Nukazuke, the rice bran pickling bed

You'll need

• 3-liter (about 3-quart) food-grade plastic container with a lid
• Kitchen scale
• Clean cloth
• pH strips reading 3 to 5.5, or a pH meter

Step by step

1. 1

   Mix the bran with the salt, then add the water little by little

   Wash the container with hot, soapy water and rinse it well. Weigh 500 g of bran and 70.2 g of salt and mix them dry. Add 600 g of water a little at a time, kneading with clean hands, until it feels like wet sand or miso.

   The salt is 6% of the weight of everything, salt included: 70.2 g out of 1,170.2 g. In one study, the freshly made bed held 6% salt; the studies' recipes start at 5%.

   Tip: Raw or toasted bran both work. If yours is raw, you can toast it first in a dry pan, stirring, until it smells like bread, then let it cool.

2. 2

   Press the bed into the container and wipe the sides

   Move it to the container and press it down with your hands so no air pockets are left. Smooth the top and wipe the sides with the cloth. Put the lid on.

3. 3

   Bury vegetable scraps until the bed is acidic

   Wash the cabbage leaves or scraps under running drinking water and bury them in the bed. Swap them for fresh ones every 2 or 3 days and throw the old ones away. Keep the bed at 68–77 °F and stir it every day. At first it smells of raw bran. Little by little it starts to smell sour and fruity: that's the sign it's alive. It takes at least 2 to 3 weeks (our house rule), and it can take more than a month: in the studies, at 75 °F, the bed's pH fell from 6.0 to 4.0 over 38 days, and no vegetables were pickled until day 40.

   Before you eat the first vegetables, check the bed's pH: mix a spoonful with a little distilled water, wait a few minutes and dip the strip. It needs to read 4.6 or lower (our house rule). If it reads higher, keep going with scraps, which get thrown away, and check again in a few days.

4. 4

   Stir it from the bottom once a day

   With clean hands, stir the bed from the bottom, bringing what's underneath up to the top. Press it down, smooth it, wipe the sides with the cloth and cover it. Do this every day (our house rule: the studies stirred it every 2 days).

   On top, where there's air, film yeasts and mold grow; inside and at the bottom, lactic acid bacteria. Stirring keeps it balanced. Left unstirred, a few yeasts take over the bed and make it smell off, like solvent or nail polish remover.

   Tip: If the bed gets warmer than 77 °F, keep it in the fridge (our house rule): it works more slowly there and needs less looking after.

5. 5

   Bury the vegetables for a few hours and keep them in the fridge

   Only once the bed is acidic, at pH 4.6 or lower. Check it again if the smell changes or it has gone days without stirring. Wash the vegetables under running drinking water. Bury them whole or in large pieces, well covered with bran. Taste after a few hours: cucumber is quick, while carrot or turnip may need a day. That's custom, not a figure from any guide.

   Take them out, rinse off the bran, slice and eat. Whatever you don't eat goes straight into the fridge, at 50 °F or below, to be eaten within 2 days (our house rule). The vegetables come out with only 1% to 3% salt: it's a fresh pickle, not one that keeps.

6. 6

   Add bran and salt when the bed shrinks or gets wet

   Each batch of vegetables takes salt from the bed and leaves water behind: in one study, salt had to be added four times in just over a month. When the bed shrinks or gets watery, soak up the water on top with the cloth and add fresh bran with its salt: 11 to 12.5 g of salt for every 100 g of bran, the proportion in the studies' recipes.

   Tip: The bed isn't thrown out at the end of a batch: looked after like this, it lasts for years.

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