playing with fire and water

pokeweed

(Ooops. The photos that originally appeared in this post were of Japanese knotweed, destined for a future post. They were placed here by mistake— the result of trying to publish in haste after working too many hours. Unexplicably, the pokeweed photos that were meant for this article are missing from my files. Until I can restore them or  find the opportunity to replace them, this post will appear  photoless)
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Farmers say that a weed is just a plant in the wrong place and there's truth in that. Jewelweed, for example, look lovely in hedgerows, but gangly in a garden.

Unlike cultivated plants that fuss over the right conditions, weeds are opportunists just trying to survive. My issue has always been with the bullies that come out of nowhere and threaten to take over the neighborhood. They just don't play nice.

I'm all for giving Darwinian theories a stage in the wild, but not in my gardens.

Of all of the weeds that I've battled over the years, I'd classify pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) among the most obnoxious. Certainly, it would top the tenacious list for its long rambling roots that reach far and dig deep. Pokeweed waits until you turn your back to go from innocuous sprouts to monstrous copses that reach ten feet in height.

Pokeweed, though, is not without its charms. It is a native plant, so that gives it a right to stake its claim. Its long panicles of white flowers are attractive and even smell mildly sweet— and I'm a sucker for scented flowers. Songbirds love the deep purple berries whose juice was used as ink during the Civil War. In fact, the Declaration of Independence was written with poke ink and remains legible after two and a quarter centuries. So there's that. But all of those virtues aside, there is one other that undeniably endears it to me: pokeweed is edible.

Yes, pokeweed has a long and rich history as a wild food, but it is also potentially poisonous!

In the rural south, the young leaves (known as poke sallet, or polk salet) were collected in the spring and cooked in three changes of water to leech out the toxins, of which there are at least three different types. I can only guess at how many mountain folk fell seriously ill after consuming the highly toxic roots, and mature stems and leaves and eventually realizing that only the thoroughly cooked young shoots and leaves were safe to consume.

Despite the risks, the regional appeal of poke sallet was strong enough to inspire a folk song "Polk Salad Annie", recorded by Elvis, and a commercially canned product by The Allen Canning Company, who ceased production in 2000 because of "the difficulty of finding people interested in picking poke". Today, pokeweed is still celebrated in annual Poke Sallet Festivals that take place in Harlan, KY and Gainesboro, TN, and its legacy lives on in a new generation of foragers and interest in historical foods.

The internet is full of old-timers poetic waxings about pokeweed. But for every fond memory, there is an equally passionate warning against its consumption. Jean Weese, of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, has this to say:
   "The boiling process removes some of the toxins but certainly not all of them. I suggest that people avoid this plant no matter how many times your mother or grandmother may have prepared it in the past and no matter how good it tasted. Why would you want to eat something that we know is toxic when there are so many other non-toxic plants out there we can eat?" 

It's a good question— one I've asked myself many times.

Plants are fascinating on so many levels. As the primary source of phytochemicals, they have the ability to do harm or to heal. It's not unusual for one plant to do both. Pokeweed contains chemical compounds that can make us sick, yet it is sold as a dietary supplement. And an antiviral protein unique to pokeweed (PAP) is being studied (and showing promise) in treatments of cancer, herpes, and HIV.

Minor ailments aside, I'm a physically healthy person (or so my doctor tells me). And let's assume that I'm also mentally sound, if only because I have no overwhelming desire to poison myself. Why then would I knowingly consume something that can harm me? It's not a decision I make lightly. My approach is careful and methodical: 

1. Research, research, research. Proceed only when confident.
2. At first, take small bite, chew, spit out, wait 24 hours for side effects.
3. If there are none, go back for another small bite, chew, swallow, wait another 24 hours. 

At the very least, it's a three day proposition. Only then would I consume a moderate meal of any questionable plant. But that's just the how. The why is more complicated. 

Eating plants that were prepared and enjoyed by people of a different time, place or culture matters to me because it connects us. Maybe that's purely idealistic, but it's this romantic attraction to food that keeps me engaged on an emotional level.

On another level, it appeals to my sense of discovery. Throughout history there have been food pioneers who consumed strange things for the first time and forged paths of deliciousness for the rest of us. Consider the brave individuals who dared to bite into a pungent gnarled root of horseradish or sip a foul-smelling fermented beverage before anyone else had. That would not have been me! When it comes to consuming potentially toxic substances, my curiosity is trumped by reason and altruism by self-preservation. My sense of discovery extends only to foods that are new-to-me, and must first be positively identified and known to be edible.

Perhaps, what most compels me to seek out and eat plants like pokeweed is simply to taste it. Every new flavor that I experience adds to my  catalog of flavors— a tool that is more useful than a sharp knife. Flavor is the foundation and defining factor of any good dish. Without it, technique is gimmickery and composition is arbitrary. A chefs repetoire of flavors is no different than a painters palette or a writers vocabulary; diversity allows for a broader range of expression.

Had I never tasted rhubarb, I would not have it as a reference to describe the sour vegetal flavor of raw pokeweed. And had I never experienced beets and spinach, I could not use them as examples to compare the earthy mineral flavor of cooked pokeweed.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll eat something that I can say "tastes like pokeweed".

 

Peter Hertzmann's floating island: the evolution of a dish

One of the most gratifying aspects of blogging is the private interaction with readers through emails. I love reading your thoughtful questions, comments, and ideas. It's these interactions that often become fuel for the fire.
Two years ago, I worked with a young cook who had mentioned a book that had helped him to advance his knife skills: Knife Skills Illustrated by Peter Hertzmann. Imagine my surprize when a few days later I found mail from Peter in my inbox!
Peter Hertzmann* and I have exchanged dozens of emails since then and I've always found his insights stimulating. Last month he began sharing a misozuke project (complete with photos) that was particularly inspiring and I asked if I could share its evolution here on the blog.
This is how it began: 

Hi Linda,
You've created a miso-zuke monster—me.
I've now done oysters, scallops, endive, radishes, and cucumbers.  I originally was interested because of your article where you pickled some egg yolks. I wanted to do quail, rather than chicken eggs. I was never able to get the eggs cooked just right, so I sort of gave up. Then a couple of weeks ago, I started playing with peeling eggs with acetic acid. In the case of quail eggs, an overnight soak in white vinegar leaves a shell-less egg with both of the membranes intact. The egg feels a bit like a full water balloon. I threw a few of these eggs in shiro miso and nothing happened, or so it seemed. After two weeks, they appeared for all intents and purposes the same as when they have been first immersed in the miso. So I'd thought I break one and look inside. The membrane was a bit tough, but I was able to pick a small tear in one end with some forceps. The white came gushing out—not quite as fluid as water, but not really a jelly. Inside was a firm, pickled yolk that I could carefully pull and then wash all the white away from. The taste was definitely that of a yolk, but the presence of miso was also pronounced. With a light sprinkle of ichimi, the task was marvelous.
A new dozen is now pickling to see if this was a fluke, or not. Thanks again for turning me on to this technique.

Several things interested me about Peters process: 
1. dissolving the shell with vinegar allowed him to pickle the whole raw egg much more efficiently than waiting for the miso to penetrate the shell. This step alone opened up many ideas.
2. the texture of the cured yolk.
3. the miso-flavored egg whites.

A few weeks later, I received the following email:

Here's an update on the quail eggs. Like before, I removed the shells by soaking them in white vinegar (6% acetic acid) overnight. The following day I rubbed off any remaining shell with my fingers. The eggs, minus their shells, were immersed in shiro miso for two weeks. After rinsing they looked like…



Other than appearing a bit browner than originally, their appearance and firmness was unchanged. I used a pair of small 45° forceps to tear a small hole in the tapered end of each egg and drained them into a bowl. The "white" was as viscous as water and brown in color…

After removing from the membranes and rinsing, the yolks, which were firm but not hard, looked like…

I decided to cook the whites. I placed them in a small glass bowl and covered it with plastic film. This was placed in simmering water until the whites no longer jiggled. After cooling, the texture of the cooked whites was similar to a grainy custard. They tasted very much like the miso they had soaked in. I had hoped that they would cook hard so that I could sieve them for the final dish, but that was not to be.
About 4 hours later I plated the eggs…

As you can see the yolk weeps. (The flower is a rosemary blossom.)
I'm intrigued by your suggestion to make a meringue with the whites. These eggs didn't produce much white to work with so I'm going to try the same process with a chicken egg so I can get more white.

 

Then a few weeks later I received the following update:

Here's the followup on the previous email. I used vinegar to once again remove the shell from an egg; this time a chicken egg. I started with two but one broke with moderate handling during the shell-removable phase. The remaining egg was covered with shiro miso for 21 days. At the end it looked like below.


I should have measured the size after the shell was removed because I think it was then it grew. I should have weighed it also. Oh, well. It's obviously larger, but I can't say why.
I opened the egg onto a plate.


Normal eggs have four layers of albumin, two thick and two thin. It now appeared to have three distinct types of albumen.
The yolk was similar to an egg cooked at 64°C (and I did roll, freeze, and cut this into ribbons). In the picture I had already crushed it a bit with my fingers.

The white beat fairly normally in a stand mixer.

And they seemed fairly stable, at least for an hour before they were all destroyed.
I tried doing two things with them. The first was to make sort of a floating island in dashi. As soon as the egg white hit the hot soup, it started to collapse.

The final texture was similar to a kitchen sponge, but the flavor in the dashi was quite nice. It would be interesting to see if a little xanthum gum or versawhip would help stabilize them in the heat. I also tried some meringues, but they were a complete disaster. Besides collapsing most of the way, they turned brown like a cookie and tasted very salty. Maybe if they were stabilized they would have fared better. IN their plain form they weren't stable enough to pipe, but if they were, it would be interesting to make soup croutons out of them.

In a followup email, I asked Peter some questions about his experiment:

L: I'd be interested to know why the egg grew, or swelled.
P: I would too. I wonder if the hydrostatic pressure of a normal egg is slightly positive so that it expands once the restraint of the shell is removed. I guess it would be possible to conduct a small experiment, but I'm not ready to sacrifice a dozen eggs at the moment.

L:You said you made meringues, but they weren't stable... I'm assuming that you didn't use sugar because of the savory application.  I like the idea of a salty/sweet meringue. Or perhaps a macaron?
P: Yep. No sugar, or anything else for that matter. Give the salt and sweet meringue a try and let me know how it is. I was thinking just savory, since the miso flavor is pretty pronounced.

A short while later, I received another email from Peter expressing a desire to use methylcellulose to stabilize the 'floating island' and he asked about ratios. I made some suggestions, and he responded:

I started with your suggestions and, as is normal for me, went my own way a bit. I also downloaded the Methocel tech sheet. It sounded like hot hydration would work better for me since I'm working in very small quantities.
I hydrated 1g of Methocel F50 in 20ml of simmering water, water that was boiled in microwave and then measured with a syringe. I stuck this in the frig for a few minutes. It was about 18°C when I pulled it out. I separated 1 extra-large egg white, about 30g. When i whisked the egg white and Methocel/water together is seemed to foam fairly rapidly so I decided to try whipping it in the KitchenAid. This took about 15 to 20 minutes to form soft peaks. I spooned this into hot hon-dashi to cook. I tried Chang's method of a 30-second steam followed by basting. I also tried a 60-second steam with less basting. The later was easier to do since I wanted to cook four at a time. In either case the linear shrinkage was about 50%, but still acceptable. I added ao-nori to the mixture part way through to give it a bit of color. I shot the picture quickly with my iPhone so the color is a bit off.

The final mouth feel of the island was similar to a spongy hard-cooked egg white. Not the same as a floating island made with sugar, but very interesting. I feel good about the results, at least enough to drop a couple more eggs into a vinegar bath and start the pickling again. I'd like to eventually serve the egg white in a double-strength chicken consomme and load the egg white with a fresh herb, maybe oregano. Everything should be ready by May 6th. I already have some guests scheduled for dinner that night. Little do they know…
As always, thanks for your help.

*Peter's bio: Cooking for Peter is a serial obsession. After spending 25 years studying Chinese cooking, history, and culture, in the mid 1990s, Peter started applying the same energy to French cookery. Over a period of 15 years he taught himself to read French, studied the history of dishes back to the 14th century, and worked in eight different restaurant kitchens in France to hone his skills. In 1999, he started an e-zine about French gastronomy and in 2011 added a weekly blog of amuse-bouche and mignardise to the site. In 2007, Peter wrote the book Knife Skills Illustrated: A Users Manual, now used for teaching in a number of cooking schools and restaurants. He has taught knife-skills classes around the country and in Canada. He has made many television appearances, including The Martha Stewart Show. He recently demonstrated knife skills for four hours at the Exploratorium for their After Dark: Gastronomy event. Nowadays, besides teaching recreational classes, he teaches knifes skills and general cooking twice a week at the San Mateo County Jail and twice a month at JobTrain, a vocational training center specializing in providing job skills for the underprivileged. As a charter member of The Butchers Guild, Peter is currently editing the official Guild Butchery Glossary. In July, he once again will be presenting a paper at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking. The subject for this year’s Symposium is Wrapped and Stuffed Foods, and Peter will be addressing how Modernist cuisine relates to the issue.

parsley oil

It's hard to imagine cooking without parsley. A workhorse in the kitchen, parsley's bright herbaceous flavor lets it go places where other flavors can't. Equally at home in the background or at center stage, it is perhaps most useful at bridging disparate flavors.

In the garden, it's one of the last herbs to succumb to frost, and quick to resurrect in the spring. As a biennial, it's life cycle is limited to two growing seasons, but letting the seeds ripen and self-sow in the second year ensures successive crops.

In my everyday cooking, I can think of few dishes that wouldn't benefit from a bit of parsley and I'll admit that I use it less judiciously than black pepper, whose distinct flavor can easily overwhelm and is often overused as a seasoning. With that said, crushed black pepper and freshly minced parsley make a fine seasoning.

It's so versatile that it's rare that I find myself with leftover parsley. In those instances, I stockpile the stems in the freezer and toss leaves into salads. Or, when there's a considerable amount, I make parsley oil.

Making parsley oil is as simple as pureeing parsley leaves in a blender with oil and straining through a coffee filter. The more oil used, the faster it will strain and the higher the yield, but there will be less flavor.

In spring, the oil is fantastic drizzled on seasonal fare: smashed new potatoes and peas (with a sprinkle of nutmeg), asparagus veloute, roasted fiddleheads, fresh ricotta with honey, and it will make anything that comes off the grill sing. It's also a flavorful medium in which to poach, or confit, fish if you keep the temperature below 50C so the flavor doesn't turn woody. That's where this cuttlefish tentacle was heading, but looking at the parsley root that it was to be served with, it made more sense to place the flavor there. Raw parsley root tastes a lot like fresh parsley, but becomes sweet and earthy when cooked. Gently cooking it in parsley oil and letting it macerate overnight transforms the flavor and color to a bright, beautiful green.

Celebrating the flavors of spring: cuttlefish, parsley root, meyer lemon, and toasted almond gremolata.

butternut squash fusilli

There's an hors d'oeuvre on our fall/winter catering menu that we refer to as "the squash box". It consists of a hollow cube of roasted butternut squash, filled with goat cheese and crushed pistachios. When we serve them inverted and lined up on trays, they appear to be simple bite-sized blocks of squash— the hidden filling comes as a surprise. The squash boxes exemplify the combination of appealing flavor and clean presentation that we strive for in our passed hors d'oeuvres, so naturally, we were pleased by their popularity. But back in the kitchen, they were a real pain in the ass to make.
At first, we hollowed them by scoring 1/4" thick walls with a paring knife, then meticulously removed the centers with a melon baller. This was manageable when making a few dozen, but when the numbers stretched into the hundreds, we had to rethink the process.  
Chef Martin is a great thinker, a creative problem solver, and a lover of tools. His first attempt at a solution was to have a square metal die fabricated to score the inner wall. In theory, it should've worked perfectly, but in reality, the metal was too thick and split the walls of the boxes. Undeterred, he pulled out the power tools— specifically, a drill fitted with a Forstner bit. It was a beautifully quick and effective solution to a previously tedious task.
Here's a short clip of Martin in action. Please excuse his parting gesture—apparently, his hands are not a fan of the camera.

 

Delighted as we were by this streamlined solution and the clean holes, I was more interested in what came out of them: long, coiled ribbons of butternut squash that looked identical to fusilli pasta. 
Here's a closer look: 

In this by-product of the squash boxes, I saw an elegant alternative to vegetable pasta. But cooking the butternut squash fusilli posed a critical problem. I tried every possible application of heat: wet, dry, slow, fast, but in each instance, just as it passed into a palatably tender stage, they would go limp and lose definition. I knew the solution was somewhere in the folds of my memory, ready to access, but there I failed, too.
Memory is a curious thing. Sometimes it's as direct and linear as a gunshot, sometimes it's like fishing in a labrinth.
I felt a tug on the lure while reasearching nixtamalization for a pickling project. It bit down in my memory of the 2011 Star Chefs Congress. When I reeled it in, at the end of the line were 2 gleaming nuggets of information.
The first was courtesy of Andoni Luis Aduriz, who, in a workshop, demonstrated a fossilization technique where salsify was soaked in a lime (the mineral, not the fruit) solution to firm the surface before cooking. From my memory, his claim that "any fruit with pectin will react with lime to make calcium pectate". 
The second nugget was from Paul Liebrandt's mainstage presentation from the later that day. In a similar technique, he used calcium lactate to form a skin on the surface of jerusalem artichoke, allowing it to keep it's shape while the interior cooked to a creamy texture, without loss of moisture.
So, it seemed there were two possible solutions that produced parallel results. One, alkaline and caustic, the other a neutral salt.
I went with the calcium lactate. In the photo below, you can see the results. In the foreground is the squash that soaked in a 1% calcium lactate solution for 2 hours, then air dried, and roasted— tender, but still defined. In the background is the untreated squash roasted on the same pan— limp in comparison.

Solutions, like a great catch, are worth waiting for. 
That's an easy one to remember.

butternut squash ✢ black kale ✢ goat gouda ✢ kale stem 

citrus in eight courses

Last month, I invited a group of friends to my house for dinner. There was no real occassion for it except that I had a rare weekend off and I wanted to cook a proper meal in my kitchen. Also, my refrigerator was bursting with beautiful citrus that needed to be celebrated.

I planned the meal with the same approach that I would take for a client: taking into account food preferences, what was fresh and available, limitations of time, space, and equipment. The major difference with this meal was that I had the luxury of time to document it by recording recipes and photographing the preparations and presentations.

I thought that I would share the meal with you here in a series of posts, but they grew unwieldy and dragged on forever. Lucky for us, there are more space efficient and visually appealing options for sharing documents. Enjoy.

Open publication - Free publishing - More chef

confessions of a visual whore

At this time last year our new kitchen was just taking shape. As the first of the cabinets were being installed, a rented dumpster was exiting the driveway with the remnants of our old kitchen, and a large part of my life.

Gutting the kitchen and dining room was cathartic, a feeling that carried over into an overwhelming desire to purge the rest of the house. I spent a week clearing out the cellar and attic, bewildered by the amount of stuff that we (mostly I) had accumulated. 

Most of it was irrelevent and obsolete: boxes and boxes of magazines, notebooks, and clippings that spanned a wide range of interests in things that I had once wanted to cook, taste, grow, build, make, paint, learn. I questioned why, if not out of nostalgia, I still held onto them. I told myself, and my family when we moved them from house to house, that those boxes contained my inspiration. But when it takes up that much space, inspiration becomes a burden. It was time to let go.

Truth is, I stopped looking to those boxes when two forces came into play. The first was recognizing that inspiration shouldn't be a burden, it could be as spontaneous and organic as intuition. If you can already see the world in a grain of sand, then inspiration is everywhere, always. That realization was like learning that I could cook without recipes, and go on to teach others to cook as well. Inspiration works that way too. Once you learn how to turn it on, there is no course but to turn it loose. That's why I started this blog, which brings me to the second force: the Internet.

Those of you who remember life before computers, were witness to the revolution. On my first PC I was able to scan images and text and organize them in easy to access files. No more rummaging through boxes. They needed no real estate and would never occupy space in a landfill. Then came the internet, a universe of stimulus and information, and the capability to connect and share in a scope that I never imagined. 

Depending on your needs and comfort level, there are a multitude of applications that allow you to connect and share, but few also provide inspiration and the capacity to save and organize. Nothing stimulates my imagination like images and design, I can happily spend hours sifting through visual aggregate sites like stumbleupon, foodgawker, notcot, etsy, and all of the tangental sites I've discovered through them. There are so many talented people making beautiful things that inspire me, that I want to save them all. But inspiration, and obsessing about beautiful things, is an addiction. Wasn't I just replacing those cardboard boxes with an endless column of bookmarks?

I've often fantasized about making a site where I could paste collections of linkable images without the distraction of excessive text. And, because ads are the aesthetic death of websites, there would be none of that. How thrilling it would be to scroll through a page of hand-picked inspiration— my bookmarks in images.  I've also fantasized about doing the same with this blog, condensing it to a collection of photos that would link back to the post— a visual archive that didn't require endless scrolling and searching by month.

Someone heard my prayer and invented Pinterest. With 13 million users in just 10 months, there must've been many people on their knees.

To begin using Pinterest, you must request an invitation and be prepared to wait for a week or two. Why? I don't know. Then you download a button to your bookmark bar that lets you pin images to your boards hosted on their site. I was able to archive nearly 300 post photos from PWFW in just a few hours, counting the time spent scrolling down memory lane. I rarely go back into my own blog, let alone others. Pinterest could change that.

http://pinterest.com/foodplayer/playing-with-fire-and-water/

 

barley salad

Salads, like a wardrobe, change with the seasons. In winter, grains stand in for the leafy greens that are abundant in the warmer months and I look to my windowsill instead of the herb garden for flavor power ups. Fruits and vegetables, the mementos of summer, are culled from jars instead of bins.

The dressings for these salads vary as widely as the components, even within the parameters of a classic vinaigrette: 3 parts oil to 1 part acid. Oils pressed from seeds, nuts, grains, and fruit each possess their own personalities and can be further customised with aromatics. And oils aren't limited to plants— hot rendered animal fats can transform coarse greens and grains into something special.

Acids offer even more variety as they can be made from, or flavored with, almost anything and needn't be restricted to just vinegar and citrus. Sour fruit juices such as verjus, tamarind, passion fruit, crabapple, rose hips, plums, rhubarb, and pomegranate make fruity dressings bursting with sweet, tangy flavors when the oil ratio is lowered to double the amount of juice. Most milk products lack acidic presence, but kefir whey makes a kicky dressing that feels light on the palate with a milky background. 

With a wide and varied palette of flavors at hand, your mind and palate will never be bored, and a meal as ordinary as salad, with little effort, can be made extraordinary.

This barley salad was dressed with passion fruit juice, rice bran oil, shallots, and hishio, a type of barley miso. Herbs from the windowsill include mitsuba (Cryptotaenia japonica), saltwort (Salsola kornarovil), and sedum (Sempervivum tectorum). And from the pantry are: burdock ribbons pickled in coconut vinegar, Rainier cherries preserved in umeboshi and simple syrup, and ground cherries (Physalis pruinosa) preserved in sake.

beet roses

If asked, I'd say that the rose is my favorite flower, but my husband knows better than to bring any home today. It's not that roses on Valentine's Day is a cliché... something so classic and eternally beautiful can never be that. I guess my objection is the mass-marketed, factory-farmed, ridiculously-priced aspect. Yet, as symbols of love and romance, they are undeniable. So, while there will be no long-stemmed, hothouse-forced, All-American Beauties in my house today, there will still be roses! 

bull's blood beet chips on Couer de Bray (cow)

candy cane beet chips on Bonne Bouche (goat)

microwave beet chips

beets
1 quart water
1 Tblsp kosher salt 
olive oil in a mister bottle 

Slice the beets thinly on a mandolin so that they are slightly thicker than a credit card. (If your beets are round and you wish to make roses by embedding them in cheese, they will need to be tapered on one end like a rose petal.)
Add the salt to the water (yes, it's a lot of salt, but neccessary for proper dehydration) and bring to a boil. Drop in about a dozen beet slices at a time and boil for about 3 minutes, (adding more water to maintain the level or it will become too salty as it evaporates) or until they become flexible. Remove beets with a slotted spoon and spread out on paper towels. Blot the tops dry with additional towels. Transfer slices to a sheet of parchment paper on a flat, microwave-proof dish in a single layer. Spray the tops lightly with olive oil. Flip them over and mist again. Place beets in microwave and cook on high power for 1-2 minutes, depending on the wattage of your microwave (run a trail with a few beets to confirm the time— they should become crisp within a minute of removing them from oven). Repeat with remaining beets. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.

sashimi rose and a celebration of fermentation

My first batch of shoyu has been brewing for six months now and it's just hitting its stride. I've tended it faithfully, stirring at least once a week and skimming off harmless surface mold as it formed, but for the longest time it was barely more interesting than a pot of bean soup. It wasn't until the end of its fourth month that I noticed a marked difference as the mold quit and the moromi (solids) began congregating on the surface, concealing clear dark liquid beneath. When I stir it now, the aroma is intoxicating in the nuanced complex way of fermented things. Soon, I'll begin filtering small batches to mark its progress and though I don't yet know when it'll be done, I expect it to continue improving with time.

While I wait for the shoyu, there's a fresh batch of mirin to celebrate— and real mirin is a just cause for celebration. I'll restrain myself from a full-on rant about what passes for mirin in the commercial market; you have only to read the list of ingredients and if it begins with glucose and ends with corn syrup, you should wonder why you're being asked to pay four dollars for ten ounces of sugar water. Hon- mirin (true mirin) contains no added sugar, though it is remarkably sweet— the result of koji/rice saccharification. The aroma of hon-mirin is unlike anything else, fruity and floral with a delicate flavor that can be sipped like a fine sake*. In fact, I see great potential for hon-mirin in cocktails and as an alternative dessert wine/spirit. And, an unexpected perk of brewing mirin is the lees— a heady cream that is left after pressing the moromi and before filtering.

The celebration continues with hishio, a hybrid of mugi (barley) miso and lactic-fermented fruits and vegetables. Hishio is made entirely with barley koji that is fermented in water and salt for about a week before adding vegetables (asian pear, cucumber, and eggplant in mine) that are seperately fermented in salt. The loose, miso-type condiment is then fermented in a warm environment and is ready in four months.

In even less time, a lively yuzu kosho can be made in a just over a week at room temperature. This particular batch was made late last year, when piney green yuzu were still available. They were zested with a microplane and blended with the restrained heat of charred, minced shishito peppers and salt. After it fermented for eight days, I blended in the last of the kinome leaves just before my tree went dormant for the winter. I'm sad to see the bottom of my jar come into view as fresh yuzu won't be available again until the end of the year, but I'm equally gratefully for the bounty; a consequence of soil, bacteria, and patience.

(left) mirin: clockwise from top- filtered, lees, moromi
(right) from top- hishio, yuzu kosho

sashimi rose
hiramasa  •  mirin lees  •  yuzu kosho puree  •  strained hishio

* most mirin brewers add water to the rice, koji, and shochu to bring the finished alcohol down to about 14%. I used straight shochu (20%), no water, and can only assume that my mirin comes in at between 17%- 20% alcohol by volume.  

salmon pumpernickel leek

A variation of the previous dish with salmon sausage, chocolate rye pumpernickel (in pudding form), micro leeks, and oca.

pumpernickel pudding

50g charred leeks, cooked through
30g pumpernickel bread, trimmed of crusts and crumbled 
50g kefir
35g water 
20g beer
2g salt
15g neutral oil

Place all of the ingredients except the oil in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Slowly drizzle in the oil with the motor running. If necessary, add more oil to thicken, or water to thin. Adjust seasoning. 

Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) is a species of oxalis that has long been cultivated in the Andes, where it is the second most popular tuber next to the potato, and more recently in New Zealand. Unlike common oxalis (wood sorrel), oca forms prolific fleshy tubers that can be eaten raw or cooked. In its raw form, they are crisp and moderatly acidic, like an apple without the sugar.

Oca contains fairly high concentrations of oxalates, an organic acid that can lead to kidney stones. Because the oxalates are found mostly in the skin, they can be diminished by peeling, cooking, or by exposing the tubers to direct sunlight for several hours.

Cultivating oca requires a long growing season. To get a headstart, they were sprouted in a bright, moist environment. And now that they're off to a good start they'll go directly into pots, where they'll live until the ground warms up. By late autumn, I hope to have a new crop of these delicious nuggets.