This post continues the saga of my daikon pickles from home grown daikon.  The first post can be found here.  Now it’s been two weeks and my daikon are pliant and wrinkly.  They’ve also shrunk tremendously.  Step one has been successful.

Now is step 2, pickling them for at least a month.  Today I put them in the rice bran with all of the other ingredients to sit and pickle until they are good and yummy.  Here’s how I did it, as per the book:

Mix rice bran with dried chilis, salt, brown sugar, and I added a little dried ginger for extra flavor.

Put a layer on the bottom of your pickling container, along with dried persimmon or other fruit peels (I used persimmon and pear) and kombu chunks.  I’m just using my Japanese pickle press.

Layer the daikon and their dried leaves in a circular pattern.

Then add more rice bran, fruit peels, and kombu.  Repeat as necessary.  I only had two layers.  Add more rice bran and top with copious amounts of dried daikon leaves.

Press and let sit!

And as a bonus for people who actually read my blog, here’s my best Daikon Zoidberg impression for you:

Ho Ho Ho!

In the continued spirit of over-ambition, I grew my own daikon this year.  The original purpose was to make kimchi with home grown organic veggies, but my green onions and napa cabbage failed miserably (which I figured out through soil testing was due, apparently, to too little potassium and phosphorus).

However, my daikon grew quite well.  Beautifully lush, with bright, almost glowing white roots.  Their eventual destination is takuan-zuke, a classic Japanese pickled daikon, made at home without preservatives or food coloring.  The guide I’ll be using is my trusty book, a gift from my mother a few years ago, Quick and Easy: Tsukemono – Japanese Pickling Recipes.  This book is highly recommended and available on Barnes and Noble for under $10.

The first step to transform these beauties:

…is to let them dry for a couple of weeks until they are pliable.  The book says “in the sun”, to which I respond “Oh?  Can you bring some please?  We’re a little lacking right now.”  So they’ll have to deal with being inside, stinking up my cozy little home until the sun comes out next.  (Which is supposedly Monday, but only for one day, according to the weather report.)  Here’s a beautiful picture of how happy these daikon would look if it wasn’t raining continuously and we were in Japan.  I’ll try to put them out in the sun for a little bit at least though, so they can be endowed with the flavor of happiness and joy before being forced into a pickling crock (or some hippie nonsense like that).

This is going to take quite a long time.  This first step takes two weeks, and then the daikon pickle for at least one month, if not two.  And then, only then, are the takuan-zuke ready.  So stay tuned to see how this experiment turns out.