Couple of months have passed since I stopped making nukaduke.
I have rightful excuse for this, I got pregnant and I’m a mom now! I felt sick and distracted during my pregnancy and I couldn’t grow my nukadoko anymore (at least my baby was growing!).
Now that I’m getting used to my new life with a newborn child, I decided to give it another try.
I bought this ready-to-use nukadoko online for about 600JPY. Very cheap. I made sure it didn’t contain too much additives like food thickeners. It says I should keep this in my refrigerator, but I wanted to keep it at room temperature, and I’m doing my experiment at my own risk.
What to pickle? I went for daikon radish, the classic!
Did you know that daikon radish tastes differently depending on which part you eat? Top part (closest to the leaves) is milder, and the bottom tip is more bitter and sharp. I usually buy top half of daikon, but one full daikon was cheap and calling me so I went for big thick daikon this time. Great opportunity to experiment with nukadoko!
So the right daikon (looking like a cone) is the bottom tip, and the left daikon (looking like a cylinder) is the top part.
Microbes on human hands are said to be good for nukadoko to grow, but I had experience with my last nukadoko that my skin gets irritated by red chili peppers (added to avoid mold), so I’m going to use disposable groves. Also, I recently moved to an apartment with disposer in the kitchen sink, and disposer goes so well with nukaduke making! Washed nuka get stuck in kitchen sink nets, but I don’t have to worry about them anymore!! These are the 2 things that changed from my last attempt, but other than this, method is all the same.
Two daikon came out like this. A little bit softer in texture. This is about 14~16 hours after I put them in my new nukadoko.
Nukaduke is salty in general, so I like to slice them into thin pieces. They came out nicely!
When I compare the result, I personally like the top part. Bottom tip is bitter, as expected. This difference in taste is more bold when you grate daikon to make daikon-oroshi. When it’s nukaduke, the bottom tip becomes milder than raw, but still very sharp in taste.
When my second nukadoko is finally here, I can’t help myself from pickling other veggies. Next up, cucumber, also classic.
1kg of nukadoko is enough to pickle I’d say up to 2 cucumbers. See the red bits? They come hard on your hands, so watch out.
I pickled my cucumber for about 12 hours and it came out wonderfully too.
I’ll mix my nukadoko once a day, even when I don’t pickle anything, and I hope to grow old with it. Let’s see how long my 2nd nukadoko will last!
