Fermented & preserved ── Tsukemono (pickles)
Kasuzuke
Kasuzuke — vegetables re-packed again and again in sake lees until they turn amber
A family of pickles made by repacking salted vegetables again and again in aged sake lees. The lees' sugar and umami are said to seep in over time, turning the vegetable a deep amber — a method that took hold especially where sake breweries were plentiful.
Lineage
What it's made of
The basic form is a vegetable — melon or daikon most often — salted first, then packed in aged sake lees. Ingredients range widely: shirouri melon in nara-zuke, chopped wasabi stem and root worked into lees for wasabizuke, herring roe kneaded into lees for sankai-zuke. It sits in its own category, distinct from plain salt-curing or lactic-fermented pickling, built around a lees-based bed.
How it's made
The vegetable is salted to draw out its water, dried, then coated in sake lees as if spreading a paste. Rather than stopping there, the lees are replaced and the vegetable repacked again and again, letting sugar and umami work in gradually until the flesh turns amber. Some versions, like Aichi's kaimori kasuzuke, finish with mirin lees instead of plain sake lees.
Why it took this shape
Regions with active sake brewing produced large amounts of leftover lees, and kasuzuke is thought to have taken hold as a way to put them to use rather than waste them. On the Chita Peninsula, once home to more than 200 breweries at its peak, a kasuzuke culture is said to have grown up pairing that lees with locally grown vegetables. Elsewhere, as in Niigata's lees-pickled pufferfish roe sac, the same method is applied to seafood instead.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- How to shop in a depachika (department store food hall)A guide to browsing prepared foods and bento, choosing wagashi as a gift with a good shelf life, sampling etiquette, end-of-day discounts, asking for cold packs and wrapping, and finding your way around a depachika floor.
- Enjoying a bussanten (regional products fair)A guide to what's sold at a bussanten (regional products fair), how to find one, when it gets crowded, shelf life and taking food home, and how to fit one around a trip.
Dishes in the same style
- Bettara-zukeDaikon salted first, then pickled sweet in rice malt and sugar — said to descend from a lightly pickled daikon once sold at Edo's ebisu-kō market. The rice malt gives it a natural sweetness, and it still headlines Nihonbashi's autumn "Bettara Market."
- Fukujin-zukeSeven kinds of vegetables — daikon, eggplant, lotus root among them — diced and steeped in a soy-based marinade. Said to have originated in Tokyo, it's best known today as curry rice's standard side.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Known source
Derived style
- Nara-zukeMelon salted, then repacked again and again in aged sake lees — the pickle most closely identified with the whole kasuzuke family. It's known for the labor of repeated repacking until the flesh turns amber.
- Wasabi-zukeChopped wasabi stem and root worked into sake lees. Cultivation is said to trace to Utogi, a valley Tokugawa Ieyasu once forbade anyone to carry wasabi out of, and the pickle became a fixture of Shizuoka Station's platform stalls from 1889.
- Moriguchi-zukeA slender daikon over a meter long, pickled whole in sake lees — a Nagoya specialty. Like kasuzuke made from the local kaimori melon, it is said to have grown out of the sake-lees culture of the nearby Chita peninsula.