I was introduced to nukazuke by a friend of mine who’d spent a lot of time in Japan. A bit of reading led me to believe that I could probably manage to pull off this kind of pickle, but then for years that’s where I was stuck.

I never actually got around to finding where to buy rice bran, or getting a container I could use to pickle in, or really doing any sort of actual prep or execution towards making these pickles.

Finally last weekend things came together and Cin and I managed to have time and supplies to get started.

I pieced together a plan from a variety of guides online.
Wandering Spoon‘s post about Nukazuke
Joi Ito‘s guide to Nukamiso
A post in the egullet forums by helenjp
The Black Moon‘s page on Tsukemono

Here’s what I came up with:

1kg of rice bran (米糠 mǐkāng)
670 ml of water
330 ml of tsingtao
150 g of salt （盐 yán）
a 2.5×5 piece of seaweed, soaked in cold water (海带 hǎidài)
1 slice of bread
a handful of cabbage, about 100g (白菜 báicài)

I also decided to try adding:
a few dried red peppers （干辣椒 gānlàjiāo）
a few dried mushrooms （干香菇 gānxiānggū）
a couple cloves of garlic, peeled （大蒜 dàsuàn）

These ended up buried in the mix.

I was going to do twice as much, but as I was weighing out the rice bran, I realized that it was a lot more voluminous than I’d expected.

The first step was to toast the bran. This proved not very easy to do in our limited kitchen, so we did it in a lot of batches. In our case, toasting meant mainly getting it hot, scorching the bottom, then making a mess trying to stir more. The end result is a very uneven toasting.

Next up, boil the water, salt, and beer. Then we broke up the bread and dropped it in and waited for it all to cool down.

Mixing up the bran and water to achieve a consistency something like wet sand.

After this, though we neglected to get pictures as our hands were covered in bran at this point, was burying the starter cabbage and then finally wiping down the sides and setting it down to wait for a day.

Some other (crappy) photos of this process are on my flickr set.

back to Ferments

Later still, while living at the corner of Dongzhimen Beixiaojie (东直门北小街) and Dongzhimen Nei (东直门内）I came across a reference on a friend-of-a-friend’s blog (via a tweet of Beijing Haochi) about where to find specialty flours for bread making, and yet somehow I never actually made it 100 meters down the street to check it out. I even got my bike repaired next door!

Finally, last weekend I managed to swing by and check the place out, having already struck out trying to find rice bran at another grain type shop up near the Lama temple.

The place is kind of a mess inside, though the couple running the shop were pretty great. They’re from Dong Bei and offered me some really tasty hazelnuts. They mentioned that all sorts of foreigners come looking for special flours and brown rice and such, as well.

[Map]
19 Dongzhimen Nanxiaojie, Dongcheng District (150m south of Gui Jie)
Tel: (010) 8401 7569
东城区东直门南小街19号

So I did what any reasonable food-interested nerd would do and started searching for how to get a sourdough culture started.

After reading a few different guides, most of which seemed intimidating and complicated, I decided “to hell with all that!” and got started loosely following the instructions on this very approachable guide.

I had an empty jar that previously contained bottled spaghetti sauce, a large bag of Chinese all-purpose flour sitting in a larger box that used to hold frosted mini wheats, and as much Beijing tap water as I needed.

I mixed together equal parts by weight of water and flour, and let it sit out for a couple days uncovered. After that, I started regularly “feeding” the culture, which involved stirring it up, pouring some out, and then replacing with new flour and water.

After a few days, you can imagine my surprise when I noticed that it was bubbling up and had a not unpleasant smell. I’d expected some kind of foul spoilage with colorful mold and putrid odor. (All of these I have been treated to since in other failed attempts to start a culture.)

It was only then, culture alive and bubbling, that I decided to give it a name: Melvin. I think my sister Cara and I were hanging around on the roof and possibly drunk when we came up with that one, but either way the name stuck.

I started trying to use Melvin to make bread, and the first few loaves turned out a little… flat, but with repeated effort I was eventually turning out tasty little loaves.

Eventually though I moved to a new apartment with no oven, and I gave Melvin to my mother, where he continues to thrive and provide delicious local Beijing sourdough flavor to those fortunate to be a guest to dinner when my mother entertains.

The gist of it appears to me that gluten is (very) bad, and most carbohydrates fall on a scale from not-good to akin-to-poison. That this seems a little dramatic may be a consequence of the… colorful language some proponents use in describing their dietary choices. There are a few accounts that are more balanced out there (I encourage you to spend some time with Google as I did) but much of what I see is characterized by language and attitudes which strike me as more proselytizing than persuading. It seems interesting, though I have a lot of questions, but that is a topic for another post.

I did read a bunch though and something that struck me was how little consensus there seemed to be on many topics regarding human diet and nutrition. We’ve got a lot of experts saying a lot of different things, and moreover, what the experts have been (loosely) agreeing on seems to shift over time. The whole situation reminded me of an excellent blog post I’d read a while back on Idle Words.

The post, titled “Scott and Scurvy“, is about how scurvy was all but eliminated as a problem, and then it came back. The post goes into a lot of fascinating detail on the history of scurvy and its treatment and how our flawed models for understanding it led to that period where scurvy resurfaced as something to worry about.

I tried to find a high profile advocate of the Paleo Diet to title this post with but couldn’t think of any and so I went with Owsley Stanley instead who adheres to a slightly stricter doctrine of food, summarized thus: “Stanley believes that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.”

All that said, it strikes me as interesting to think that at some point we’re going to get this whole nutrition thing down and at that point, in retrospect, all these diets and theories of nutrition and so forth are going to look kind of cook-y just as ptomaines look to me now. I hope that it happens soon enough that I personally can see how it all turns out.

It reminded me a bit of this time a friend of a friend came to visit Beijing and we were at dinner and I discovered that he had just finished law school at my alma mater in Chicago. We got to talking about the places to hang out in Hyde Park and it struck me how we had some very different experiences.

While I was in Hyde Park, there were a few restaurants that I went to a number of times and whie I don’t think I would have said they were amazing places, weren’t bad food. But since leaving Chicago, or hell, since getting out of Hyde Park more in later years, I’ve realized that a lot of the places I’d eat at repeatedly were actually kind of awful. Convenient and good enough, but otherwise wholly unremarkable if not actually remarkably gross.

So when I see people go back to their school and say how they’ve eaten at one of their old haunts and how great it is, it makes me wonder if they just had much better food around their school, or if they haven’t since expanded their definition of great food since finishing college. For me there’s not much I would go out of my way to have in Hyde Park. While the 55th street may have been where I have eaten the largest amount of Thai food in my life by volume, it is certainly overrepresented relative to how good it is.

Of course, it’s not just the food. It’s the place as much as the food for a nostalgic visitor. In fact, upon thinking back, I am probably guilty of having made these same kinds of status updates myself. Shortly after moving to China, I did go back to Hyde Park and I probably ate all the same crappy things and thought so highly of the experience because of all the good things I associate with the places I ate, all the things besides the food.

Where are the best Japanese restaurants in Beijing?

In terms of "where" geographically, my guess would be up near Anjialou, where I understand there to be a higher density of Japanese expats. Up there is a little pocket of a bunch of Japanese restaurants, of which I've only tried two, but both of which I liked a lot.

One is Sake Manzo but the other, next door, is my personal favorite. It's called Takenosuke and is so far one of only a couple places I've found to eat okonomiyaki here in Beijing.

Continuing with places elsewhere in the city: the only other place I've had okonomiyaki is Izaka-ya in Sanlitun. I found the okonomiyaki to not be as good but their other offerings quite tasty.

While Hatsune strikes me less a Japanese place and more a Californian take on Japanese, it does nonetheless end up on most lists of good Japanese options in Beijing.

There are a bunch of all-you-can-eat/drink types of places, be it for sushi (eg Tokugawa), or teppanyaki (eg Tairyo). While they can present a good value in the right circumstances I wouldn't argue for them being the best at most things.

There are a bunch of nondescript little Japanese-style curry places dotted around Beijing which vary a lot in quality but one I found particularly tasty is Tonkatsu and Curry Rice in Wudaokou. There's little highbrow about the place but damn if it isn't tasty.

Finally, Oden is an interesting place that places an uncommon (in my Japanese dining experiences, at least) emphasis on oden. Being a big fan of the stuff, I've liked my meals there, though the austere decor is perhaps not the most inviting.

That said, natto is definitely an acquired taste. When my chef sister first tried it she didn’t think it especially tasty, though allowed that it could have a place in fine Asian cuisine. Another friend of mine on taking her first bite declared that it was “like eating little solid bits of alcohol” (a description I didn’t really understand, though perhaps it was in reference to the somewhat ammoniac taste) along with a facial expression conveying very clear distate.

To what I assume is the typical western palate, natto is unpleasant at best (a funny read, but don’t take it too seriously, it’s not that disgusting). Just today I discovered “The Natto Project” an interesting account of some people who also decided to acquire a taste for natto, and their experience has proven interesting to me to read so far, though I’m only a couple days in at the time of writing.

In the rest of this post I’m going to recount my personal history of acquiring a taste for, as well as where in Beijing one can get, natto.

I think two years ago, maybe even less than that, I had never tried natto before. I had heard of it because it was one of those things that people told me smells bad but tastes good (like some cheeses, or stinky tofu [I like eating those too]). But I had never tried it before because I never even noticed it on a menu at any Japanese restaurants I’d been to up to that point, and having never seen it, didn’t really search for it when going shopping.

A friend of mine was living in Japan for a while and she told me a bit more about natto. I don’t remember anything specific, but she seemed to enjoy it well enough. Maybe she did from her first try? Maybe she too had acquired a taste over time, I don’t know. I think she told me it was supposed to be really healthy (“Natto: the ultimate health food“, it’s even got it’s own funny named enzyme “nattokinase“!), maybe she didn’t but that was the impression I got when I read about it online (mostly that one site and wikipedia probably). Whatever the case, I was curious.

I think about the time I moved to Beijing, I also became really curious about stinky tofu (chou dofu). The first stinky tofu that I can remember eating was at this place next to a market where I used to live in Beijing. Outside the shop stinks, though probably more due to its proximity to a public toilet than the stinky tofu itself. But I tried it, and was in love. That stuff was great. Theirs was pretty mild (I’m told) and the texture was just that of fried tofu, nothing particularly gross about it. I ate a lot of stinky tofu for a while after that and once or twice went and read a bit about it online as well.

After enjoying stinky tofu of a few varieties, and then hearing about some other fermented soy product that was also stinky and supposedly very good for you, I decided that I was going to be a person that likes pretty much whatever fermented soy food I could get my hands on. It occurred to me later that Miso also falls under this categorization, but doesn’t seem to be nearly so off-putting to most people on account of it’s lack of stinkiness. I’m not sure exactly why I was so determined about this, but I had been convinced that eating fermented foods was a really good idea because cultures that ate lots of fermented stuff were healthier or something like that. Eating lots of microbes that were alive and well in my food would give my immune system super powers. Or something. I also noticed that I really like the taste of a lot of things that are the products of fermentation: the sourdough culture I cultivated, kimchi, lots of booze, cheese, and so much more!

That was a long digression, but the essential point is that I decided to like natto, too.

Much time passed and I never really did anything about this because I continued to not notice natto anywhere.

But then one day in Texas of all places, I tried some natto. I was in Austin attending a friend’s wedding and in the days leading up to the big event we went to get lunch at this sushi place near where he lives. Not excellent, but considering our distance from, uh, oceans, not bad. While skimming their menu, I noticed that they had natto rolls, and I remembered my new goals. I ordered some.

It was gross. I don’t know if my memory of this is simply that it was my first time trying natto, I don’t know if it was actually gross Natto at the Japanese restaurant in Texas, I don’t know if it was something else. It was just natto and rice, wrapped up in seaweed, and I did not like it. I ate one, and what I remember thinking was that it tasted weirdly smoky, had a strange texture and that I didn’t want to eat anymore. I forced down the first roll, and later in the meal tried a second, thinking maybe it would be better. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually finish the roll and if you know me, you’ll know that I am not one who takes not finishing what is ordered lightly.

I didn’t give up though. A while later, long enough that I had forgotten the specifics of my first bad encounter with natto, I discovered natto as an appetizer on the menu of my favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Beijing. I had to get it because maybe it would be better this time, different, palatable even. This time it came in a little bowl, a mound of natto, topped with some pieces of nori, chopped up spring onions, and a raw egg yolk. A bottle of soy sauce (also a fermented soy product!) was brought with it to the table. I wasn’t really sure how to eat this, so I poured in a bit of soy sauce and gave it a vigorous stir with my chopsticks.

This was my first experience with the sticky strands that are part of natto. They looked gross. I touched the sticky mass, and they felt gross. They also stuck to everything. Those strands stretch for a very long time, and they got all over me as I was sitting there playing with my food. I’m sure I looked very silly.

After enough of that though, it was time to give it a try. I worked a bite into my mouth, getting more strands on my face in the process. It was… weird. The texture was still taking some getting used to but this time it didn’t actually taste all that bad. I think having the egg and the soysauce and the onions all together really made a big difference for me because I finished that bowl without a problem.

And since then, I’ve come to really like natto, so much so that at some point I was thinking how I’d really like to have some, but didn’t know where to get it without going out to dinner at a Japanese place. I checked briefly when I went to by groceries a few times but never saw it anywhere, and for a while, I just assumed that it would be too difficult to find so why bother?

Then of course, my want to eat novel foods overtook my inertia and I started actually thinking of where I would get natto in Beijing. After a bit of google handiwork it seemed that my best bet would be to try a grocery store in a Japanese owned mall/building. The places that I found in searching for these were the grocery areas in Scitech plaza, SOGO, and Ito Yokado. I don’t actually know where the latter two are, but I do know where Scitech is (Jianguomen Wai) so I decided to swing by there after work one day.

Success! All sorts of Japanese foodstuffs can be found there, miso paste, natto, a bunch of other weird things I don’t know what they are, and so on.

I read that other places I could try are other big supermarkets such as Carrefour or Walmart and then browse their international foods, and that also the grocery area in Pacific Century Place (on Gongti Beilu) has a lot of Japanese stuff. I’ll have to check out these alternatives as some of them may be a bit more convenient for me. (Update: Sept 20 2009 – Pacific Century Place’s basement does indeed also have Natto, and moreover, there are more different brands there.)
(Update: Dec. 20 2009 – turns out the BHG marketplace supermarket right next to where I work has the cheap brand that I have taken to buying regularly. These supermarkets are all over the place in fancier malls and such! How did I miss this for so long?)

Now I’m curious what other tastes I may decide to try and acquire. Maybe the next thing to try and find is tempeh? I’m also slightly curious to improvise an incubator and make my own natto, but that’s a bit more involved of a project than I think I’m ready to taken on right now.

There was also a link to this article from the NYTimes dining section about the street food of Mumbai and while I can’t say I really sampled much in India, my own experience with street food in China agrees that it’s not the same off the street.

Right now I would enjoy some dosa so much. so so so much.

First, I read about this ridiculous thing here and decided I would try it. I didn’t realize that I would decide to try it quite so soon but I ate it. Surprisingly not horrible but entirely too much of a mess.

Second, I wish I understood what that sign up there means. I’ve seen it a few places now and I still don’t really get it. No exploding here!

And lastly I saw this car flipped over and a bunch of people gawking (like me) the other night while biking home. This was like a block from home, awesome.