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SoraNews24
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- SoraNews24
How to make pickled plums like the Japanese grandparents you may or may not have【Part 1】
Today in the SoraKitchen, we're not just making umeboshi, we're making umeboshi inside our office. SoraNews24's HQ in downtown Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood is made up of two rooms. There's the main room, where our in-office staff writes articles, and the conference room, which is used for meetings, interviews, and making pickles. That last one is a recently addition to the conference room activity list, courtesy of our Japanese-language reporter Go Hatori…but really courtesy of Go's grandpa and grandma. A few years back, Go's grandparents taught him their recipe for making umeboshi, Japanese-style pickled plums. Summer is the season for making umeboshi, and Go tried his hand at it for the first time in 2021. The results, he says, were less than delicious, and his plums turned out slightly, but not much, better in 2022. 2023 was a breakthrough, though, as Go managed to produce a truly tasty bath of umeboshi, and even his grandpa was impressed when he tasted Go's work. ▼ Go's granddad with a whole bunch of umeboshi Sadly, Go's grandpa passed away in 2024, and our reporter took that year off from umeboshi making. He's ready to try again, though, not just because he likes umeboshi, but also as a way of keeping his connection with his grandpa through his pickling legacy. But why is Go making his umeboshi in the office? Because he's having construction work done on his apartment balcony this summer and he won't have anywhere to hang the plums to dry (the final step of the process). He'll need to make periodic adjustments to the batch, so doing his pickling at the SoraHouse, way off in the mountains of Saitama Prefecture, won't work. That leaves making pickles at the office as the best option, and that also means that we get a front-row seat to the process, so even those of us without a Japanese grandpa or grannie of our own can learn how to make umeboshi too. From start to finish, it takes several weeks to make umeboshi, so today Go will be showing us the initial steps, and we'll check in with him again when it's time for the next stage. What supplies do we need at the starting stage? Japanese plums, or ume, as they're called in Japanese, are first on the list, naturally. Next we'll need coarse-grain salt (we'll explain the exact quantities below). A toothpick and paper towels will come in handy, but those are things you probably have in your kitchen already and won't need to make a special shopping run for. We're also going to need a container to keep the plums in as they pickle. While you could possibly get away with any old bucket, Go recommends getting a specialized pickling bucket, which has two lids. Amazon Japan has a bunch here, with several available for about 1,000 yen (US$7]. He suggests getting a 'pickling stone' too, which is a fancy name for a weight designed to sit on top of the pickling bucket's inner lid and keep it firmly clamped down. Again, you could probably use any suitably disc-shaped heavy object, but you can get a pickling stone from Amazon Japan for 2,000 yen or less, so Go thinks it's a worthwhile investment. And last, Go strongly recommends getting a pickling bag that can be tied up to protect the plums during the process, and once again, you can get them from Amazon Japan, with Go's preferred brand being about 500 yen for a set of two bags. And with that, it's time to get started making some umeboshi! ● Step 1 The first thing to do is to remove the stems from each of the plums. This is where the toothpick will come in handy, since it'll allow you to dig the stem out without slicing up the rest of the fruit. ● Step 2 Wash the plums in cold water to remove any dirt or debris. ● Step 3 Dry the plums using a paper towel. ● Step 4 Now let's talk about the quantities of plums and salt to use. For the plums, you can use as many or as few as you want, of course, but just make sure you weight them, because Go's grandpa's recipe ratio calls for an amount of salt equal to 15 percent of the total weight of the plums. So, for example, if you had two kilograms (4.4 pounds) of plums, you'd use 300 grams (10.6 ounces) of salt. For Go's batch of office umeboshi, he's got 1.89 kilograms of plums, so he measured out 284 grams of salt. ● Step 5 Place the pickling bag inside the pickling bucket. Really, this is a failsafe step, but the extra layer of the pickling bag will help keep things secure and hygienic during the pickling process. ● Step 6 Place the plums and salt in the pickling bucket. Start with a layer of plums, sprinkle salt over them, then add another plum layer, then more salt, and keep going until you've got all of your ingredients in there. ● Step 7 Tie the pickling bag closed and place the pickling bucket's inner lid on top of it, and then place the pickling stone on top of that, and then put the bucket's outer lid in place. ● Step 8 Place the pickling bucket in a dark, cool place. Oh, and if you're making your pickles at work, you'll probably also want to make sure it's somewhere so that the container won't be in the way while you and your officemates are working. And with that, we've completed Stage 1 of Operation Make Go's Grandpa's Umeboshi. We've got about two weeks until Stage 2, so like our pickled plums stay cool, and we'll see you back here then. Photos ©SoraNews24 ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
SoraNews24
14-05-2025
- General
- SoraNews24
Rice ball melon bread – A treat Japanese bakeries aren't crazy enough to make, but we are【SoraKitchen】
Today in the SoraKitchen, we push the melon bread envelope with melon bread filled with onigiri, mochi, and even ramem. Melon bread is one of Japan's greatest creations in the field of baked goods. Despite the name, it doesn't really contain any melon. Instead, melon bread is a half-spherical bun with a slightly crisp, sugar-dusted cookie crust and softer, fluffier bread underneath. Sweet but not too sweat, filling but not too filling, melon bread is so loved that it's available in just about every convenience store and supermarket in Japan, but we recently learned that melon bread's cookie dough crust is pretty easy to make yourself at home. Our Japanese-language reporter Ikuna Kamezawa has been exploring the vast array of possibilities this knowledge presents us with. She recently decided to see what other types of bread cores can be given the melon bread crust treatment, and emboldened by her success, another question popped into her head: If melon bread rust can make bread more delicious, can it do the same for other types of carbohydrates too? To find out, Ikuna rushed out to our local branch of convenience store chain Lawson, coming back with an onigiri (rice ball), mochi, and ramen, all of which she was going to augment by encasing in melon bread. After preparing a fresh batch of melon bread crust dough (following the process here), Ikuna rolled out three pieces, one for each of her test subjects. For her rice ball, Ikuna had selected one with an ume (pickled plum) filling, and she placed it in the center of a piece of dough, then pulled up the sides for a neatly folded triangle. ▼ Melon bread gets its name from the grid pattern bakers make in the dough, which resembles the outer skin of a melon. For her mochi test, Ikuna had originally been planning to use a standard rice cake. The more she thought about this, though, the more she felt like the stiffness mochi acquires after its initial cooking and cooling would make for an unpleasant mouthfeel underneath a melon bread coating. So at the last second, she changed her mind and decided to use warabimochi, a jiggly, gelatin-like mochi, instead. Unlike regular mochi, warabimochi is eaten as a dessert, and the pack Ikuna picked up was dusted with kinako (roasted soybean powder), meaning that her warabimochi melon bread was going to be a combination of one sweet snack inside of another, so she had a lot of confidence in this pairing. And finally, for the ramen, Ikuna selected Lawson's Rich and Filling Pork Raman, which was like the most flavorful-sounding of the ramen varieties they had on offer. Unlike the rice ball and warabimochi, the ramen needed to be cooked before its melon bread wrapping. After getting it out of the microwave and giving it a good stir, Ikuna used her chopsticks to transfer noodles and a slice of chashu roast pork to the melon bread dough. With the prep work done, now it was time to pop the trio into the oven to bake at 180 degrees Celsius (356 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 minutes. When Ikuna pulled the tray back out of the oven, she was happy to see that the rice ball melon bread had cooked up beautifully. The rice ball and ramen melon breads, though, had a few cracks. Actually, maybe it'd be more accurate to call the warabimochi melon bread ruptured, since some of the filling had bubbled up through the crust during cooking. That said, none of them looked bad, and they looked even better in cross section! From this angle, Ikuna's rice ball melon bread looks like it could be an official professionally produced product… …and the warabimochi and ramen melon breads had a rustic, homemade charm to their aesthetics. Rather than take the first bites herself, Ikuna once again assembled a taste-testing panel, made up of fellow reporters Seiji Nakazawa, Mr. Sato, and P.K. Sanjun. ▼ And no, SoraNews24 doesn't have a black T-shirt dress code, they just all happened to coincidentally coordinate on this day in the office. Considering how well Ikuna's previous batch of melon bread breads had gone over with them, Ikuna inwardly smiled as she expected similar praise for her newest innovations. After tasting them all, it was P.K. who spoke first: 'The warabimochi one feels like some trendy type of experimental melon bread, so it's pretty good…The others are awful.' Next came Mr. Sato's comments: 'I guess the warabimochi melon bread isn't too bad. The others are awful, especially the ramen melon bread…If this a cruel joke, I'm not laughing.' And finally, from Seiji: 'It'd take me about an hour to fully express how bad these are.' ▼ Ikuna's dreams were as shattered as the divvied up melon bread. Crestfallen but curious, now it was Ikuna's turn to taste her criticized creations, in order to see how things had gone wrong. The warabimocih melon bread really wasn't half-bad. She hadn't expected the mochi to liquify to this extent, but the sweet gooiness has a certain charm to it. However, Ikuna can't honestly say that her warabimochi melon bread tastes better than regular warabmochi or melon bread do by themselves, so there's not much incentive to go to the trouble of combining them. As for the rice ball melon bread, as soon as she took a bite Ikuna realized she'd made a major mistake by using a rice ball with a pickled plum filling. Japanese pickled plums, called umeboshi, are very sour. That sharp taste clashes harshly with the gentle sweetness of melon bread crust, and since pickled plums have a sort of liquidity to their outer layer, that flavor seeps out beyond just the center of the rice ball. Taking a careful nibble so that she could taste a portion with no plum flavor, Oona found the taste of her rice ball melon bread greatly improved. She's still not sure if making rice ball melon bread with a different filling, or maybe even no filling at all, would be good, but it definitely would be better than the plum-filling one she had here. The tasting panel had been unanimous in heaping their biggest complaints on the ramen melon bread, and here too Ikuna could understand their sentiments right away after trying a bite herself. As mentioned above, she'd tried to pick out the most flavorful ramen she could, but she neglected to take into account that when you're eating ramen, you're really not getting much flavor at all from the noodles themselves. It's the broth that lights up your flavor receptors, and while some of its taste gets soaked into the noodles, once you take them out of the broth and bake them, the broth's flavor largely disappears, so the ramen melon bread turned out bland and unappealing. Come to think of it, for yakisoba bread, a Japanese bakery staple in which stir-fried ramen noodles are placed inside a bun like the kind used for a hot dog, the noodles' sauce (which is thicker than ramen broth) is always included in the list of ingredients, which is probably why it doesn't have the problematically lacking flavor that Ikuna's ramen melon bread did. So in the end, Ikuna feels like she owes her coworkers, and melon bread itself, and apology, since in hindsight there were issues she failed to notice at the concept stage. She's not giving up just yet, though, and even as we speak she's scheming up new things to try putting in melon bread for a future taste test. Photos ©SoraNews24 ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! [ Read in Japanese ]
