tokyo food file

Today's shiso day

Today's the day. Time to add the akajiso (red shiso) leaves to the ume we're pickling…

The first step is to pluck the leaves off the stems.

 

The air fills with the heady aroma of this wonderful herb…

 

 

Next step: out with the aku. 

It's always a surprise how much juice comes out of those seemingly-dry leaves as you knead and squeeze the salt into them…

 

Caught red-handed: after tipping out the black, brackish aku juice, it's time to knead them with shiro-umezu, the clear salty ume juice from the pickling crock.

This produces such a beautiful bright red/purple colour...

 

Finally, the shiso leaves (and that bright red juice) go into the crock on top of the ume fruit, to impart their gorgeous colour and natural preservative properties. 

 

Now we pack them up and leave them to pickle some more, until the end of July — doyo ushi no hi (the Day of the Ox) to be precise. 

Lots more about this stage of the umeboshi process on my parallel blog, which I put up last year but which has been reworked and is now called Umeboshi 2014 — here…

 

spring meets summer on the plate

This really is my favourite season, when spring segues into early summer, with clear skies, warm sunshine, fresh green foliage on the hillsides -- and still no humidity (or bugs) to spoil the great outdoors.

 

It's a favourite on the plate too, the last tastes of spring overlapping with the early flavours of summer.

Like this dish: tempura of takenoko and chi-ayu. The bamboo shoot came from Ishikawa, where spring is still in the air. The young ayu sweetfish were shipped up from Lake Biwa, in Shiga. 

 

And what better to go with it than a drop of Kaze-no-mori — "wind in the forest".

 

Another confluence of the seasons: takikomi-gohan made with bamboo shoot and sora-mame beans.

The arrival of broad beans in the local markets is one of the supreme pleasures of this time of year. Cooked in with the savoury rice in a heavy ceramic pot, it's a beautiful melding of colours, textures and flavours.

 

With plenty of kinome (sansho leaf) added at the end to give it extra zing…