Umeboshi and the RBQ

Before I even get started, this is a story of failure. Umeboshi, Japanese salted plums, get their plum-purple color traditionally not from the fruit itself–Japanese ume are actually yellow–but from red shiso, an herb in the mint family with an inimitable flavor. I have tried and failed to grow red shiso so many times. It’s not that it’s particularly tricky to grow; nay, it luxuriates like its profligate minty cousin in most climes (provided you water it enough and keep it out of harsh desert sunlight). It is just that I am a shockingly incompetent gardener. To be fair, I get some unlooked-for help from adorable little feathery assistants I lovingly refer to as the rat bastard quail (RBQ). It took me a while to discover the ministrations of the RBQ because they’re stealthy little jerks–so stealthy, in fact, that I do not have a single photo of them to accompany this post and had to draw a portrait for you:

I swear it’s a good likeness. Anyway, it was only as I was planting my shiso seed for the *3rd* time and wondering aloud whether or not the seed was bad that I noticed the row of neat little holes right where I had planted the seed the previous month. And sure enough, that evening when I heard the dulcet tones of the RBQ out the window, I crept out onto the deck on stocking feet, and what did my wondering eyes behold? The RBQ merrily digging up and bolting down their greedy little gullets every last precious, expensive shiso seed I had planted that morning.

Sigh. So, I embarked on my umeboshi-making experiment sans shiso. Fortunately, you can add it later, and while red shiso isn’t easy to find in my Asian markets here, green shiso is. And since I’m using normal garnet plums or whatever they’re called, I’ll still get the purple color….

I’m following this recipe from Namiko Hirasawa Chen at Just One Cookbook (*love* her site). You start out by presalting the plums and add the shiso later, so I have time to hunt it down. You wash the plums, sanitize a pickling jar with straight sides (so you can use a plate to push the plums down into their brine as they release their juices), and layer in your plums with salt in an 18% ratio. That’s as far as I got today: I’ll keep you posted over the next month!