Pickles Hawai'i-style

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Sandy Kodama rubs her fingers roughly over the ribs of a hunk of cabbage and smiles.

"Hear the squeak? I love the squeak," she says, letting the cabbage drop back into the plastic bowl in which it has been soaking in salt water overnight.

The squeak, recognizable to anyone who has ever made this dish, is the sure sign that the cabbage has released its natural moisture, absorbed the salt and begun the transformation from vegetable to pickle.

Kodama, a prolific home cook who also who serves as housemother, baker, hostess and all-around help in her son D.K.'s restaurant, Sansei at Restaurant Row, said the squeak is the beginning of tsukemono, the most common version of a family of pickled dishes that is as much a part of the Japanese daily menu as shoyu or rice.

Pickles and dressed vegetable side dishes, especially tsukemono, are at the center of many loving memories of Japanese daily life.

"Tsukemono was every day on the table, regardless of whether it was breakfast, lunch or dinner," said chef Hiroshi Fukui of L'Uraku in Honolulu, who was born in Japan and lived there until he was 12. And in the formal, multi-course kaiseki dinners he prepares twice a year at L'Uraku, miso soup, pickles and rice are invariably a late course — the pickles to clear the palate, th soup to settle the stomach, the rice to vanquish any remaining hunger.

Tsukemono is so familiarly regarded that it has a "baby name" — koko.

An informal chazuke-type meal includes tea, rice (in this case, a kamameshi rice flavored with mushrooms, but the usual practice is to serve steamed white rice) and a selection of pickles to spark the appetite, clustered in the center of the picture. Clockwise from the bottom: the two small dishes contain commercially made konbu and fukujinzuke pickles; the octagonal dish contains a mustard eggplant pickle; above center is a tsukemono made with cabbage and daikon leaf; above right is a cucumber tsukemono and at the very center of the picture, homemade takuwan (daikon pickle). Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

During World War II, when she lived on her grandparents' poultry farm, she said, shreds of pickles atop hot rice were often all they had to eat, the pickles offering a welcome spark of flavor in the bland and parsimonious wartime diet.

O'ahu resident Duane Kawamoto remembers his grandmother, and later his mother, carefully tending the pickles each night after dinner, turning over the fermenting mixture so mold would not set in, adding fresh ingredients, perhaps a little sake for flavor. "Grandmother, being a nisei and living through the Depression, always had the mentality of 'not wasting,' so she would experiment with a variety of other ingredients. I recall once she even used watermelon rinds."

Pickles, Kawamoto said, are "true local comfort food." And when he visits Japan, he enjoys chazuke parties, in which the key ingredients are hot rice, flavorful tea and pickles — the tea poured over the rice, a spread of different pickles to serve as garnish. "Especially after a night of drinking, it hits the spot for me," he said.

But the traditions surrounding this staple food have altered drastically over the years.

In Hawai'i, the time-consuming crock method of making pickles has become a rarity. It involved daily tending of a mixture that often contained nuka (rice bran), or even bread, as a fermenting agent not unlike sourdough starter. In this technique, vegetables were placed whole in the slurry of pickling ingredients and pulled out to eat when they were ready, with more fresh vegetables added. A crock of nuka miso — rice-bran mash — would be babied for long periods of time.

But most pickles are made today by time-saving methods involving just a night or two of brining or marinating.

Over the years, Hawai'i tastes also parted company with Japanese tradition, so that our pickles differ in preparation method, flavor and texture from Japanese counterparts.

In Japan, where women have joined the work force, pickles are much less likely to be made at home, and that also is true here.

As fusion and New Age cuisine proliferates, the once-strict lines that governed how the various types of pickles were made and categorized have blurred, Fukui said — especially in Hawai'i.

For example, in Japan, namasu is made with carrots and daikon — the good-luck colors of red and white —Êin a marinade of vinegar, water, salt or shoyu, and served at New Year's, Fukui said. Here, namasu is very common and made with a wide variety of ingredients, from cucumbers and ogo (seaweed) to abalone and hokkugai (clams), and the dressing is an individual matter.

And in Japan, the best takuwan is made by first hanging the daikon to dry in the sun until the radishes are somewhat dessicated and rubbery; the pickle is a golden color. In Hawai'i, food coloring and a salty, vinegary dressing make a very different, almost shocking yellow pickle.

In general, Fukui said, flavors of these foods are sweet and saltier than in Japan: "It's almost too bold for me," he said. But Hawai'i is changing his palate. "Now, when I go back to Japan, it's almost too delicate for me."

In Hawai'i, as third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans have become more westernized, pickles have passed into the category of specialty food, something to pick up seasonally. Some find the pervasive scent of pickling brine foreign, or at least nostalgic, because many no longer make pickles at home, or even know how.

A quartet of pickles includes, bottom left, Kogen-style daikon pickle; bottom right, easy daikon, cucumber and cabbage tsukemono made with a commercial preparation of white shoyu, dashi and other ingredients, called shiro dashi; above right, homemade rakkyo, sweet-salty pickled scallion bottoms; and above left, a young cabbage tsukemono (marinated one night only) with a splash of shoyu. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

And everywhere, the discovery that the high sodium content in pickles is a dangerous invitation to heart disease has meant that people are enjoying this delicacy less often.

But for the older generation, it's a pleasure to talk about and make pickles.

At a sort of contemporary chazuke lunch at Sandy Kodama's home recently, the spread of pickles included Kogen-style tsukemono, a delicious daikon pickle made by friend Aiko Hirota; Gertrude's spicy tsukemono made with a touch of chili pepper; sweet-spicy rakkyo, pickled scallion bottoms, the specialty of a friend in Hilo; a quick cucumber and daikon pickle made with Shiki-no Irodori, a commercial mixture of white soy sauce, konbu (kelp), dried mushrooms and dashi (bonito-flake stock); a yuzu cucumber pickle, flavored with the citrusy tartness of yuzu lemons from Gertrude's yard; a mustard-spiked eggplant pickle; tsukemono made with daikon leaf; a bright orange homemade takuwan that put commercial varieties to shame in both sweet flavor and snappy texture; a sweet namasu made with hasu (lotus root) that was positively addictive, and a couple of commercial pickles that Kodama couldn't resist.

In the kitchen, Kodama's homemade tsukemono was still resting under the concrete weight that she inherited from her mother-in-law, Tsuwa Kodama. The homely object, typical of old-fashioned weights found in local kitchens, was made by pouring cement and sharp black gravel into a coffee can.

This is a classic tool for making shiozuke, the salt-pressure family of pickles that includes traditional tsukemono. The vegetable is cut as desired — quartered for cabbage, sliced for eggplant, sliced or chunked for cucumber, whole for daikon leaves — sprinkled with a couple of tablespoons of salt (it's customary here to use Hawaiian salt, but in Japan, finely milled salt is used), then laid in a nonreactive bowl or crock. Plastic, crockery, glass or wood all are suitable. A plate is placed on top and then weighted down (bricks or canned goods work). The vegetable is then allowed to pickle for an appropriate period of time (for cabbage, two to three days; for a delicate leafy vegetable, overnight is usually enough).

The salt drives the water from the vegetable's cells and causes the flesh to harden and grow crisp, almost to candy. Liquid gathers in the bowl but needn't be drained off. The final step is to quickly rinse off the salt, squeeze the pickled vegetables hard to remove the liquid and then chop them as desired (fine shreds are customary for plain tsukemono). At this point, the pickle may be eaten plain, dressed with with a few drops of shoyu, or flavored with a dressing, typically a shoyu-sugar-vinegar mixture. Many cooks like to toss in other ingredients: chilies, bits of seafood, sesame seeds, miso or kamaboko (fish cake).

Kodama eyed the spread on her dining-room table, in which there was not one shred of meat or even seafood. "You don't have to have anything else," she said. "So long you have rice."