Kintame, a Kyoto shop specializing in tsukemono since 1879, showcases pickled vegetables that serve as focal points in the meal. The artful presentation encourages diners to appreciate the depth of flavor and the underlying elements of Japanese cuisine, such as sourness and umami, all stemming from fermentation. Ingredients like rice vinegar and koji spores are pivotal in this process, which goes back to ancient times when fermentation was crucial for food preservation. Today, despite modern refrigeration, there remains a yearning for the complex flavors that fermentation brings to dishes.
You become conscious of how these flavors sourness, tang, funk and umami run like a baseline through Japanese cuisine.
Fermentation was one of our earliest tools of survival, a way to preserve food from rot and eke out supplies in winter.
Today everyone uses the refrigerator, but we crave this flavor of arrested time, of something left to languish in the dark.
Such are the yields of fermentation, here coming from the rice vinegar in the pickles, but present throughout the Japanese pantry.
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