Cooking with Japanese Pickles

January 17, 2022
Yokoyama, a cooking instructor specializing in Nagano regional cuisine, makes her English-language debut with an enlightening guide to making Japanese-style pickles at home. She begins by listing the necessary equipment—ceramic containers, for example, are great for pickling because they are nonreactive (meaning they won’t erode from the pickles’ salt and acid). Complete with accompanying photographs, the step-by-step instructions are a breeze to follow, especially when laying out more involved processes like creating a rice bran pickling bed—which should be stirred twice a day to ensure freshness. Recipes vary from quick pickles that “can be made in as little as 30 minutes”—such as eggplant pickled in salt and red onion pickled in sweet vinegar—to specialties that take weeks to make and sometimes a month to “mature,” such as takuanzuke (pickled daikon radish). In addition to offering plenty of appetizing serving suggestions (salt-pickled water celery can be used “to add fragrance and savor” to unseasoned soups or porridges), Yokoyama also includes a handful of recipes that use pickled veggies, such as an umami-filled pan-fried garlic pork—which gets a tangy kick from garlic preserved in soy sauce. Readers ready to take the plunge into Japanese preserves need look no further.