Quick & Easy Tsukemono: Japanese Pickling Recipes, by Ikuko Hisamatsu

A friend of mine lent this book to me because I love pickles, and it was really interesting to read through but I'm a little intimidated by the thought of trying to make most of these recipes. Partly it's that the book contains SO MANY ingredients that I either do not own or do not even know what they are. And partly it's that most of these are fermented recipes, and any recipe where mistakes can end in you dying is a little more high-stakes than I usually like my unfamiliar recipes.

Yes, I regularly do home canning in the Western style (just spent all weekend doing some canning and plan to do even more the coming weekend, it's that season!), but I know what I'm doing there, and I know what kinds of precautions to take in order to make sure I don't end up dead of botulism. I don't know this style of pickling well enough to make informed choices.

This feeling is strengthened by the fact that there were a few too many times when reading through this recipe book that I felt a given recipe was not giving enough details in the steps involved for me to know I was doing things correctly. There seemed to me to be leaps of logic where the author assumed you know things that I don't know.

Oh well. Overall it was fascinating to read through, even if I don't plan to make anything from it, to learn about the very different pickle traditions of another culture.