Kyoto & Kaiseki · Side
Shibazuke
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, acid holding everything up to the light, leaving a faint perfume.
Ingredients
- 1 kg small aubergines, or kamo nasu in wedges
- 200g red shiso leaves, stripped from the stems
- 100g myoga, sliced
- 100g cucumber, in batons
- 56g fine sea salt, 4 percent of the total weight
The skills inside
Brining & curingKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Quarter the aubergines lengthwise, skin on, and weigh everything together; the salt is 4 percent of the combined weight of vegetables and shiso.
- Rub the shiso hard with a third of the salt until it gives up a dark, bitter liquid. Squeeze that out and throw it away, then rub again with a second third until what runs is clear purple.
- Layer the aubergine, myoga and cucumber with the shiso in a crock, salting each layer with what is left.
- Weight it with twice the vegetables' weight. Brine must cover everything within two days; if it does not, add more weight rather than water.
- Keep it at 15 to 20C (59 to 68F) until the liquid smells sour like yoghurt and the flesh has gone rose right through, three to six weeks. Squeeze, slice and serve cold.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauvignon Blanc (Sancerre)
- Also Right
- Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Berliner weisse
- Zero-Proof
- Cucumber-lime water
Green plates want green wines: vinaigrette’s acid meets its match, and the difficult vegetables surrender to Grüner.
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