Ume Preserves
Cooking without cooking
Umeshu after a day of infusion.
It’s fascinating to cook, not on the stovetop or in the oven, but with the help of microorganisms and lots of time and patience. Being able to watch and taste as ingredients transform - breaking down but also recombining into something new - connects me to some of the oldest processes of humanity.
Sure the ingredients we use today have evolved. We now also have sophisticated tools to precisely monitor every step of a process that was previously half-mysticism and half-intuition. However the basic premises remain the same for each of these processes. The flavours of the end products: sweet, sour, earthy, spicy, intense - these have danced upon tongues for millennia. This is one of my favourite ways of connecting to history.
Shoyu after six months of fermentation.
I was worried about making a video about preserves that will not be complete for another month or a year - food that I myself had not made before. That is part of the journey though. I follow recipes and guides but your ingredients behave in their own weird little ways; I fuss and worry about it (Is that mould? Am I about to poison myself?); I am anxious because it is going to be a year before I know if I’ve succeeded.
Over time I’m learning the rhythm of your tiny microbial friends. Also, the more preserves I make, the less catastrophic a failure feels - laugh and move on.
Exploring different methods of preservation
Infusing, fermenting and pickling - plus the opportunity to try out my homebrewed soy sauce.
This set of ume preserves exposed me to a few new methods of transforming ingredients, and has let me revisit some earlier ferments. Umeshu is about infusing flavour and ume miso is about quick fermentation.
Excitingly, the ume shoyuzuke (soy sauce pickle) allows me to test out my homebrew soy sauce that I’ve been fermenting for six months now. I intend to let the remainder continue fermenting, but have bottled some for cooking with, and as a comparison. I have no idea how any of these will turn out, but I’ll patiently hope to be rewarded in time.