Genpei Namasu, Tied Vinegared Burdock Knots, Vinegared Lotus Root, and Daikon Namasu

●For Genpei Namasu, the skins of burdock and carrot are meant to be eaten, so peel them as thinly as possible. In particular, the Kyoto carrot (also known as kintoki carrot) used here has strong carotene content and holds a lot of red pigment in the surface skin, so its carrot smell is fainter than that of an ordinary orange carrot. So with carrots and burdock, work without peeling much — more in the sense of just scrubbing them.

Peel the carrot and cut it lengthwise at an even thickness. It looks simple, but you have to cut the carrot to a uniform thickness. This thickness becomes the final width of the piece once it's tied, so you adjust the thickness to match that. This is the most important part, and the most difficult step in this whole process. For example, if the blade angles slightly and shaves off unevenly, that produces extra trim and changes the yield, and depending on the fineness, the size also changes according to how tight a knot you're aiming for. At the end, after tying, you trim the ends, but you cut it to just the length needed to tie it, taking the cut so as to leave as little to trim away as possible, for the best possible yield. Of course the trimmed-off ends aren't simply thrown away, but since they don't have much use as a finished product, we measure the dimensions precisely so there's no excess, to avoid producing waste as much as possible.

Bevel the edges of the carrot pieces cut lengthwise as close to the limit as possible, and use the part near the carrot's skin to make it into cord-like strips. The outer part from the lengthwise cut is fine, but the core of the carrot — the part in the very center with the slightly stronger red tint — is riddled with tiny air pockets (su), and if it's used in a simmered dish, this is exactly where it will start breaking apart during cooking; the cell structure is coarse and the fibers are weak, so it's fragile, and using this part makes it very prone to snapping. So, to avoid this part, we make the cord-like strips as close to the skin as possible, which keeps waste to an absolute minimum. Of course this core part isn't just thrown away either — we run it through a blender separately, or use it as a vegetable in simmered dishes — but what really matters is how you handle the carrot, and that's why we take it this way.

For the burdock, rather than peeling it thin, you really scrape the skin off with a scrub brush, but this time we used migaki-gobō (scrubbed burdock), which has a lower level of aku (bitterness). After that, just as with the Kyoto carrot, cut it into pieces of roughly even thickness so as not to waste any, and drop them into vinegar water. Since we're making a large quantity, this is to keep the aku from clinging to the cut pieces; likewise, since the carrot can also crack, drop it into salt water so the cut surfaces aren't exposed to air. After this, you boil it once, but only just enough for the heat to reach the core.

Now tie the burdock and carrot together, two pieces at a time. The steps are: hook one side, hook it into two loops, pass it through, tie it, and stretch it out. Then finally trim the ends to a neat, even length... it's honestly very hard to explain in words, but put simply, you bring two loops together and wind them so they cross one another. What matters here is making sure that wherever a loop forms, the red carrot always ends up on the outside. That said, as far as the actual work goes, all you really need to do is cross two loops, so everyone works out their own way of doing it quickly.

We make quite a large number of these, so it takes time to finish tying them all, and during that time, the carrot alone would be fine, but the burdock develops aku, so we always soak it in slightly stronger vinegar water to stop the aku. Any pieces that have loosened while soaking get retied properly, and after trimming the four ends sticking out evenly, they go into sweet vinegar. They're left marinating right up until plating, but because there's moisture in them, water works its way out, and left as is, that would lead to spoilage, so after about four to five days, we do what's called an amazu-gae (sweet-vinegar changeover) — replacing all the sweet vinegar once — and leave them marinating in that until the end. Especially with burdock, even after boiling it, the aku still clings to it, so I think it's essential to keep it as a vinegar pickle.

The act of tying has deep roots: long ago, when building a house, people couldn't use things like nails even for the pillars, so houses out in the countryside were bound together with straw rope. The pillars and other framing were assembled, and at that point they were always tied. Even the gasshō-zukuri farmhouses of Shirakawa-gō, a World Heritage site, have their pillars entirely bound with straw rope. Tying is such an important act that you could say you can't really speak about Japan without understanding it. 'To bind' (shibaru) is the same as 'to tie' (musubu). Even a wedding is described with the word musubu (to bind two people together). That's how important tying is, and that's why the idea of musubi still survives today at celebratory occasions. It's not limited to cooking at all, but whatever you're tying, if the piece is too short you simply can't tie it. There's a proper length needed to tie something, and grasping that precisely is exactly how you avoid producing waste. Not producing waste — knowing, for instance, how much you can tie from a single carrot — is what matters. When you make things by hand, that becomes visible to you, but conversely, all sorts of problems arise today precisely because that visibility is lost. If everyone made things by hand like this, in plain sight of everyone, there would be no falsification, nothing to hide; but once this is handed off to a subcontractor and it's no longer visible who did the work, all kinds of problems arise. Being able to see is exactly what connects to a sense of security and safety.

●Vinegared Lotus Root works well both on celebratory occasions and at memorial services. First, cut the lotus root into suitable lengths and peel off the rough outer skin. The skin of lotus root has a harsh, bitter edge and isn't edible, but here we peel it as thin as possible. Then trim both ends down to where the holes are large enough to make peeling easy. The trimmings are put through a blender and used to make lotus-root dumplings, or added into tsukune (ground meat or fish patties) to adjust its softness. Then score the thick, hole-free section with the knife and peel it to look like a flower. Keeping the thickness even between the holed and outer sections this way means the heat penetrates evenly when it's boiled. Lotus root that tends to float is rounded in shape, and naturally the center section bulges out a bit too, so the middle is thicker — which is why, to be precise, we make the cuts in three passes at each spot: from both ends and then the center. If you peel the skin too thick at the start, the trimmings are of course used for something else, but the portion usable as Vinegared Lotus Root shrinks. Once done, soak it in vinegar water, boil it in water with vinegar added to finish it pure white, and marinate it in sweet vinegar right away. Boiling it once is so that no aku clings to it once it goes into the sweet vinegar, but this sweet vinegar also needs to be warmed to roughly the same temperature, or else, unless you're using freshly dug lotus root, it won't finish up tender. One piece made this way, cut into four slices with the knife, makes one serving. This way the stack of lotus-root slices comes out neatly even.

●For Daikon Namasu, first peel the daikon, cut it into rounds, and then cut those further into strips. Sometimes the peel is cut thick to save for later use in something else, but this time it isn't peeled very thick. Cut it down into strips roughly 0.5 mm thick, cut those into strips, salt-cure them, and finally finish them as a sweet-vinegar pickle. If it's cut too thin the texture isn't good, so the thickness is kept to a point that's neither too thin nor too thick, so some bite remains.

The important thing here, too, is just to cut it so as not to waste anything. That's the only point that really matters. Since this is daikon namasu, white daikon is the main ingredient, but pure white alone has no color, so a touch of red carrot goes in for visual accent. Once it's soaked in salt water and has completely gone limp, rinse it once in sweet vinegar, squeeze it out well, and then marinate it in sweet vinegar. If it marinates too long, the daikon's fibers become — how should I put it — translucent. Ideally you'd make it right before handing it to the customer, but the closer it gets to the end of the year, the more there is to do, so honestly, with namasu and dishes like it, we'd like to finish them as early as possible... but if you make them too early, the flavor ends up gone by the time they're eaten, so since the jūbako assortment keeps for 30 days but is eaten on a single day, working backward from that, we aim to make it sometime between around December 20 and 25. Seasonings for making food taste good aren't something you add in large amounts. Seasoning, fundamentally, isn't meant to be tasted directly on the food — it's there to make the food itself keep longer, or to preserve it by curing it in salt, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, and the like.

●For Hagoita-Shaped Carrot and Daikon, we use the tail end of the carrot left over from the Genpei Namasu and shape it into a hagoita (a decorative New Year's paddle), since it's for New Year. It's a decoration, so it doesn't need to be very big; decide on a rough length, peel the skin thin, and make use of the shape the carrot's tail end already naturally has — it widens out toward the end, much like a hagoita. We build on that existing shape. Since there's a red-and-white pair, the daikon is made the same way, using the leftover pieces from the daikon namasu — cutting a thick piece into four, or using end pieces that are otherwise awkward to use. Since all you need is two or three red-and-white pieces peeking out per one-and-a-half servings' worth of jūbako, and numerically, making 300 of each per 100 orders is enough, these kinds of scraps are more than sufficient. The one thing to watch, though, is that carrot and daikon have different fiber structures — daikon's fibers are coarser and it holds more water — so when both are soaked in the same seawater-strength brine and left to wilt, the daikon inevitably shrinks by a greater percentage. So if you start them out the same size, the daikon ends up smaller once finished; instead, we make the daikon piece a bit larger and thicker from the start, so that once it's gone limp, it ends up exactly the same size as the carrot.

When vegetables are salt-cured, the moisture dissolves out into the salt water, so everything shrinks somewhat, but daikon shrinks by roughly 10 percent. Making it about one size larger to begin with brings it out to just about the same size once it's gone limp.