repeat until all the leaves are in there.

Add a few dried small dried red chiles into the crock.

Put the lid on, and screw down the press to apply pressure.

Let it sit on the counter a few hours, and then press it down some more.

Leave it to ferment. The liquid will come out of the leaves.

The next day, open it up and taste the brine. If it tastes like seawater, it’s OK. If it’s less salty, add a little salt, around a half teaspoon at a time, until it’s saltier than seawater.

Press it for one or two more days on the counter, until it develops a flavor you like. You can speed this up by swishing the brine around to get it more uniformly salty.

When it seems done, I like to loosen the press, and swish it around. This allows some brine back into the leaf.

Use it, or continue to age it in the refrigerator, to mellow it out. (You can just put it into a plastic container to ferment in the refrigerator.)

If you want a less peppery flavor, a softer leaf, or less risk of funky flavors, you can parboil each leaf for a few seconds in hot water below boiling temperature.

Related Posts

• How to Reheat Leftover Rice by Steaming on the Stove
• Riceball Restaurants (Onigiri, Musubi)
• Authentic Sushi

The post Takana Riceball first appeared on 🍙.

(Mochi is the rice, it’s not the combination of rice and ice cream. Mochi ice cream was invented by Mikawaya in Los Angeles. Mochi with sugar and sweet fillings are called “mochigashi” which translates to “mochi candy”. Mochigashi is also called “manju”, the etymology which probably relates to Korean “mandu”, a filled wrapper “dumpling”.)

I’m compiling this list for people who are distant from one of the handful of areas with Japanese folks.

If you want your business to be included on this list, or have a link added to your website, contact me here.

California

Fugetsu-do, Los Angeles

Chikara Mochi, Gardena

Shuei-do, San Jose

Osaka-ya, Sacramento

Hawaii

(Come on. You can go to any supermarket.)

The post Where can I buy traditional mochi? first appeared on 🍙.