Pickling umeboshi
Umeboshi taste super delicious. They’re salty, pickled, Japanese plums and I’ve been hoping to make some. So when I came across a wild plum tree on a hike in Redwood Regional Park, I saw my chance. (Tons of blackberries out there right now, too, by the way.) All I had to do, I figured, was go home, slap them in some salt, weigh them down (see the photo on the right), and then wait a while, right? Wrong.
It turns out that making umeboshi is a little more complicated. You need to start with unripe, acidic plums that grow in Japan. Then you need to soak them in water overnight, pack them in salt, and press them with a weight. Two months later you dry them in the sun. Then they age for five, ten, or more years. Easy.
There are very detailed directions here on Kuro5hin and a more straightforward recipe in this thread on tribe.net.
The plums I picked were already ripe and are way too soft to undergo two months of fermentation. I might as well stuff some shiso (also called perilla) leaves in the jar and see if I can do a ‘quick’ fermentation. But what fruit from California should I use to make some real umeboshi?
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