The Week In Review January 22-26 — The Cultured Pickle Shop

Throughout the fall, we are on an intense production schedule. The produce in the fall is bountiful, and we are scrambling to preserve a myriad of moments and prepare for the up-and-coming holiday season. January is a time to regroup a bit. Alex is at her desk more, closing out our year and preparing for tax season. In theory, I have more time at home to attend to things neglected during the holidays. Still, the days are full of projects. Here are a few we did this week.

Monday

Monday is my day away from The Shop. We have a home and garden, two dogs, and four ducks, all requiring some amount of daily attention, and I get one full day a week for a whole host of household projects. Occasionally, Alex calls me in for something, usually kombucha. Kombucha is a dynamic ferment. A well-cultivated and cared-for SCOBY has the potential to yield a beautifully complex kombucha. We are, in essence, capturers of moments, and the moment of complexity in a kombucha ferment is fleeting as the acetic acid increases and begins to drown out the more subtle flavors the ferment offers us. We have around 30 batches of kombucha going at any one time Alex spends a chunk of each morning tasting and assessing most of them. When she decides one is ready to get bottled, it gets bottled that day. On Monday, a Nettle kombucha was ready. I came in to bottle a Ginger-Nettle Kombucha.

Tuesday

Maintenance. A couple of small projects.

Fermenting is a bit like cooking, an assemblage of ingredients subjected to time and temperature, and voila- a dish. Fermenting is a bit like agriculture in that it is cultivation. The cultivation of microbial communities and utilizing their metabolic processes to create something delicious, hopefully. We create living systems. At The Shop, we oversee anywhere between 100 and 200 separate ecosystems at any one time. These systems require maintenance to increase the likelihood of a successful outcome, that is, a delicious outcome with maximum yield.

I won't discuss the science of fermentation on the blog. I don't know enough about it. I’ve said before that we think about the science of fermentation while we work about as much as we think about the science of respiration while we breathe. I haven’t dissected our relationship to the term, but I don't feel as though we use scientific method to organize our production, and we don't use scientific language to articulate our processes and outcomes. We don't think about The Shop as a lab. Still, it's helpful to understand some basic concepts, after all, they are there whether we think about them or not. Almost all of the fermentation we employ at The Shop is anaerobic, meaning it takes place without oxygen. We create and maintain anaerobic conditions in two main ways. Our stainless steel tanks have a floating lid with an inflatable bladder. The lid is pushed down against the product's surface, and the bladder is inflated to hold it in place. We also have food-grade acrylic discs we place on top of the product that we weigh down with jars filled with water or rocks. Neither one of these systems is perfect and they both require some maintenance to ensure a quality product and to maximize our yield. When the products come into contact with oxygen, they are susceptible to discoloration and surface growth of aerobic microbial communities. So, the vessels get checked and cleaned regularly.

On Tuesday, I cleaned and assessed three tanks of Kasuzuke. A spring onion ferment started in April of 2022, a jalapeño ferment begun in September of 2022, and another jalapeño ferment started in September of 2023.

Eggs for the weekend. This week, I prepped seven dozen eggs. We get our eggs from Riverdog Farm, which, if you've ever been to the Berkeley Farmers Market, you know people line up for them, and for good reason. We cook the eggs for 6-and-a-half minutes to soft boil them and marinate them in a mixture of tamari and shiso vinegar, which is a shiso kombucha that has gone too acetic or vinegary to use as a beverage. However, the shiso flavors are still nice and clean, so we long age it into a mild vinegar and mix it with the tamari and sake lees from last year's Kabocha squash ferment. These are a delicious twist on a traditional Ramen Egg. The secret ingredient is the sake lees from a previous year's ferment instead of Mirin. When we make Kasuzuke, we ferment vegetables in the lees for an average of 12-18 months. At the end of the fermentation time, when the vegetables are ready to harvest, they are removed from the lees, jarred up, and sold as a pickle, kasuzuke, which means pickled in kasu. We hold on to the remaining kasu, and we age it out. We have a whole archive of variously aged and flavored kasu dating back to 2011. We use the aged kasu like you might use a miso. We use it as a seasoning, as a condiment, and to make a broth to simmer vegetables in. The kasu gives the marinade a foundation of mature and complex umami that you just can’t find in your average store-bought mirin.

**2023 Kabocha Kasu, Tamari, and Shiso Vinegar for egg marinade**

The Dashi we serve at the beginning of our Rice and Pickles meal is a Kombu Dashi. We select some byproducts from our production week, the peels, pulps, innards, etc, from the various vegetables we’ve worked with. We simmer those all day on Fridays, and on Friday night, we cold infuse the broth with Kombu seaweed, which gives it some viscosity, and some ocean umami, and makes it a dashi.. We reserve the Kombu from the weekend's dashi and use it for other projects. On Tuesday, we took the Kombu from last week's dashi, julienned it, and mixed it with Misozuke Garlic. Every year in late May and early June, when garlic is just being harvested when it has developed cloves but it has yet to be cured, we take the young, tender cloves and bury them in a two-year-old barley miso and let them ferment for an entire year. We purchase miso from Japan for this project. All the misos we make at The Shop are young and made in micro batches. They are unsuitable, and we don't have enough for this. The garlic and the miso are minced together and mixed with the kombu and will be used on this weekend's rice bowl.

Wednesday

When we started Cultured in 1996, we wanted to make Miso. We had been practicing making miso for a couple of years and intended to go to Japan and seek an apprenticeship. When Alex got pregnant, plans changed, and we moved to Berkeley to start a family and a business. We tried out a few different products in those early years. We built a greenhouse in the backyard and grew wheatgrass and microgreens. We spouted grains and made essene bread; we made a variety of miso: Sweet White Miso, Mellow Barley, Adzuki, Chickpea, and two condiment misos- Natto Miso, which is a three-month barley miso mixed with barley malt, ginger & Kombu and Hisho made with soybeans, barley koji, tamari, diced carrots and daikon. We also made sauerkraut. Scaling a microgreens operation in a backyard in Berkeley was impossible. People were obviously familiar with miso in the mid-nineties, but small-batch artisanal miso didn’t have the cachet that it does now. Within two years, sauerkraut began to dominate our production, and within five years we stopped producing miso altogether. Although, years later, we would re-introduce miso along with a wide array of other products into our line, for most of our 27 years in business, we functioned primarily as a wholesale sauerkraut company. At our height, we produced around 2000 pounds of sauerkraut a week. These days we produce about 400 a month. On Wednesday, we made a batch of Super Sauerkrat Salad, one of the four original flavors of sauerkraut that we produced in the late 90’s. It is a beautiful ruby-red kraut made with green cabbage, beets, carrots, and ginger.

**Super Sauerkraut Salad- Green Cabbage, Beets, Carrots, and Ginger**

Pumpkin-Rooibose Kombucha- This is a fermented rooibos tea with the juice of pumpkin added at the time of bottling. After juicing, the pumpkin pulp is saved for the weekends Dashi.

We processed Tokyo Tunips to be fermented in a Fennel & Bee Pollen Brine. The Tunrip green were reserved to be julienned and mixed with Jalapeno kasuzuke for the weekends Rice bowl.

**Tokyo Turnips ready to be Brined with Fennel & Bee Pollen**

We started a batch of amazake for the weekend. We make amazake by taking our Rice & pickles rice blend, a 50/50 mix of short grain brown and sweet brown rice; we mix the rice with rice koji and incubate in jars in a dehydrator at 135 degrees overnight. During the incubation, the molded rice metabolizes the starches in the rice blend into sugars; in the morning, we have a naturally sweet rice porridge that we then thin out and blend to make the beverage known as amazake. On the weekends we serve amazake warm, paired with the sweet bite at the end of the meal. Occasionally, we bottle it and sell it as a cold rice shake; and we use it as a sweetener in mamy of our desserts.

**Koji being added to Brown Rice blend for amazake**

Thursday

Some weekend Prep. Some packaging.

Prep for the weekend Rice & Pickles event goes on all week but is far from the focus of The Shop. We are not a restaurant; we are a Pickle Shop, and our production during the week focuses on the products we make and package to be sold out of our retail case. That being said, Rice & Pickles is a reflection of the week's production and an opportunity to showcase our work. You will find on the bowl products that are available for purchase and quick pickles that are created during the week, many of which reflect the produce that we have been working with during the week. Preparation for the weekend occurs all week but definitely intensifies as we draw nearer.On Thursday, we began a couple of quick pickles:

- Red Daikon mixed with our Indian Pickled Lime.

**Red Daikon Ready to be mixed with Indian Pickle Lime**

-Kohlrabi pickled in Umeboshi Brine.

**Kohlrabi shaved on a mandoline to be pickled in Umeboshi Brine**

-Cabbage Leaf rubbed with a paste made from Dates and a Kimchi Brine to be dehydrated to make a crisp for the weekend’s Rice bowl.

The more we do, the more we have to do. All the products we make must eventually be packaged for sale. When a ferment is ready for sale, it is removed from the vessel. Some of the product is immediately jarred up for sale, and the remaining product is put into gallon jars to be packaged later as needed. Alex seems to have a packaging station set up on a cart at all times. Even during slow periods on the weekends, I will look over to see that she is quickly packaging a gallon of this or that. Below are just a few products jarred up on Thursday.

**Cauliflower fermented with Spring Onion, Mustard Seed & Ginger**

**Mustard Green fermented with Leek, Fresh Turmeric & Fennel Seed**

Friday

Miso. Weekend Prep.

In 1994, Alex and I were living on a farm in the hills of Northern Mendocino County in California. The farm was remote, about 45 minutes off the highway on a gravel road. Once a month, we would make a pilgrimage, four hours to the south, to Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco. We would stock up on a dazzling array of beans & grains that could be found in their legendary bulk section. We would fill bottles with cooking oils, tamaris, shoyus, and vinegars. From large buckets, we would replenish our inventory of Miso- Light sweet Shiro miso, Light brown Barley Miso, Rich dark Hatcho Miso, Sweet and Gingery Natto Miso, and jars of Adzuki, Chickpea and the prized Dandelion Leek Miso from South River in Massachusetts. Miso was such a mainstay in our diet that we wanted to learn how it was made and, more importantly, how to make it ourselves. This was pre-internet, of course, and the information on miso making was limited and difficult to find. In the book section at Rainbow Grocery, we found The Book of Miso by William Shurtleff, an excellent book filled with history, recipes on how to cook with miso and instructions on how to make it. In those days, the difficult part of making miso was finding koji. In the back of The Book of Miso was a list of resources; we found GEM Cultures there. GEM Cultures, started in 1980, was, and still is, a mail-order company that sells Scandinavian dairy cultures, 25-year-old sourdough starters, and they were at the time the only importers of Aspergillus spores from Japan for making koji. As luck would have it, GEM Cultures was located in Fort Bragg, about 25 miles from where we were living. One day, we hitchhiked out to the coast and knocked on the door of the company headquarters, which was the home of Betty and Gordon McBride. If the couple was surprised to see two dirty and disheveled hippies at their door, they didn't show it. They happily invited us in, showed us around their garden and kitchen laboratory, gave us lunch, and sent us on our way with envelopes of obscure Japanese mold spores that would shape the rest of our lives.Nearly thirty years later, we still make miso. Every few weeks, we produce a Sweet White Miso. Occasionally, we make a three-month mellow barley miso, which we sell on its own, or we mix it with ginger and barley malt to make a sweet, salty condiment called Natto Miso.

We Blanched and Shocked Nettles to be marinated in Miso Tamari for the Weekend.

**Nettles- Blanched & Shocked ready to be minced and marinaded in Miso Tamari**

We jarred up some Chile Paste and some Preserved Lemons.

We prepped a large a beautiful Lunga di Napoli squash for the weekend pureé.