Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (14 page)

29>

Gravlax

PREPARATION:
10 min

WAITING:
3-4 days

Lox on bagels is one of our favorite treats, but lox are expensive. We were surprised to learn we could make them at home for a lot less by using frozen salmon fillets.

Lox had always seemed so mysterious to us. Were they smoked? They seemed raw, yet not raw. It was a deli mystery. Turns out they’re salt cured, and salt curing is as simple as can be. You just have to trust the salt.

It’s a 2- or 3-day process, so start this midweek to enjoy a plateful of bagels on a lazy Saturday. Frozen salmon is usually less expensive than fresh and has the added benefit of being safer, because parasites don’t survive commercial freezing. Fresh salmon is lovely, though. Just make sure you use sushi-grade fish.

YOU’LL NEED

• 1 pound frozen salmon or raw, sushi-grade salmon fillets (not steaks)
  
• 2 tablespoons sea salt
  
• 2 tablespoons sugar
  
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
  
• 1 bunch of fresh dill
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Defrost the fish, if necessary. Rinse and pat it dry. Lay out each fillet on a big piece of plastic wrap. If you feel any bones, pluck them out.

Mix the salt, sugar, and pepper in a bowl. Sprinkle it all over the fillets, making sure to coat the front, back, and sides. Lay whole fresh sprigs of dill over each fillet.

You can adjust these seasonings to taste, just keep the essential proportions of 2 tablespoons salt and 2 tablespoons sugar per pound of salmon. If you’d like sweeter gravlax, add an extra tablespoon of sugar to the mix. If you don’t have dill, try other fresh herbs, like parsley. We’ve even used wild fennel fronds.

Wrap the seasoned fillets in plastic wrap to make little packets. Tuck those into a zipper-lock bag or put them in a deep dish, like a baking dish, because the fish will release juices as it cures.

Refrigerate for 48 to 72 hours. The longer the gravlax cures, the more intense the flavors. Leave it too long and it becomes dark and unpleasantly tough. Some lox fans advocate pressing the fish under weights during the curing process. This results in a denser texture.

After 48 hours or so, discard the dill, rinse off the salt and sugar, and pat dry. Using a very sharp knife, slice the fillets into thin pieces on the diagonal. To store, wrap the fillets well in clean plastic wrap. They’ll keep in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks—but they’re unlikely to last that long, because they’re delicious.

30>

Nukazuke

PREPARATION:
30 min

WAITING:
2 weeks

When we hear of an old housekeeping technique that has come to be regarded as too time-consuming or arcane for modern folks, we sit up and take notice. This generally means we’re onto something good.
N
UKAZUKE,
or rice bran pickles, are a traditional Japanese pickle. When we heard a Japanese cookbook author wistfully note that she didn’t have time to keep a
NUKAZUKE
crock—a
NUKADOKO
—like
her mother had done, we knew we had to try it.

Nukazuke
is the most unusual form of pickle we’ve ever encountered. Rice bran is soaked in saltwater and various flavorings and kept in a crock to culture. Salt plus time equals lacto-fermentation. In this lacto-fermentation technique, fresh vegetables are buried in the wet salted bran, where they’re transformed by lactobacillus into crispy, salty pickles. Each day, pickled vegetables are fished out and new vegetables buried. The miraculous thing about this process is that it happens overnight or, in the case of delicate vegetables, in a couple of hours. Unlike other pickle recipes, this isn’t exactly a preservation technique. Instead, it’s all about the transformation, taking a raw vegetable and making it into a new food.

The
nukadoko
can be maintained for months, years, even decades. Over time, it takes on its own personality, like an old sourdough starter. Every household’s pickles would taste a little different. Like many traditional recipes, the outlines of this are variable. The flavors are a matter of interpretation. What’s most important is to set up the correct ratio of salt, water, and bran and to maintain that correct ratio over time.

What could be inconvenient about making pickles overnight, you ask? Nothing. As far as pickles go, these are fast food. The inconvenience arises in maintaining the bed. It has to be stirred every day, without exception, to aerate it. If the damp bran is allowed to sit around clumpy and compressed, it will develop mold. The
nuka
(the salted bran) is best stirred with the bare hands. The bacteria on our hands is said to help the culture. This is interesting, because it also means that the pickles are uniquely yours, that they’re tied in subtle ways to your own biology. More practically, it’s easier to lift the bran from the bottom of the crock and break up lumps with your fingers than with a spoon. If you’re not someone who likes playing with your food, this isn’t the project for you.

YOU’LL NEED

• 2 pounds rice bran (Buy it at Asian markets or health food stores.)
  
• 5 cups water
  
• ½ sheet dried kombu seaweed, about 3 x 6 inches
  
• 9 tablespoons sea salt (Never use iodized salt.)
  
• 1-2 inches fresh gingerroot
  
• 3-5 small dried chile peppers, any type
  
• Permanent container for your pickle bed—a Tupperware-type container or small food-grade plastic bucket or a ceramic, enamel, or glass container (Traditional crocks are made of wood or clay. Whatever container you use, it should have a lid, a wide mouth, and about a 14-cup capacity. Ours is a bean pot that we found at a garage sale.)
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Toast the rice bran in a wide, hot skillet. It will be easier to do if you break the bran up into two or three batches. Don’t let it burn. Use your nose. As soon as it starts to smell good, take it off the heat and do the next batch.

Meanwhile, bring the water to a boil. Pour 1 cup of the boiling water into a small bowl. Break the seaweed into a few strips and place it in the water to soak.

Pour the remaining 4 cups of boiling water into a larger bowl. Add 6 tablespoons of the salt and stir to dissolve.

Peel the ginger and chop it into rough chunks. Chop the peppers into rings.

By this time, the kombu seaweed should be soft. Holding back the kombu strips, drain the soaking water into the brine. Now you should have 5 cups total of brine, give or take.

Transfer the toasted bran to the container you plan to keep it in. Put the kombu strips, peppers (seeds included), and ginger on top of the bran. Pour the brine into the container and stir with your hands to make sure all of the bran is equally wet. Put the lid on the container.

Here we’ll stop to say that like barbeque sauce or anything else, different people make this different ways. The only absolutely necessary ingredients are bran, salt, and seaweed. Some people make their brine with beer. Other flavorings that might be used include—but aren’t limited to—miso paste; raw cloves of garlic; apple or persimmon peels; crushed, dried eggshells (they’re said to clarify the flavors); and powdered mustard (which is supposed to help preserve the
nuka).
You can adjust the flavors of your bed as you go along.

OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS

It will take a couple of weeks for the bed to come up to speed. The cultures need time to develop. You’ll notice the smell changing as this happens, becoming less toasty and more pungent. You can speed its development by offering the bed fresh vegetables from the very first day. It won’t pickle them well at first, but you might like the way they turn out anyway. Don’t be afraid to eat them or add them to the stockpot.

To pickle, bury any firm, clean vegetable in the
nuka
(the salted bran) and leave it overnight. Really bury it and tamp down the bran, just as if you were laying that radish to eternal rest. Test thin, delicate, or small vegetables after a couple of hours—they may be done that quickly. They’re ready when they taste good to you. They become softer and more pungent the longer they sit.

The vegetables are usually buried whole and chopped into pieces before serving. Make exceptions for veggies that won’t fit into the bed. Cabbage, for instance, is cut into chunks. Try pickling just about anything that comes to hand—whole red radishes, chunks of daikon, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower florets, even sturdy greens like kale or Swiss chard.

When you take the pickles out, they’ll be dusted with bran. Wipe as much as you can back into the crock with your fingers, then rinse the pickles before serving. They are best straight out of the bed, but you can keep them in the fridge for a couple of days if you leave their bran coating on them. Keep a lid on the bed at all times to keep out vermin and help maintain moisture levels.

K
ELLY:
Let’s talk about how you killed my pickle bed when I was out of town. You didn’t stir it, you didn’t love it.

E
RIK:
It was kind of stinky, and I didn’t really want to reach my hands into that funky rice bran. What’s wrong with sticking with regular ol’ kraut and kimchi?

K
elly:
Kraut and kimchi are great, but they’re not the same.

E
rik:
Meaning they’re not a pain in the butt? How’s that a problem?

K
ELLY:
This coming from a man who feeds his sourdough starter religiously every single night. You obsess over your starter. You’ll get out of bed to feed it.

E
RIK:
But the starter makes
bread.
That’s entirely different.

K
ELLY (sighing):
You see, dear reader, we all have different priorities. Even the bonds of matrimony won’t ensure that your pickle bed will be tended with the necessary diligence when you’re away. Keeping a
nukadoko
is a practice best left to hard-core pickle fans. Pickle fans who don’t travel a lot.

MAINTENANCE

Each time you remove a pickle, you’re removing bran, so you’ll have to add a handful of fresh bran every once in a while. You’ll also lose salt, so you’ll want to add a little saltwater occasionally, too. The overall proportion of bran to salt by weight is between 5:1 and 7:1. Don’t let the bed go dry or turn boggy. You’ll get to know the
nukadoko
intimately from stirring it every day, and so you’ll know what to do. Sample the flavor of the bran once in a while (it’s kind of tasty, really). That way you’ll know what it tastes like when it’s right, and you can diagnose problems if something goes off kilter. Add new flavorings as the spirit moves you.

If you go on vacation, you must find someone trustworthy enough to tend your bed. As this can be difficult, it may be better to trust no one and put the bed in suspended hibernation. Take any vegetables out and smooth the surface. Pour ¼ inch of sea salt over the entire surface and put the crock, covered, in the fridge. When you return, pour off as much salt as you can and mix in the rest.

Signs of a sick crock are pretty obvious. A healthy crock should always smell like a ferment, which encompasses a range of interesting smells, but it should not smell rotten. Rotten is dead. Ferments smell alive. You should never see any mold or slime. If you do, it’s best to start over.

Indoor Gardening

Vegetables are sun hungry. This makes it difficult to grow food indoors unless you have a sunny, south-facing window. Even then, it’s tricky. It takes a lot of solar energy for a plant to set fruit (like a tomato) or to generate a starchy, edible root (like a carrot). The best crops for indoor gardening are those where the leaves are the edible parts. Potted herbs, like chives and parsley, do well on a windowsill and are a great starting point for your indoor garden. The next two projects are a little more ambitious than potted herbs but are lots of fun. Both translate well to outdoor growing, too, if you have the space.