Starterzuke

Another way into grain-based pickling

Here’s a fun and easy one I came up with recently, taking advantage of my overwintered carrot bed before everything sorts and turns bitter. Jaimon wrote recently about nukazuke, and we talked about it some more during Kojicon—including good options to use instead of rice bran, which can be hard to find sometimes. Oat bran and wheat germ both work well, and each has its own character.

Like a sourdough starter, cultivating your nukazuke takes a bit of time since the polyculture of bacteria and yeast need to colonize the bran and get established—and each batch of vegetables that you add brings more microbes to the party. I wanted to see how sourdough starter would work as a medium, so I took the very tangy discard from my jar when I got home from France (I was away for just shy of two weeks) and mixed it with enough oat bran (which is what I had handy) to create the volume I wanted for the glass container you see in the photo. Then I drizzled in enough water to give it the desired wet sand consistency, and then weighed out and stirred in 4% salt.

I buried carrot batons in it and left it on the counter overnight. The next day, success! Tangy, perfectly seasoned, and slightly wiggly carrot batons ready for snacking or adding to a dish. I’ll be using this container for more carrots in the coming days, as well as green onions (which survived the savage winter handsomely), and in short order the first radishes out of the garden.

I had 80 grams of starter discard (mine is 100% hydration), and I added 120g of oat bran to that plus about another 25g of water—but please don’t worry too much about any of the measurements except the salt. I have also done this with straight salted starter, and it definitely works, but it’s gooey and sticky and you have to wash it off the veg when you want to eat them. Adding some dry bran makes for a far tidier excavation as you see above, which means no waste of your precious substrate.

The beauty of this (apart from the zero waste aspect, always a favorite bonus) is that your sourdough starter is already teeming with the kind of biodiversity that you want to bring to bear on nukazuke. So it’ll work right away. And it doesn’t matter what flours and hydration level you use in your starter—just tinker with the bran and water additions to get the amount and consistency you want. As it gets wetter over time (from pulling moisture out of the vegetables), just add a bit more salt to account for that extra water. And when it gets super funky or tired out, you can follow my method for converting it into a salt crust for roasting vegetables or fish.