My homemade, unpasteurized sauerkraut (and photos of it) will be on display and up for trade at the exhibition Non*Mart at Y2Y Gallery in San Francisco from November 6 till January 15, 2010. See more details about eating some at the opening at my post about it on awesomepickle.com or at the show and gallery links. Click the pic for a bigger flyer.

Friends, I have another website on this fine internet of ours. It’s called awesomepickle.com and it’s dedicated to the awesome world of fermented food and drink. The contents are mostly recipes for pickling food at home with the help of live microorganisms Food prepared this way is very healthy. It also tastes delicious and never fails to impress friends and strangers alike. I recommend you go to the wbsite immediately, make some sour dills or sauerkraut, brew some beer, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors with a grilled cheese sandwich.

Although I haven’t had much to put up here for the past few weeks, I swear I’ve been working. Editing doesn’t deliver the bylines the way writing does. There are some articles are in the works, though.

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?