I’ve been making nukazuke for a bit over a year now. Cucumber, carrot, daikon, turnip. They taste exactly as good as you’d expect. So far, nothing surprising.

What I didn’t see coming is that after a year, the best thing to come out of the pot wasn’t a vegetable at all. It was the dried goods I’d been throwing in to keep the bed from going watery.

The pot gets watery whether you like it or not

Salt pulls water out of the vegetables. Obviously that water ends up in the bed. The more you pickle, the looser the bran gets, the more the flavor goes flat, and if you leave it long enough the whole thing spoils. Day-to-day maintenance of a nukazuke pot is almost entirely a fight against water.

There are a few standard moves. Sink a paper towel in and let it soak. Spoon out the pooled water and throw it away. Add fresh bran to build the volume back up. All of them reduce the water, and all of them cost you something. The paper towel just soaks and gets binned. Pouring off the water takes the flavor with it. Adding bran means rebuilding the salt level and the seasoning from scratch.

Let dried goods drink the water, and the dried goods come out better

So I pickle dried goods instead. Dried shiitake, kombu, dried daikon strips. They drink a lot. As long as the dried goods can absorb it, the water level drops and nothing gets thrown away.

And the dried goods you pull back out are good. Not “edible, I guess,” which is what I was expecting.

Dried shiitake rehydrated in the bed is nothing like shiitake rehydrated in water. It comes back carrying the sourness of the bran’s lactic fermentation. It isn’t fresh shiitake and it isn’t ordinary reconstituted shiitake either. Bite it and you get dashi and acidity at the same time. Dried daikon strips keep their bite and turn sour, and chopped up they work as something to pick at between other dishes. Kombu goes soft and slippery, so that one I just slice thin and finish off on the spot.

Which makes sense when you think about it. Dried goods were dried in the first place so they could drink water and come back. What I’m giving them to drink is bed liquid, which is vegetable water plus salt plus lactic acid. It would be strange if that didn’t beat plain water.

Chopped and frozen, it’s already prep for the next meal

Whatever I pull out gets chopped and frozen. Flatten it before it freezes and you can just snap off a piece when you need one.

Fried rice is where most of it goes. Throw it in still frozen, stir-fry, and the bran sourness and shiitake dashi spread through the whole pan. Otherwise a quick toss in sesame oil is enough on its own.

So the stuff I dropped in purely to remove water has already become the filling for the next batch of fried rice. Put another way, slacking on pot maintenance means running out of fried rice ingredients. When the payoff for a chore is wired that directly to the chore, I don’t feel much like skipping it.

Odd things that have nothing to do with the water

This part is unrelated to the water problem. Nothing here surprised me the way the dried goods did, but the non-vegetables worth pickling were boiled eggs, processed cheese, avocado, and well-drained tofu. All four are less a side dish than something to drink over.

Boil the eggs hard. Soft-boiled ones collapse in the bed, which is sad. Quail eggs work the same way. Processed cheese picks up the bran aroma on the surface and goes straight into sake territory. Avocado also falls apart if it’s too ripe, so pickle it while it’s still a little firm. Tofu that hasn’t been drained properly collapses and adds water to the bed on top of it, so I weight it down for half a day first.

Among vegetables, the ones outside the usual suspects that worked were myoga, celery, cherry tomatoes, and yamaimo. Leafy things like turnip greens, daikon greens, and celery leaves pickle fine, but they release so much water that the dried goods can’t keep up. When it gets to that point, I go back to the fresh bran I dismissed earlier. Rebuilding the seasoning is a pain, but I’ve decided leafy greens in quantity are the one exception.

Meat and fish are also good pickled and then grilled. That one is worth doing in a separate container with bran scooped out of the main pot. Once the smell and juices of raw meat get into the main bed, it’s hard to bring it back.

The upkeep is lazier than I expected

I’d assumed you had to stir it every day, but keeping it in the fridge slows the fermentation down enough that once a week is plenty. What I use is the kind of ready-to-go bed sold at supermarkets and Muji, the sort you open and start pickling in. That’s carried me a year.

I ruined it exactly once, by leaving it out at room temperature in midsummer. “Keep it in the fridge and you’ll be fine” is a lesson from that failure.

For seasoning I keep sansho berries, chili, kombu, dried shiitake, a little katsuobushi, and mustard powder in there. Sansho berries shift the aroma noticeably, so it’s worth adding them while they’re in season. Kombu and dried shiitake show up here too, but the ones that stay in for seasoning and the ones that go in to drink water and get pulled back out are separate.

It’s salty. That comes with the territory for pickles, so it isn’t something to eat by the plateful. I have a few slices a day and leave it there.

Wrapping up

I started because I like pickles, and I started pickling dried goods for the defensive reason of protecting the bed. A year in, pulling out the shiitake and the daikon strips is the part I look forward to most.

Cucumber and turnip are good. But I never expected the thing I threw in to absorb the inconvenience to end up being the best thing in there. The pot brings a water problem with it, and when I push that problem onto the dried goods, the place I pushed it to quietly turns delicious and hands it back. That convenient little loop is running in my fridge.