In a pickle

Busy today ensuring a supply of vitamin C for the coming winter by making kimchi. The ingredients are Napa cabbage, salt, chili flakes, ginger, garlic, green onion and in this case rice-flour paste, regular onion, salt shrimp and fish sauce….

There’s also a batch with daikon.

The process ends up with serious mushy mashing activity requiring plastic gloves – it looks like the goriest-ever quack psychic surgery in the Philippines. Hopefully, after a slow start contributes to a deeper and more subtle flavor, warmer weather in the next few days will give the fermentation a kick before the jars can be put in the fridge.

You might still have time to make this evening’s Sauerkraut for Dummies demonstration in Cyberport. Sauerkraut is the way to start, because it makes itself. Use non-iodized salt, squeeze all the air out when you put the stuff in jars – and it can’t fail.

Disturbingly (as the Cyberport gig suggests) home pickling is becoming so trendy in Hong Kong that even the expat housewife food faddist set are getting into it. Time to spread the word, perhaps, that it’s all about breeding millions of bacteria.

 

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8 Responses to In a pickle

  1. Docta G says:

    That is not your hand. One of your old ladies’ who minister to you no doubt. I suspect that it is similar to that time when I called you up and you said you were cooking. Further enquiry revealed that you were putting a Tupperware box one of the old ladies had left out for you into the microwave. You called it “cooking”. How can we now credit the veracity of today’s piece? Your cover is blown. The expat definition of cooking, seeing what has been left out for one to heat up, will no longer satisfy.

  2. Joe Blow says:

    If you had a goat you could make your own goat cheese, among other things.

  3. Cassowary says:

    There’s no need to be mucking about with rice flour. Put your onion, and an apple in the blender. The resulting slurry does quite nicely in place of rice flour paste.

  4. Red Dragon says:

    I see that, following a long and much-welcomed period of dormancy, Mount Adams has started blowing plumes of toxic debris high into the atmosphere.

    People living in the Mid Levels should be aware that they fall well within the exclusion zone surrounding this dangerous volcano, and that no amount of kimchi or sauerkraut will save them from the deluge of bullshit which will envelop them when Adams finally blows its top.

    Top tip? Remove yourselves to Macao and watch the eastern sky turn eerily ginger.

  5. Stanley Lieber says:

    Evening fermentation is for pussies. Real fermenters do it in daylight.

  6. @Joe Blow – what other things? I think we should be told.

  7. HK Phooey says:

    Is this just a metaphor for the HK political environment?
    A bowl of cabbage(s) – (Legco), add some chili (CCP), a little fish sauce (Carrie Lam) mix it all together and you are a left with something that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and will probably end up in a jar at the back of the cupboard for five years.

  8. Regina’s O Face says:

    At last a glimpse of the Filipina elves. Can Winky Ip be far behind ?

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