November 28, 2011

Making Nozawana Zuke/野沢菜漬けを作る

This is my wife's very first attempt to make nozawana zuke.
妻が生まれて初めて作った野沢菜漬けです。

8 kg nozawana
2 liters water
1 owan* salt
* Owan is a bowl to put miso soup in.
I did some googling and found that the salt should be 3% of nozawana in weight.
2 red peppers

You need a weight and a plate.

野沢菜 8キロ
水 2リットル
塩 お椀一杯
お椀とは、味噌汁を入れるボールです。
Googleすると、塩は、野沢菜の重さの3%にするそうです。
赤唐辛子 2本

重しと板が必要です。

You can start eating it in a week or so. The nozawana is more than two weeks old.
およそ一週間後に食べ始められます。この野沢菜は2週間以上過ぎています。

You can see film yeast on the surface of the water.
水の表面に産膜酵母が見えます。
When you remove the weight and the plate, you will see this:
重しと板を外すと、こうなっています。
Too salty for my taste, so I have to soak in water for a while before eating.
私には塩辛すぎるので、食べる前に水にしばらく漬けておきます。

6 comments:

Sissi said...

Hiroyuki, I just looked up on wikipedia nozawana (I have never seen it before) and they say "Pickled nozawana is one of the most typical local foods in Nagano Prefecture". The process reminds me of pickled cabbage (sauerkraut) that I love and that is made in Germany and other Central and Eastern European countries. It is also mainly water and salt and the yeast on the surface looks very similar.

Hiroyuki said...

Sissi: Yes, my father comes from Nagano (aka Shinshu), and I've been familiar with nazawana zuke since childhood.

My father says that the Shinshu people like to have it even as a snack to have with green tea at "oyatsu" time at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Nozawana zuke is also very popular in Niigata, which is adjacent to Nagano.

muskratbyte said...

This looks delicious! Could I make this with turnip or mustard greens? I don't think I could find nozawana here.

Hiroyuki said...

muskrat: I'm not 100% sure but I think you could, because other nozawana-like leaf vegetables are pickled in similar ways in other parts of Japan.

Ruminating Roy said...

muskrat and Hiroyuki:
I know the Chinese do a salted cabbage (天津冬菜 - Tianjin preserved vegetable) for cooking by way of a similar salt curing process. I've also had salt preserved hakusai done like the nozawanazuke.

Perhaps an experiment with some turnip or mustard greens is in order!

Hiroyuki said...

Ruminating Roy: I did some googling and found that that pickle is made with salt and garlic(!).

Nozawana zuke is a little different. You enjoy the crunchy texture of salted nozawana in the initial stages (within, say, one month after the start of pickling) and then you enjoy the sour flavor (due to lactic acid fermentation).
For photos of sour nozawana zuke, see a previous thread on nozawana zuke:
http://hiro-shio.blogspot.com/2010/01/pickled-nozawana.html