Fresh picked cucumbers and tomatoes from my garden today. Pickling vinegars and kimchee base in the background, used for making Japanese style pickles.Today I harvested some veggies from our little garden. We are getting lots of cucumbers, so I am attempting some REAL Japanese pickle creations. Today I tried Shiba-Zuke, translates to "Natural Red Pickles" in English.
This recipe calls for Eggplant and Cucumbers with red and white plum vinegar as well as the regular Japanese rice vinegar . The plum vinegars were a bit harder to find than I thought it would be, but I am handicapped a bit due to not being able to read Japanese. My husband's co-worked kindly helped find the red plum vinegar for me!
I used:
3 Japanese Eggplants, slightly peeled
1 huge Japanese Cucumber (from my garden, about equal amount to the eggplant)
Japanese Eggplant slightly peeled.Both the Eggplant and the cucumber needs to be sliced up into 1/4 inch (5mm) thick diagonal slices (after cutting the whole thing in half first). The both need to be soaked in brine (2 cups water with 2 teaspoons salt), eggplant separate from the cucumbers (2 bowls) for 2 minutes. Use a small saucer to lightly press down so all pieces can completely soak for 20 minutes.
I used some sliced pickled Miyoga (a kind of ginger) and some red shiso leaves from a jar of Umeboshi (pickled plums). You could probably use some Ume and Shiso furikake if you can't find the former. 1 tablespoon of this.
Thinly sliced the Myoga and squeeze lightly, place in large bowl.
After the 20 minutes soaking is up, squeeze out the water firmly from the eggplant. Lightly squeeze the water from the cucumbers. Place them also into the same large bowl with the Myoga. Add the Shiso (or the Ume and Shiso furikake if you are using that).
Sprinkle everything with the mixed vinegars (2 tablespoons of each of the plum vinegars and 1 1/2 tablespoon of rice vinegar) and 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of castor sugar (fine not coarse). Mix well and place in a wide bowl (preferably glass but plastic is ok too, NEVER use aluminum for either the container or covering!). Place a lid or saucer on top and weigh it down so that everything is compressed and completely covered in the vinegar juices. I used a large jar of peanut butter with a round lid underneath it.
Compressing the pickles with a lid and a heavy jar of peanut butter.Mix once or twice to blend the flavors and it will be ready to serve in one day. I placed mine in the refrigerator for this process.
Side view of the pickles being compressed by the peanut butter jar and resting in the refrigerator.And here are the finished pickles one day later...they are sour, not sweet...pretty good!
